Essay 3

Socrates responds to Glaucon and Adeimantus' challenge by proposing a strategy grounded in an important analogy:

That’s well said in my opinion, for you must indeed be affected by the divine if you’re not convinced that injustice is better than justice and yet can speak on its behalf as you have done. And I believe that you really are unconvinced by your own words. I infer this from the way you live, [b] for if I had only your words to go on, I wouldn’t trust you. The more I trust you, however, the more I’m at a loss as to what to do. I don’t see how I can be of help. Indeed, I believe I’m incapable of it. And here’s my evidence. I thought what I said to Thrasymachus showed that justice is better than injustice, but you won’t accept it from me. On the other hand, I don’t see how I can refuse my help, for I fear that it may even be impious to have breath in one’s body and the ability to speak and yet to stand idly by and not defend justice when it is being prosecuted. So the best course [c] is to give justice any assistance I can.

Glaucon and the others begged me not to abandon the argument but to help in every way to track down what justice and injustice are and what the truth about their benefits is. So I told them what I had in mind: The investigation we’re undertaking is not an easy one but requires keen eyesight. Therefore, since we aren’t clever people, we should adopt the [d] method of investigation that we’d use if, lacking keen eyesight, we were told to read small letters from a distance and then noticed that the same letters existed elsewhere in a larger size and on a larger surface. We’d consider it a godsend, I think, to be allowed to read the larger ones first and then to examine the smaller ones, to see whether they really are the same.

That’s certainly true, said Adeimantus, but how is this case similar to [e] our investigation of justice?

I’ll tell you. We say, don’t we, that there is the justice of a single man and also the justice of a whole city?

Certainly.

And a city is larger than a single man?

It is larger.

Perhaps, then, there is more justice in the larger thing, and it will be easier to learn what it is. So, if you’re willing, let’s first find out what sort [369] of thing justice is in a city and afterwards look for it in the individual, observing the ways in which the smaller is similar to the larger.

That seems fine to me.

If we could watch a city coming to be in theory, wouldn’t we also see its justice coming to be, and its injustice as well?

Probably so.

And when that process is completed, we can hope to find what we are looking for more easily?

[b] Of course.

Thus to understand the essential nature of justice, which we must do if we are to explain why it is better all things considered to be the just man thought to be unjust (and suffering all the recriminations, condemntations, and punishments thereof!) than the unjust man thought to be just (and accepting the accolades, awards, and benefits thereof!), we would do better to study how it is manifest in the city than in the soul, since the city is the soul writ large. Notice, however, that Glaucon, in challenging Socrates, and Socrates himself assume that justice has an essential nature, so that our task now is to discover that essential nature so as to answer the overriding question, what is justice? so as to finally and definitively meet Glaucon's challenge.

Has it an essential nature, though, about which we can all agree once we've discussed and deliberated about it sufficiently well?

Consider the possibility that justice is whatever anyone happens to believe it to be. After all, everyone thinks they act justly. For example, protesters think they are justly protesting the injustice of cops killing a man; Cops think they are justly maintaining law and order by bashing protestors, and so on. Quite to the contrary of Socrates, Glaucon, and even Thrasymachus, justice has no essential, albeit controversial nature. Rather, justice is whatever we (individually perhaps, or maybe collectively) take it to be. Thus justice is in the eye of the beholder--what is just (or right, or good, or pious--we're not sure of the difference at this stage of the discussion) is left up to us as individuals or groups to decide, pretty much arbitrarily. Maybe we simply inherit our notions of justice from cultural norms, or maybe at the end of the day there is nothing more to it that our individual opinions on the matter. In any case, there is then no objective, essential truth of the matter, echoing precisely what the sophist Protagoras asserted when he famously proclaimed,

Of all things the measure is man, of the things that are, that [or "how"] they are, and of things that are not, that [or "how"] they are not. (DK80b1)

Regardless of whether we are up to the task of discovering it, has justice an essential, objective nature to be discovered, much as Plato presumed? Why or why not?