Spartanmouse

Well I'm not going to be published anywhere else, am I?   Thrasymachus declares that justice is nothing but “the advantage of the stronger.” What does he mean by this? Identify and evaluate how successfully Plato rejects this claim in the Republic.   In Book 1 of Plato’s the Republic, Socrates engages his interlocutors in a dialogue about the nature of justice. The sophist Thrasymachus proposes the contentious but compelling definition of justice as being ‘simply what is in the interest of the stronger party.’  In this rejection of conventional morality, Thrasymachus disclaims the relation between justice and moral virtue, asserting the relativistic position that what is right is defined entirely by the interests of those with the greatest political power, the rulers, and not by any absolute objective standard of right or wrong action. Socrates cannot give a definition of justice of his own, but he refutes Thrasymachus’ claim using his customary technique of questioning t...