## 1. Introduction: The Question and the Strategy


### 1.1 The Nature of the Question




In Book One, the *Republic*'s question first emerges in the 
figure of Cephalus. After Socrates asks his host what it is like 
being old (328d-e) and rich (330d)--rather rude, we might 
think--Cephalus says that the best thing about wealth is that it can 
save us from being unjust and thus smooth the way for an agreeable 
afterlife (330d-331b). This is enough to prompt more questions, for 
Socrates wants to know what justice is. Predictably, Cephalus and 
then Polemarchus fail to define justice in a way that survives 
Socratic examination, but they continue to assume that justice is a 
valuable part of a good human life. Thrasymachus erupts when he has 
had his fill of this conversation (336a-b), and he challenges the 
assumption that it is good to be just. On Thrasymachus' view (see 
especially 343c-344c), justice is conventionally established by the 
strong, in order that the weak will serve the interests of the 
strong. The strong themselves, on this view, are better off 
disregarding justice and serving their own interests directly.




Socrates sees in this "immoralist" challenge the explicit
question of whether one should live a just or unjust life (344d-e),
and he tries repeatedly to repel Thrasymachus' onslaught. (See the entry on 
 Callicles and Thrasymachus.) Eventually,
Thrasymachus withdraws sullenly, like Callicles in
the *Gorgias*, but Socrates' "victory" fails to
satisfy Glaucon and Adeimantus. The brothers pick up where
Thrasymachus left off, providing reasons why most people think that
justice is not intrinsically valuable but worth respecting only if one
is not strong enough (or invisible enough) to get away with
injustice. They want to be shown that most people are wrong, that
justice is worth choosing for its own sake. More than that, Glaucon
and Adeimantus want to be shown that justice is worth
choosing *regardless* of the rewards or penalties bestowed on
the just by other people and the gods, and they will accept this
conclusion only if Socrates can convince them that it is
*always* better to be just. So Socrates must persuade them 
that the just person who is terrifically unfortunate and scorned 
lives a better life than the unjust person who is so successful that 
he is unfairly rewarded as if he were perfectly just (see 360d-361d).




The challenge that Glaucon and Adeimantus present has baffled modern 
readers who are accustomed to carving up ethics into deontologies 
that articulate a theory of what is right independent of what is good
and consequentialisms that define what is right in terms of what 
promotes the good (Foster 1937, Mabbott 1937, cf. Prichard 1912 and 1928). The insistence that justice be praised "itself by 
itself" has suggested to some that Socrates will be offering a 
deontological account of justice. But the insistence that justice be 
shown to be beneficial to the just has suggested to others that 
Socrates will be justifying justice by reference to its consequences.




In fact, both readings are distortions, predicated more on what modern
moral philosophers think than on what Plato thinks. Socrates takes the
basic challenge to concern how justice relates to the just person's
objective success or happiness (Greek *eudaimonia*). In Book
One, he argued that justice, as a virtue, makes the soul perform its
function well and that a person who lives well is "blessed and
happy" (352d-354a, quoting 354a1). At the beginning of Book Two,
he retains his focus on the person who aims to be happy. He says,
"I think that justice belongs in the best class [of goods], that
which should be loved both for its own sake and for the sake of its
consequences by anyone who is going to be blessed"
(358a1-3). Given this perspective, Socrates has to show that smartly
pursuing one's happiness favors being just (which requires always
acting justly) over being unjust (which tolerates temptation to
injustice and worse), apart from the consequences that attend to the
appearance of being just or unjust. But he does not have to show that
being just or acting justly *brings about* happiness. The
function argument in Book One suggests that acting justly is the same
as being happy. If Socrates stands by this identity, he can
simultaneously show that justice is valuable "itself by
itself" and that the just are happier.




