Philosophy essay (Term 1 assessment for Cert. Philosophical Studies)

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 the assumptions underlying the claim and seeking to reveal the inconsistencies between these assumptions and what the interlocutors agree to be true about the things they are discussing.

The dialogue presents Socrates’ refutation as successful, extracting many a surly and sarcastic remark and at one point even a blush from the belligerent sophist, before he eventually withdraws from the conversation abruptly for it to be picked up by two other interlocutors. Socrates is successful in revealing inconsistencies and contradictions in Thrasymachus’ arguments, but though he seems satisfied he has dealt with the entirety of Thrasymachus’ case, in this essay I will argue that Socrates fails to repudiate Thrasymachus’ contention conclusively and that arguing against his stark view of justice is a challenge that remains difficult today.

Thrasymachus appears conceited, cynical and full of contempt, entering the conversation with a blustering attack on Socrates’ method of questioning and criticising him for failing to provide a definition of justice. He claims he can provide a definition of justice but demands to be paid for his trouble. [R: 337d] His impudence may not endear him to the reader, but Thrasymachus’ position proves harder to refute than the preceding more conventional claims of Cephalus and Polemarchus, that justice is giving people their dues or doing good to friends and harm to enemies.

Thrasymachus’ sees a dog-eat-dog world in which everyone is in competition with one another. People are driven by their self-interest and given the opportunity, will always do what they can to benefit themselves at the expense of others. Those in the ruling class set the rules to their advantage and are to be envied for their strength, whereas those who follow the rules are weak. By following the rules the weak behave justly but they profit nothing by their obedience and so are foolish to accept this subjugation. It is in one’s interest, therefore, to act unjustly.

Socrates refutes Thrasymachus’ account of justice with several points. Firstly, he makes the simple point that those with power do not always know what is in their best interests so what they say is right may at times be to their disadvantage [R: 339b-e]. Thrasymachus could have responded to Socrates’ point by modify his argument to say that justice is the will of the stronger, rather than the interest of the stronger, but his actual response: that in exhibiting a deficiency of knowledge of his interests a ruler is to that extent not a true ruler, is of questionable validity.

Secondly, Socrates asserts that all skill and authority are exercised in the interest of their subjects (in the case of political rule, the interests of the ruled) [R: 341c-342e]. A criticism of the dialectic in these passages may be the overly simplistic arguments the interlocutors deploy and the ineffectiveness of the analogies they use to illustrate their points. Socrates succeeds in getting Thrasymachus to affirm his assertions about the nature of skills (techne in Greek) as he builds up to his claim that skills are always exercised in the interest of their subjects, but he does not supply any solid reason to believe that what is true of medicine and the other skills he mentions must necessarily be true of the skill of ruling as well, so it is unhelpful for his argument to rely on this. This is proved by the ease with which Thrasymachus dismisses the argument he appears to have just accepted by invoking the example of the shepherd who acts in his own interests and not those of his sheep [R: 343-b].

The most interesting part of the dialogue and the heart of the disagreement is in the question of whether justice or injustice pays. Socrates argues convincingly that since injustice breeds enmity and dissent, it renders the unjust incapable of cooperation, and as such is a source of weakness, not of strength. Thrasymachus has no answer for this. A key difference between Thrasymachus and Socrates’ accounts of justice is in the relationship between the individual and the state. For Thrasymachus, individuals within a state seek dominance over one another and thus benefit from unjust not just action. By contrast, Socrates argues that as a virtue, just action benefits rather than disadvantages the agent of the action. For this to be the case, the interests of an individual must be bound up in the interests of others, but this is surely true.

