Ancient Philosophy - Lecture 3
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
Lecture 3
Plato’s Positive Account of Justice
A reminder of the ambitious nature of Plato’s undertaking in the Republic: through his mouthpiece Socrates, Plato promises to show that justice discounted by pain and dishonour is better for the just man than injustice supplemented by all the rewards of an (undeserved) reputation for being just. How can he hope to achieve this?
The direct strategy of trying to show that even the cunning unjust man has good reason in all times and situations to embrace a pattern of behaviour similar to that endorsed by the conventional understanding of what is required by justice seems unpromising. What could make it unreasonable for us, here and now, to prefer a long life of richly-rewarded injustice rather than public opprobrium and a painful death in the near future?
Plato accordingly adopts an ingenious indirect strategy. He doesn’t put his effort into arguing that a particular pattern of behaviour is advantageous to everyone irrespective of the kind of person they are and the circumstances in which they may happen to find themselves. Rather he argues that we all have good reason to endeavour to become a particular type of person – a person with a harmonious inner motivational structure and a set of desires and values co-ordinated and furthered by the intellectual side of our natures. And once we have become that kind of person, we will discover that we no longer have any inclination or indeed ability to behave in a way that would place us substantially at variance with conventional views of what is proscribed by justice.
What precise kind of psychological harmony is at issue here? According to Plato there are three principal elements to the mature human personality: the intellect, the bodily appetites, and a cluster of seemingly disparate motivations which Plato calls ‘spirit’ or thumos. These latter motivations include such things as anger, shame, ambition and a sense of self-respect, and we can perhaps best understand them all as manifestations of some underlying impulse of self-regard and self-assertiveness. In contrast to some psychological theories, Plato does not treat reason as a mere faculty of calculation that serves to work out the best way of satisfying other antecedently existing desires. Thus the tri-partite soul or psuchç envisaged by Plato is, in part at least, a reflection of his belief that human beings are motivated by three main impulses, towards (1) intellectual activity, (2) self-realization, and (3) bodily satisfaction. But in addition to throwing its own distinctive motivations into the overall mix, the intellect has the function of directing and co-ordinating the activity of all three kinds of motivation so as to achieve the best overall result for the agent. Plato holds that the bodily appetites in particular lack foresight and any awareness of potentially untoward consequences. Unless restrained and guided in some way, the bodily appetite for x would lead to immediate action to satisfy that appetite irrespective of the longer-term costs of so doing. Thus a properly harmonious personality for Plato is both one in which the impulse towards intellectual activity has a chance to express itself and one in which the intellect has enough control over our other motivations to co-ordinate them so as to maximize our overall capacity to satisfy our appropriately weighted desires.
It shouldn’t be supposed, though, that Plato holds that one intense desire is necessarily worthy of being satisfied to the same extent as another equally intense desire even if the subsequent consequences for the agent are comparable. Plato is adamant that some desires are intrinsically less worthy of being satisfied than others. So the desire to inquire into the origins of the universe, for example, would be more worthy of being satisfied than the desire to kill some fellow commuter even if the latter desire happens at that particular moment to be very intense and no legal or social consequences would follow from indulging it. However this isn’t supposed to be just an arbitrary and personal judgement on Plato’s part: he seems to hold that when we are not immediately in the grip of the latter desire or some very similar impulse, there would be an overwhelming consensus amongst us all that this is not a desire we would willingly endorse as one that ought to be satisfied. And in a properly harmonious person, this relative weighting is one that the intellect is capable of enforcing on the other aspects of the personality.
From Plato’s perspective, then, a person exhibiting the foregoing kind of psychologically harmony is someone at peace with himself and someone who stands the best possible chance of satisfying those desires that he genuinely values and wishes to endorse. He concludes, therefore, that we all have reason to seek to become such a person. But once we have become such a person, our capacity to act in an unjust manner will be undermined. The kind of desires that might push us into behaving unjustly will have been eradicated from our personality, and we will be highly averse to indulging any residual impulses that might serve to disrupt our inner tranquillity and calm enjoyment of the pleasures of practical and theoretical intellectual activity.
In essence, then, Plato’s argument directs our attention away from the supposed merits of adopting a particular pattern of outer behaviour towards the benefits of being in a certain kind of psychological condition. In fact we might interpret him as being willing to concede that conventionally unjust behaviour might well pay someone who lacks an integrated and harmonious personality. However that concession would need to be interpreted in the light of an insistence that any human being who has a chance to develop a harmonious personality has good reason to do so. And such a harmonious personality then brings about behaviour that accords with much conventional thinking about justice. Of course some care needs to be exercised here. Plato certainly doesn’t think that this conventional thinking stands in no need whatsoever of refinement or adjustment. He is by no means a moral conservative, and a Platonically just person, particularly as envisaged in the Republic, would not have the same moral code as most of Plato’s Athenian contemporaries. However Plato seems happy to suppose that actions that would constitute cases of gross injustice in conventional Athenian morality would also be actions that would be abhorred by the exponent of Platonic justice. Moreover he holds that the motivations underpinning the actions of the Platonically just person would be recognizable even by the advocates of conventional morality as morally admirable motivations. And in the case of any remaining disagreements, Plato’s assessment seems uncompromising. It is the possessor of the truly harmonious soul or personality who has the better understanding of what it is to act justly.
So far, though, we have not mentioned the role in Plato’s argument of his investigation into what constitutes a just city. It seems to me that this investigation, although long and intricate, does not play a crucial role in the argument that he ultimately provides in defence of the importance of justice within individuals. Its importance lies instead in what we might term the context of discovery. At the end of Book One of the Republic Socrates professes himself dissatisfied with his arguments on behalf of justice because he does not yet know what justice is. In Book Two, however, he suggests that it might be easier to discern what constitutes justice if we were to look at some instance bigger in scale than the just person. So our attention is directed towards the question of what constitutes a just city. In the case of a city, Socrates argues that we can readily appreciate that the feature that it must possess if it is to be both just and capable of preserving its own existence is that of having a harmonious tripartite structure of social classes where the authority of the ruling group of intellectually gifted individuals is recognized and respected by members of the two other classes.
Once assent has been given to this conclusion, Plato then proceeds to deploy one of his favourite argumentative principles – the principle that where a predicate F applies to both things of kind x and kind y, it applies to things of kind x in virtue of the same feature or features as those in virtue of which it applies to things of kind y. Consequently if cities count as just because of a harmonious tripartite internal structure where the most intelligent part of the city supervises its other components, then a just man must count as just because of a similar tripartite inner structure. This line of thought directs our attention to the potential significance of the interaction of the three principal sources of motivation within the human personality; and we then are then supposed to see that if the intellect, spirit, and bodily appetites work together within the human personality in the same way that the guardians, auxiliaries, and money-making classes work together in the just city, the end result will be a person who refrains from all patently unjust acts and acts even in more contentious cases on a wholly admirable set of motivations.
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