But the function argument concludes that justice is both necessary 
and sufficient for happiness (354a), and this is a considerably 
stronger thesis than the claim that the just are always happier than 
the unjust. After the challenge Glaucon and Adeimantus present, 
Socrates might not be so bold. Even if he successfully maintains that acting justly is identical to being happy, he might think that there are circumstances in which no just person could act justly and thus be happy. This will nonetheless satisfy Glaucon and 
Adeimantus if the just are better off (that is, closer to happy) than
the unjust in these circumstances. (See also Kirwan 1965 and Irwin 1999.)


### 1.2 Rejected Strategies




After the challenge of Glaucon and Adeimantus, Socrates takes off in 
a strange direction (from 367e). He suggests looking for justice as a
virtue of cities before defining justice as a virtue of persons, on 
the unconvincing grounds that justice in a city is bigger and more 
apparent than justice in a person (368c-369b), and this leads 
Socrates to a rambling description of some features of a good city 
(369b-427c). This may seem puzzling. But Socrates' indirect approach 
is not unmotivated. The arguments of Book One and the challenge of 
Glaucon and Adeimantus rule out several more direct routes.




First, Socrates might have tried to settle quickly on a widely 
accepted account of what justice is and moved immediately to 
considering whether *that* is always in one's interests. But 
Book One rules this strategy out by casting doubt on widely accepted 
accounts of justice. Socrates must say what justice is in order to 
answer the question put to him, and what he can say is constrained in
important ways. Most obviously, he cannot define justice as happiness
without begging the question. But he also must give an account of 
justice that his interlocutors recognize *as justice*: if his 
account of justice were to require torturing red-headed children 
for amusement, he would fail to address the question that Glaucon and
Adeimantus are asking.




Moreover, Socrates cannot try to define justice by enumerating the 
types of action that justice requires or forbids. We might have 
objected to this strategy for this reason: because action-types can 
be specified in remarkably various ways and at remarkably different 
levels of specificity, no list of just or unjust action-types could 
be comprehensive. But a specific argument in Book One suggests a 
different reason why Socrates does not employ this strategy. When 
Cephalus characterizes justice as keeping promises and returning what
is owed, Socrates objects by citing a case in which returning what is
owed would not be just (331c). This objection potentially has very 
wide force, as it seems that exceptions could *always* be 
found for any action-type that does not include in its description a 
word like 'wrong' or 'just'. Wrongful killing
may always be wrong, but is killing? Just recompense may always be 
right, but is recompense?




So Book One makes it difficult for Socrates to take justice for
granted. What is worse, the terms in which Socrates accepts the
challenge of Glaucon and Adeimantus make it difficult for him to take
happiness for granted. If Socrates were to proceed like a
consequentialist, he might offer a full account of happiness and then
deliver an account of justice that both meets with general approval
and shows how justice brings about happiness. But Socrates does not
proceed like that. He does not even do as much as Aristotle does in
the *Nicomachean Ethics*; he does not suggest some general
criteria for what happiness is. He proceeds as if happiness is
unsettled. But if justice at least partly constitutes happiness and
justice is unsettled, then Socrates is right to proceed as if
happiness is unsettled.




In sum, Socrates needs to construct an account of justice and an 
account of happiness at the same time, and he needs these accounts to
entail without assuming the conclusion that the just person is always
happier than the unjust.


### 1.3 The Adopted Strategy




The difficulty of this task helps to explain why Socrates takes the 
curious route through the discussion of civic justice and civic 
happiness. Socrates can assume that a just city is always more 
successful or happy than an unjust city. The assumption begs no questions, 
and Glaucon and Adeimantus readily grant it. If Socrates can then 
explain *how* a just city is always more successful and happy than an 
unjust city, by giving an account of civic justice and civic 
happiness, he will have a model to propose for the relation between personal justice and flourishing.




Socrates' strategy depends on an analogy between a city and a person.
There must be some intelligible relation between what makes a city
successful and what makes a person successful. But to answer the
*Republic*'s question, Socrates does not need any particular
account of *why* the analogy holds, nor does he need the
analogy to hold broadly (that is, for a wide range of
characteristics). It works even if it only introduces an account of
personal justice and happiness that we might not have otherwise
entertained.




