Platonic Justice: The Intrinsic and Ultimate Good
A defense of Plato's revisionist theory of justice contra Glaucon and Callicles.
In Republic[1], Plato describes just and unjust actions as “no different for the soul than healthy and unhealthy things are for the body” (Republic IV, 444c.) Just as physical health is both intrinsically and instrumentally valuable, so is Justice for each individual’s tripartite soul—this formulation of the soul is essential to Plato’s refutation of those views of Glaucon and Callicles; these two interlocutors believe that Justice, as commonly understood, is instrumental to human flourishing, at best, and sheer artifice, at worst. In both cases, the interlocutors regard the popular conception of Justice as intrinsically worthless, especially for the superior person. They believe, operating under an impoverished metaphysical understanding of the human person (i.e., one purely corporeal) that, if justice is understood as that which promotes human wellbeing predicated on human nature, then what’s truly just is to satisfy one’s desires for food, drink, sex, and everything else money affords—pleonectic appetites—with wanton disregard for the interests of other, inferior people.
In this essay, I will reconstruct Glaucon’s view, as presented by Plato in Republic II. I will then do likewise for Callicles’s position, presented in Gorgias. Next, I will compare these two with each other. After, I will explain how their conceptions of justice entail a certain understanding of the human person with which Plato disagrees. I will defend Plato’s tripartite conception of the human soul, drawing largely from Republic IV and IX, articulating my own arguments and thought experiments where appropriate. I will then argue that, if Plato’s metaphysics of the soul obtain, one must reject Callicles’s and Glaucon’s wrongheaded conceptions of justice, embracing Plato’s instead.
I will begin by acknowledging that, although Plato is right, as a matter of fact, about the nature of the human soul and everything this formulation entails for justice, Callicles’s argument succeeds in a different sense. Most people, as Plato acknowledges, share Glaucon and Callicles’s conception of human nature and, consequently, what is best for each individual, i.e., cultivating and satisfying (however fleetingly) one’s appetitive desires. However, people—the majority, anyway—do not have the power to satisfy these desires in the way Callicles describes; that is, they lack the power to loot, plunder, and otherwise coerce material goods from others. Recognizing their weakness, they band together to institute something called “Justice,” which, through the device of the state, binds everyone’s appetitive desires such that the inferior many cannot be dominated by the strong nor each other in their pleonectic pursuits. This political justice is not like that described by Plato as existing in a person’s soul; it is begrudgingly accepted as a social contract of merely instrumental value that would be summarily dismissed by those many inferior, or few superior, as the case may be, when they possess sufficient strength to do so. Mankind’s history of avarice, lust, and wrath is sufficient proof of this reality.
So, what is Glaucon’s conception of justice? Better put, since he wants Socrates to demonstrate the intrinsic value of justice properly understood, what does Glaucon articulate as its common (mis)conception? In short, a total inversion of Plato’s: “To do injustice is naturally good and to suffer injustice bad, but. . . [those] who lack the power to do it and avoid suffering it, decide that it is profitable to come to an agreement with each other neither to do injustice nor to suffer it” (Republic II, 358e-359). Justice, then, is a merely a stalemate between the boundless exertion of one’s will over others and that of others over the one; it is valuable only insofar as it succeeds in protecting the one from the oppression of the other, and vice versa. “People value it not as a good but because they are too weak to do injustice with impunity” (Republic II, 359b).
At this point, the reader may wonder where this desire to commit injustice comes from. Glaucon explains that “the desire to outdo others and get more. . . is what anyone’s nature naturally pursues as good” (Republic II, 359c). This claim is crucial, as it is the premise from which Glaucon’s conception of justice follows. Namely, that human beings have a simple (that is to say, singular) nature, the end of which is to attain more material goods—to feed one’s pleonectic appetite. On this understanding of the person, i.e., of human nature, the Ring of Gyges thought experiment that follows is persuasive. In short, provided he could sate whatever appetitive desire one has by any means available to him at no cost—reputational, physical, or otherwise—to himself, “no one believes justice to be a good when it is kept private, since, whenever either person thinks he can do injustice with impunity, he does it” (Republic II, 360c).
