Plato on Justice
The Greek word which Plato uses to mean "justice" -- dike or dikaios -- is also synonymous with law and can also mean "the just"; as Allan Bloom (1991) notes, Plato uses a more specific term -- dikaiosyne -- in the Republic, which means something more like "justice, the virtue" (p. 442). Gregory Vlastos (1981) goes even further to note that, with Plato's very vocabulary for these concepts of justice, "the sense is so much broader: they could be used to cover all which is morally right" (p. 111). This terminology links it with justice as it would be conceived within Plato's theory of forms, and Dominic Scott (2006) notes that -- following that theory -- this introduces "another connotation of virtue" as being "a genus of which such qualities as justice, courage, temperance and wisdom are species" (p. 14). Slippage of terminology seems to be looming here in Plato's very definition of what he means by "justice," and the idealizing tendencies of his theory of forms somewhat abandon the question of the existing social structure and framework of justice in practice rather than in theory (possibly because the democratic justice that was ultimately meted out to Socrates himself is hardly something that Plato could endorse). Without any allegiance or adherence to such an existing framework would lead to a vertiginous sense of unleashed amorality: this leads one of the interlocutors of Socrates to propose a mythological story of Gyges and his magical ring of invisibility. Intriguingly, the centrality of the Gyges story to the overall framework of Plato's discussion of justice within the Republic seems to be structurally or conceptually related to (but hardly in philosophical agreement with) the much later analysis of justice in John Rawls' now-classic Kantian discussion of "justice as fairness." Yet before taking a closer look at Plato's overall conception of justice -- as espoused in the Republic, but with brief considerations of two other dialogues (Meno and Protagoras) where justice is analyzed en passant by Socrates -- it is worth noting that the Republic itself contains a criticism of the reliance on illustrative storytelling like the myth of Gyges itself. I hope to show that, to some extent, Plato actually anticipates later criticisms of Rawls' method by including a critique . For Plato justice is an ideal -- it is not conceived of as something that is able to be put into perfect practice, any more than philosophy is.
At Republic 511c, Socrates in conversation with Glaucon has raised the question of the Platonic theory of forms. Plato's theory of forms is notorious not only for the central role it plays in his philosophy, but the almost willful vagueness with which Socrates and Plato expound its details -- but at this point, it is sufficient to note that Socrates' topic is the role that the theory of forms plays upon the practice of philosophy itself.
"Well, then, go on to understand that by the other segment of the intelligible I mean that which argument itself grasps with the power of dialectic, making the hypotheses not beginnings but really hypotheses -- that is, steppingstones and springboards -- in order to reach what is free from hypothesis at the beginning of the whole. When it has grasped this, argument now depends on that which depends on this beginning and in such fashion goes back down again to an end; making no use of anything sensed in any way, but using forms themselves, going through forms to forms, it ends in forms too." (Bloom 1991: 191.)
In other words, Socrates seems to suggest that any reference to specific illustrative examples is in itself a step down from the perfect abstraction of discussing the forms of different aspects of virtue, such as justice, insofar as it is inherent in Plato's theory of forms that to go from the abstraction of the forms to the concrete details of reality is always seen as something of a step down. (Socrates in the Symposium will explicitly compare the progress of love towards its ideal Platonic form to a ladder, in which the corporeal aspects are distinctly defined as a literal "step down" or more from the most idealized form of love that Socrates and Diotima discuss in their recounted dialogue.) Morgan (2000) glosses the passage as follows:
The philosopher's aim is to reach the intelligible moving from idea to idea, without the aid of sensible images (511c). But neither Sokrates nor his interlocutors are...
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