Although this is all that the city-person analogy needs to do,
Socrates seems at times to claim more for it, and one of the abiding
puzzles about the *Republic* concerns the exact nature and
grounds for the full analogy that Socrates claims. At times Socrates
seems to say that the same account of justice must apply to both
persons and cities because the same account of any predicate
'F' must apply to all things that are F (e.g.,
434d-435a). At other times Socrates seems to say that the same account
of justice must apply in both cases because the F-ness of a whole is
due to the F-ness of its parts (e.g., 435d-436a). Again, at times
Socrates seems to say that these grounds are strong enough to permit a
deductive inference: if a city's F-ness is such-and-such, then a
person's F-ness must be such-and-such (e.g., 441c). At other times,
Socrates would prefer to use the F-ness of the city as a heuristic for
locating F-ness in persons (e.g., 368e-369a). Plato is surely right to
think that there is some interesting and non-accidental relation
between the structural features and values of society and the
psychological features and values of persons, but there is much
controversy about whether this relation really is strong enough to
sustain all of the claims that Socrates makes for it in
the *Republic* (Williams 1973, Lear 1992, Smith 1999, Ferrari
2003).




Still, the *Republic* primarily requires an answer to Glaucon 
and Adeimantus' question, and that answer does not depend logically 
on any strong claims for the analogy between cities and persons. 
Rather, it depends upon a persuasive account of justice as a personal
virtue, and persuasive reasons why one is always happier being just 
than unjust. So we can turn to these issues before returning to 
Socrates' remarks about the successful city.


## 2. Ethics, Part One: What Justice Is


### 2.1 Human Motivations




Socrates seeks to define justice as one of the cardinal human 
virtues, and he understands the virtues as states of the soul. So his
account of what justice is depends upon his account of the human 
soul.




According to the *Republic*, every human soul has three parts:
reason, spirit, and appetite. (This is a claim about the embodied 
soul. In Book Ten, Socrates argues that the soul is immortal 
(608c-611a) and says that the disembodied soul might be simple 
(611a-612a), though he declines to insist on this (612a) and the 
*Timaeus* and *Phaedrus* apparently disagree on the 
question.) At first blush, the tripartition can suggest a division 
into beliefs, emotions, and desires. But Socrates explicitly ascribes
beliefs, emotions, and desires to each part of the soul (Moline 1978). In 
fact, it is not even clear that Plato would recognize psychological 
attitudes that are supposed to be representational without also being
affective and conative, or conative and affective without also being 
representational. Consequently, 'belief' and 
'desire' in translations or discussions of Plato 
(including this one) must be handled with care; they should not be 
understood along Humean lines as motivationally inert 
representations, on the one hand, and non-cognitive motivators, on 
the other.




The *Republic* offers two general reasons for the 
tripartition. First, Socrates argues that we cannot coherently 
explain certain cases of psychological conflict unless we suppose 
that there are at least two parts to the soul. The core of this 
argument is what we might call the principle of non-opposition: "the 
same thing will not be willing to do or undergo opposites in the same
respect, in relation to the same thing, at the same time" (436b8-9). 
This is a perfectly general metaphysical principle, comparable to 
Aristotle's principle of non-contradiction (*Metaphysics* G3 
1005b19-20). Because of this principle, Socrates insists that one 
soul cannot be the subject of opposing attitudes *unless* one 
of three conditions is met. One soul *can* be the subject of 
opposing attitudes if the attitudes oppose each other at different times, 
even in rapidly alternating succession (as Hobbes explains mental 
conflict). One soul can also be the subject of opposing attitudes if 
the attitudes relate to different things, as a desire to drink 
champagne and a desire to drink a martini might conflict. Last, one 
soul can be the subject of opposing attitudes if the attitudes oppose
*in different respects*.