Nonetheless, just because nobody, the apparently just and unjust man alike, believes justice is a private good, i.e., one that is intrinsically valuable, does not mean that, as a matter of fact, it truly isn’t such a good. For example, imagine a fisherman lost at sea. The fisherman is sweltering the beating sun and depletes the last of his freshwater reserves. As the fisherman becomes delirious from exhaustion and heat stroke, he forgets his true belief (though he may lack an adequate explanatory account [aitias logismos] thereof) that drinking salt water does not ameliorate thirst but intensifies it. Then, operating on the false belief that consuming the salt water will save him from acute dehydration, he fills himself on the very thing that kills him. Does the fact that the thirsting fisherman invariably defaults to drinking salt water confirm that the walt water is, as a matter of fact, good for the fisherman? That is, does the salt water promote his flourishing? Of course, the question is rhetorical; the answer is, trivially and emphatically: no! Moreover, the thought experiment demonstrates that human beings can be corrupted by extrinsic factors in such reliable ways so as to encourage the adoption of false beliefs that are inimical, even antithetical, to heir flourishing—the telos of every person.
The fact that nobody has “ever blamed injustice or praised justice except by mentioning the reputations, honors, and rewards that are their consequences” (Republic II, 366e) does not entail that neither possesses an intrinsic badness or goodness, as the case may be. Instead, just as the fisherman’s mind is weakened by the sun, our judgments about what is good in itself is corrupted by our inability to wrest ourselves from the corporeal part of the soul—the one whose desires are irrationally appetitive, material ones; thereby letting the inferior, apparent desires distract us from the attainment of those higher ones of the mind and spirit.
But I digress; I am getting ahead of Plato’s own argument before presenting that of Callicles, which I shall do now.
According to Callicles, “the man who’ll live correctly ought to allow his own appetites to get as large as possible and not restrain them” (Gorgias, 492). By way of contrast, there is nothing more “shameful and worse than self-control and justice for those people who. . . should bring as master upon themselves the law of the many” (Gorgias, 492b); the law of the many—that which is commonly referred to as “Justice”—declaring that the “unjust is nothing but trying to get more than one’s share,” by those who themselves prefer “getting an equal share, since they are inferior” (Gorgias, 483d). Ultimately, Callicles’s definition of justice is that the “superior,” which he struggles to define to Socrates, get the better share of material goods and avoid being “enslaved to anyone at all” (Gorgias, 491e), the inferior (so-called) least of all. The superior ought to rule over the inferior and be ruled by none other than himself.
Like Glaucon, Callicles endorses a view of the human soul that is a wholly material one, one which desires the expansion and satiation of his pleonectic appetites. To them both, whether it’s through the Ring of Gyges thought experiment (Glaucon) or the observed behavior of the fittest animals in the state of nature (Callicles), natural justice, i.e., that version unbounded by the laws imposed upon the strongest/superior individual by the many/inferior, is the attainment of these physical appetites.
Plato does not dispute that part of man’s soul is the physical-corporeal, which, by its very nature, has material desires that, provided enough power, are best increased and satisfied by the disregard for others. Plato identifies the appetitive part as “the largest part in each person’s soul and is by nature most insatiable. . .” (Republic IV, 442b). Plato even brings on board Callicles’s elitism; his opposition to the superior being governed by the inferior, both in political arrangements (as made abundantly clear by the dictatorship of Kallipolis by the philosopher-king and her guardians) and, more importantly for his revisionist theory of justice, by that inferior part of one’s own soul, i.e., the very appetitive part that Glaucon and Callicles so identify and, erring in so doing, prioritize.