Part of Plato’s thesis is the notion that justice in the individual is found in the harmony of the tripartite soul whose three aspects work together in balance in the just person, a fuller account of which comes later in Book 4 of the Republic than the glimpses we see in Book 1. Plato relates the harmony of the soul to the proper functioning of the just state, which he describes as being similarly tripartite and formed of three classes of citizen, whose interests must likewise be balanced in order to achieve justice for all. We do not have to accept the model of society Plato proposes in the Republic or his analogy between the disharmony that exists between unjust individuals and the internal disharmony that exists within the unjust individual to recognise that individuals in society do not operate independently of one another, but depend on cooperative behaviour.

For all the holes that Socrates picks in the sophist’s case, the potency of Thrasymachus’ presentation is evident from the way it echoes in the writings of subsequent thinkers. In The Prince, Machiavelli espouses a consequentialist despotism in which the aims of the powerful justify any means that achieve those ends.  The most striking echo of Thrasymachus come from Hobbes, who says that the constant human search for the satisfaction of their desires and the scarcity of the means to satisfy them would, in a state of nature, lead to a ‘war of all against all’, where ‘nothing can be unjust’ and there is no place for morality. Hobbes sees all men as having ‘a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death’ and says that a man ‘cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more’.

A problem with Thrasymachus’ argument is that he doesn’t acknowledge the ability for people to work together for mutual benefit. If he did, he would not be able to say that one can only advance one’s interests at the expense of others, but as it is he ends up promoting a life of tyranny. This objection, however, does not deal completely with the claim that ‘justice is the interest of the stronger’ and if we are to refute this properly we may be required to give an alternative definition of justice.

If we hold the familiar view that justice is a good thing, it must be good for some reason other than that it benefits only the powerful. Contemporary concepts of justice contain the egalitarian ideals of fairness and equality of freedom and opportunity for all. These ideas are straightforward enough to comprehend but the difficulty comes in discriminating what is fair, for in each situation this might be expressed differently by different individuals depending on the weight they give to each of the factors pertinent to evaluation of the case. Members of society will always be in competition with one another for resources and opportunities. This is not to say that they do not hold a concurrent interest in cooperation, but when there is disagreement about what is fair, competition leads to conflict, so agreement on what is just is important. Does there exist an absolute objective code to which we can appeal to meet this need?

Hobbes argues that there exist ‘Laws of Nature’: theorems or conclusions of collective rationality ‘that give each person the best chance of preserving his or her own life’. For him the need for these laws to be enforced provides the mandate for the state and sovereign rule. We might be attracted to an approach with a pragmatic consideration of our mutual interests and interdependence but there are several ways in which this falls short of defining or ensuring justice. Even with an authority to promote the consideration of collective interest over individual interest, we still have no way of determining authoritatively what is right and what is wrong when it comes to a disagreements over the interpretation of the collective interest, or in situations of competing interest where there is no clear broader collective interest in play. Since such disagreements come from subjective evaluations of what is right or fair, they are guaranteed always to exist. Furthermore, unless a single state and sovereign can be established to govern all people, the various states that do exist will be faced with the same challenges of how to cooperate and to mediate disagreements between one another as they must each resolve between their citizens.

In conclusion: Plato takes Thrasymachus’ view of justice to be quite wrong, and we have seen from analysis of the text how he successfully attacks aspects of his claim. The search for an objective standard of justice, however, is a difficult one, and despite offering us a description of justice as a sort of harmony of conflicting or competing aspects of the soul and state, Plato leaves us still searching. Without this objective standard, any system for the administration of justice will be at risk of attack, disenfranchisement and corruption, the results of which may sometimes look every bit as grimly amoral or immoral as Thrasymachus describes.

Bibliography

Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976)

Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 2007)

Strauss, Leo, 'Niccolo Machiavelli', in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, 3rd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)

Wolff, Jonathan, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

[1] Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd end (London: Penguin, 2007), 338c Subsequent references to this work will appear as [R] in the main text of the essay.

[2] Leo Strauss, 'Niccolo Machiavelli', in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, 3rd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p.297

[3] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p.188

[4] Hobbes, p.161

[5] Jonathan Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.14