Initially, this third condition is obscure. The way Socrates
handles putative counter-examples to the principle of non-opposition
(at 436c-e) might suggest that when one thing experiences one opposite
in one of its parts and another in another, it is *not*
experiencing opposites in different respects (Stalley 1975; Bobonich 2002, 228-31; Lorenz 2006, 23-24). That would entail,
apparently, that it is not one thing experiencing opposites at all,
but merely a plurality. But Socrates later rewords the principle of
non-opposition's "same respect" condition as a "same
part" condition (439b), which explicitly allows one thing to
experience one opposite in one of its parts and another in
another. The most natural way of relating these two articulations of
the principle is to suppose that experiencing one opposite in one part
and another in another is just one way to experience opposites in
different respects. But however we relate the two articulations to
each other, Socrates clearly concludes that one soul *can*
experience simultaneously opposing attitudes in relation to the same
thing, but only if different parts of it are the direct subjects of
the opposing attitudes.




Socrates employs this general strategy four times. In Book Four, he
twice considers conflicting attitudes about what to do. First, he
imagines a desire to drink being opposed by a calculated consideration
that it would be good not to drink (439a-d). (We might think,
anachronistically, of someone about to undergo surgery.) This is
supposed to establish a distinction between appetite and reason. Then
he considers cases like that of Leontius, who became angry with
himself for desiring to ogle corpses (439e-440b). These cases are
supposed to establish a distinction between appetite and spirit. In
Book Ten, Socrates appeals to the principle of non-opposition when
considering the decent man who has recently lost a son and is
conflicted about grieving (603e-604b) (cf. Austin 2016) and when considering conflicting
attitudes about how things appear to be (602c-603b) (cf. Moss 2008 and Singpurwalla 2011). These show a
broad division between reason and an inferior part of the soul (Ganson 2009); it is
compatible with a further distinction between two inferior parts,
spirit and appetite.




Socrates' arguments from psychological conflict are well-tailored to 
explain akrasia (weakness of will) (Penner 1990, Bobonich 1994, Carone 2001). In the *Protagoras*, 
Socrates denies that anyone willingly does other than what she 
believes to be best, but in the *Republic*, the door is opened
for a person to act on an appetitive attitude that conflicts with a 
rational attitude for what is best. How far the door is open to 
akrasia awaits further discussion below. For now, there are other 
more pressing questions about the *Republic*'s explanation of 
psychological conflict.




First, what kinds of parts are reason, spirit, and appetite? Some
scholars believe that they are merely conceptual parts, akin to
subsets of a set (Shields 2001, Price 2009). They would object to characterizing the parts
as *subjects* of psychological attitudes. But the arguments
from conflict treat reason, spirit, and appetite as distinct subjects
of psychological states and events, and it seems best to take
Socrates' descriptions at face value unless there is compelling reason
not to (Kamtekar 2006). At face value, Socrates offers a more robust conception of
parts, wherein each part is like an independent agent. 




Indeed, this notion of parts is robust enough to make one wonder why 
reason, spirit, and appetite are *parts* at all, as opposed to
three independent subjects. But the *Republic* proceeds as 
though every embodied human being has just one soul that comprises 
three parts. No embodied soul is perfectly unified: even the virtuous
person, who makes her soul into a unity as much as she can (443c-e), 
has three parts in her soul. (She must, as we shall see, in order to 
be just.) But every embodied soul enjoys an unearned unity: every 
human's reason, spirit, and appetite constitute a single soul that is
the unified source of that human's life and is a unified locus of 
responsibility for that human's thoughts and actions. (It is not as though a person is held responsible for 
what his reason does but not for what his appetite does.) There are 
questions about what exactly explains this unearned unity of the 
soul (see E. Brown 2012).




There are also questions about whether the arguments from conflict 
establish exactly three parts of the soul (and see Whiting 2012). Some worry that the 
discussion of Leontius does not warrant the recognition of a third 
part of the soul (but see Brennan 2012), and some worry that the appetitive part contains 
such a multitude of attitudes that it must be subject to further 
conflicts and further partitioning (and see 443e with Kamtekar 2008). Answering these 
questions requires us to characterize more precisely the kind of
opposition that forces partitioning , in accordance with the principle
of non-opposition (compare Reeve 1988, 124-31; Irwin 1995, 203-17; Price 1995, 46-48; and Lorenz 2006, 13-52), and to examine more carefully the broader features
being attributed to the three parts of the soul (on appetite, e.g., compare Bobonich 2002, Lorenz 2006, and Moss 2008).