To succeed in his account, then, Plato must present a different account of man’s metaphysical nature. One in which the appetitive dimension of the soul, “the multicolored beast” (Republic IX, 588c), is inferior to the others, and does these parts harm by directing the person to attend to its pleonectic desires before, above, and in opposition to those of the mind and the spirit.
Now, we must turn to Plato’s description of these two superior parts—the mind and the spirit—and his account of the necessity of their existence. Plato employs the Law of Noncontradiction to show that there must be a part apart from the appetitive, which desires something in opposition to that desired by the physical such that the whole person is desirous of F and ¬F simultaneously. Analogous to the archer who cannot “at the same time push the bow away and draw it towards him” (Republic IV, 439b), there must be one “part of the soul with which it calculates [called] the rational part and the part with which it lusts, hungers, thirsts, and gets excited by other appetites [called] the irrational appetitive part” (Republic IV, 439d). Continuing, there must be a third part that, “when appetite forces someone contrary to rational calculation, [reproaches] himself and gets angry with that in him that’s doing the forcing,” i.e., the irrational appetitive part (Republic IV, 440b). This third part he refers to as the spirit. An example to reify Plato’s introduction of the third part: the rational part dictates one will likely die if one goes into the burning wreckage to save a stranger’s wailing infant; the irrational appetitive part is averse to all that pains the body, such as the fire’s smoke and heat. Nevertheless, the will of the spirited part overpowers the desires of these other two parts, risking life and limb to save the infant from the inferno.
Justice then, by Glaucon and Callicles’s own lights, consists in these three parts doing what is in their respective natures. By Callicles’s lights, specifically, these parts must be subordinated by the utmost superior rather than the greatest being subject to the base appetite of the irrational part, which is inferior but comprises a greater magnitude of the soul than its better counterparts (Republic IV, 442b). For the man of tripartite soul, justice consists of each internal part doing “what is truly himself and his own” (Republic IV, 443d). In so doing, man “puts himself in order, is his own friend, and harmonizes the three parts of himself. . . [such that] he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious” (Republic IV, 443d-e). By permitting his whole self to be dragged about by the irrational appetitive part, there occurs “a kind of civil war between the three parts” in which that part that “is by nature suited to be a slave” rules instead of its natural superiors, leading to “licentiousness, cowardice, ignorance. . . [and] the whole of vice” (Republic IV, 444b). Concluding, Plato posits that it cannot be worth living when one’s soul is “ruined and in turmoil” (Republic IV, 445b), as it is when the appetitive (more often) or the spirited (less often) parts presume to wrestle the reins from their natural commander: the rational part.
In review, justice consists in establishing “a natural relation of control, one by another,” (Republic IV, 444) in which the “beastlike parts of our nature [are subordinated] to the. . . divine,” i.e., the rational calculating part (Republic IX, 589d). After all, that which rules must possess wisdom and the rational part is the only dimension of the soul with this capacity. In direct refutation of those views extolled by his interlocutors, Plato affirms that it cannot “profit anyone to acquire gold unjustly”—a stand-in for all those pleonectic desires afforded thereby–for, in so doing, “he enslaves the best part of himself to the most vicious. . . godless and polluted” (Republic IX, 589d-e).
Justice is refusing to enslave the superior to the inferior for Plato, Glaucon, and Callicles alike. However, provided Plato’s proper conception of the soul as tripartite, with the mind supreme, the spirit middling, and the appetitive most inferior, the shared belief in the superior’s rulership over the inferior entails the opposite conclusion: Moderation and harmonization of the pleonectic rather than striving ceaselessly for its expansion and satisfaction. Plato’s revisionist account of justice is not motivated by concern for the wellbeing of the many who, provided their false belief in the superiority of the irrational appetitive and inability to sate it, institute laws that accidentally advance in the polis a version of justice that resembling Plato’s. Instead, Plato’s intrinsically valuable justice is motivated by the same objective of Glaucon, Callicles, the many, and that which all of humanity naturally desires: the benefit of the individual.
[1] Plato, Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson. Hackett Publishing Co. (1997).