Fortunately, the arguments from conflict do not work alone. Indeed, 
they cannot, as the principle of non-opposition merely establishes a 
constraint on successful psychological explanations. Appeals to this 
principle can show where some division must exist, but they do not by
themselves characterize the parts so divided. So, already in Book 
Four's arguments from conflict, Socrates invokes broader patterns of 
psychology and appeals to the parts to explain these patterns (cf. 
435d-436b).




This appeal to reason, spirit, and appetite to explain broader 
patterns of human thought and action constitutes the 
*Republic*'s second general strategy to support tripartition. 
It receives its fullest development in Books Eight and Nine, where 
Socrates uses his theory of the tripartite soul to explain a variety 
of psychological constitutions. In the most basic implementation of 
this strategy, Socrates distinguishes people ruled by reason, those 
ruled by spirit, and those ruled by appetite (580d-581e, esp. 581c): 
the first love wisdom and truth, the second love victory and honor, 
and the third profit and money. This simplistic division, it might be
noted in passing, fixes the sides for an ongoing debate about 
whether it is best to be a philosopher, a politician, or an epicure 
(see, e.g., Aristotle, *Nicomachean Ethics* I 5 and X 6-8). 
But more important for our purposes here, this basic classification 
greatly illuminates the division of the soul.




First, we learn about the organizing aims of each of the psychological
parts (Cooper 1984, Kahn 1987, Reeve 1988, Moss 2005). In Book Four, reason is characterized by its ability to track
what is good for each part and the soul as a whole (441e, 442c). In
Book Nine, reason is characterized by its desire for wisdom. These are
not bifurcated aims. Socrates argues that people are not satisfied merely
with what they take to be good for themselves but want
what is in fact good for them (505d). So reason naturally
pursues not just what it takes to be good for the whole soul but also
the wisdom that ensures that it would get this right. Nor is wisdom's
value merely instrumental to discovering what is good for one. If
wisdom is a fundamental constituent of virtue and virtue is a
fundamental constituent of what is good for a human being, then wisdom
turns out to be a fundamental constituent of what is good for a human
being. So it should not be surprising that the part of the soul that
tracks and pursues what is good for the whole soul also loves
wisdom. Spirit, by contrast, tracks social preeminence and honor. If
'good' is the organizing predicate for rational attitudes,
'honorable' or 'fine' (Greek *kalon*)
is the organizing predicate for spirited attitudes (Singpurwalla 2013). Finally, appetite
seeks material satisfaction for bodily urges, and because money better
than anything else provides this, people ruled by appetite often come
to love money above all.




The basic division of the world into philosophers, honor-lovers, and
money-lovers also illuminates what Socrates means by talking of being
ruled by one part of the soul. If one part dominates in you, then aims
of that part are your aims. If, for example, you are ruled by spirit,
then your reason conceives of your good in terms of what is
honorable. Reason has its own aim, to get what is in fact good for the
whole soul, but in a soul perfectly ruled by spirit, where there are
no genuine psychological conflicts between different parts, reason's
love for truth and wisdom must be limited to that which is also held
to be honorable.




Still, Plato's full psychological theory is much more complicated than
the basic division of persons would suggest. First, there are
different kinds of appetitive attitudes (558d-559c, 571a-572b): some
are necessary for human beings; some are unnecessary but regulable
("lawful"), and some are unnecessary and entirely
uncontrollable ("lawless"). So there are in fact five
kinds of pure psychological constitutions: aristocratically
constituted persons (those ruled by their rational attitudes),
timocratically constituted persons (those ruled by their spirited
attitudes), oligarchically constituted persons (ruled by necessary
appetitive attitudes), democratically constituted persons (ruled by
unnecessary appetitive attitudes), and tyrannically constituted
persons (ruled by lawless appetitive attitudes). The first three of these constitutions are characteristically ordered toward simple aims (wisdom, honor, and money, respectively), but the last two are not so ordered, because there is no simple aim of the unnecessary appetites, be they lawful or lawless. In effect, the democratic and tyrannical souls treat desire-satisfaction itself and the pleasure associated with it as their end. The democrat treats all desires and pleasures as equally valuable and restricts herself to lawful desires, but the tyrant embraces disordered, lawless desires and has a special passion for the apparently most intense, bodily pleasures (cf. Scott 2000, Johnstone 2013, and Johnstone 2015).




The second complication is that some people are not perfectly ruled by
one part of the soul, but are subject to continuing conflicts between,
say, attitudes in favor of doing what is honorable and appetitive
attitudes in favor of pursuing a shameful tryst. Socrates does not
concentrate on these people, nor does he say how common they are. But
he does acknowledge their existence (544c-d, cf. 445c). Moreover, the
occurrence of akrasia would seem to require their existence. For if I
am perfectly ruled by my spirit, then I take my good to be what is
honorable, and how could I be akratic? My spirit and my reason are in
line, so there will be no overpowering of rational preferences about
what is best by spirit. You might suppose that my appetite could
overcome my sense of what is honorable, but in that case, it would
seem that I am not, after all, perfectly ruled by my spirit. Things
might seem different with people ruled by their appetite. Certainly,
if I were perfectly ruled by appetite, then I would be susceptible to
akrasia of the impetuous sort, acting on appetitive desires without
reflectively endorsing them as good. But impetuous akrasia is quite
distinct from the standard akrasia in which I endorse phing as best
for me and at just that moment intentionally ps instead, and
standard akrasia would seem to be impossible in any soul that is
perfectly ruled by any one part of the soul. If you think that
competing appetitive attitudes could give rise to a strict case of
standard akrasia, you should recall how Socrates would have to explain
these cases of psychological conflict in order to avoid multiplying
his divisions in the soul.




The general strategy of the *Republic*'s psychology--to
explain human thought and action by reference to subpersonal
homunculi--remains both appealing and problematic (Burnyeat 2006). Moreover, the
dialogue is filled with pointed observations and fascinating
speculations about human psychology. Some of them pull us up short,
as, for example, the Freudian recognition of Oedipal desires that come
out only in dreams (571c-d). The full theory is complex, and there
remain numerous questions about many of its details.


 

Fortunately, these questions do not have to be settled here for us to
entertain Socrates' response to Glaucon and Adeimantus' challenge. 
Indeed, although his response builds closely on the psychological 
theory, some broad features of the response could be accepted even by
those who reject the tripartite psychology.


### 2.2 Introducing Virtuous Motivations




In Book Four, Socrates defines each of the cardinal virtues in terms 
of the complicated psychology he has just sketched. A person is wise 
just in case her rational attitudes are functioning well, so that her
rational part "has in it the knowledge of what is advantageous for 
each part [of the soul] and for the whole in common of the three 
parts" (442c5-8). So the unwise person has a faulty conception of 
what is good for him. A person is courageous just in case her 
spirited attitudes do not change in the face of pains and pleasures 
but stay in agreement with what is rationally recognized as fearsome 
and not (442bc). So the coward will, in the face of prospective 
pains, fail to bear up to what he rationally believes is not 
genuinely fearsome, and the rash person will, in the face of 
prospective pleasures, rush headlong into what he rationally believes
to be fearsome. A person is temperate or moderate just in case the 
different parts of her soul are in agreement. So the intemperate 
person has appetitive or spirited attitudes in competition with the 
rational attitudes, appetitive or spirited attitudes other than those
the rational attitudes deem to be good. Finally, a person is just 
just in case all three parts of her soul are functioning as they 
should (441d12-e2; cf. 443c9-e2). Justice, then, requires the other 
virtues. So the 
unjust person fails to be moderate, or fails to be wise, or fails to 
be courageous.




Actually, the relation among the virtues seems tighter than that, for
it seems that the unjust person necessarily fails to be wise, 
courageous, *and* temperate (cf. Cooper 1998). You might try to deny this. You 
might say that a person could be courageous--with spirited 
attitudes that track perfectly what the rational attitudes say is 
fearsome and not, in the face of any pleasures and pains--but 
still be unjust insofar has her rational attitudes are inadequately 
developed, failing to know what really is fearsome. But Socrates 
seems to balk at this possibility by contrasting the civically 
courageous whose spirit preserves law-inculcated beliefs about what 
is fearsome and not and the genuinely courageous in whom, presumably,
spirit preserves knowledge about what is fearsome and not (430a-c). 
So you might say instead that a person could be 
moderate--utterly without appetitive attitudes at odds with what
his rational attitudes say is good for him--but still be unjust 
insofar as his rational attitudes are inadequately developed and fail
to know what really is good. But this picture of a meek, but moderate
soul seems to sell short the requirements of moderation, which are 
not merely that there be no insurrections in the soul but also that 
there be agreement that the rational attitudes should rule. This 
would seem to require that there actually be appetitive attitudes 
that are in agreement with the rational attitudes' conception of what
is good, which would in turn require that the rational attitudes be 
sufficiently strong to have a developed conception of what is good. 
Moreover, it would seem to require that the rational attitudes which 
endorse ruling be ruling, which would in turn require that the 
rational attitudes are at least on the path toward determining what 
really is good for the person. If these considerations are correct, 
then the unjust are lacking in virtue *tout court*, whereas 
the just possess all of the virtues.




After sketching these four virtues in Book Four, Socrates is ready to
move from considering what justice is in a person to why a person 
should be just (444e). But this is premature. Socrates is moving to 
show that it is always better to have a just soul, but he was asked 
to show that it is always better to be the person who does just 
actions. We might doubt that an answer concerning psychological 
justice is relevant to the question concerning practical justice (Sachs 1963).




It is easy to misstate this objection (Demos 1964, Dahl 1991). The problem is not that the 
question is about justice as it is ordinarily understood and Socrates
is failing to address conventional justice. Neither the question nor 
the answer is bound to how justice is ordinarily understood, given 
what happened in Book One. Moreover, the problem is not that 
Socrates' answer is relevant only if the class of the psychologically
just and the class of the practically just are coextensive. That 
would require Socrates to show that everyone who acts justly has a 
just soul, and Socrates quite reasonably shows no inclination for 
that thesis. (Some people do what is right for the wrong reasons.) He may have to establish *some* connection 
between doing just actions and becoming psychologically just if he is
to give reasons to those who are not yet psychologically just to do 
just actions, but an account of habituation would be enough to do 
this (cf. 443e, 444c-d).




The real problem raised by the objection is this: how can Socrates 
justify the claim that people with just souls are practically just? 
First, he must be able to show that the psychologically just refrain 
from injustice, and second, he must be able to show that the 
psychologically just do what is required by justice. The first point 
receives a gesture when Socrates is trying to secure the claim that 
harmonious functioning of the whole soul really deserves to be called
justice (442e-443a), but he offers no real argument. Perhaps the best
we can do on his behalf is to insist that the first point is not a 
thesis for argument but a bold empirical hypothesis. On this view, it
is simply an empirical question whether all those who have the 
motivations to do unjust things happen to have souls that are out of 
balance, and an army of psychologists would be needed to answer the 
question.




That might seem bad enough, but the second point does not even receive
a gesture. There is no denying the presence of this second requirement
on the grounds that justice is a matter of refraining from harm
("negative duties") and not of helping others
("positive duties"). Socrates does not criticize the Book
One suggestion that justice requires helping friends (332a ff.); he
and his interlocutors agree that justice requires respect for parents
and care for the gods (443a); and they treat the principle that each
should do his job (and thereby contribute to the city) as the image of
justice (443c). So according to Plato's *Republic* justice
includes both negative and positive duties.




Before we can consider Socrates' answer to the question of the 
*Republic*, we must have reason to accept that those who have 
harmonious souls do what is required by justice. Otherwise, we cannot
be sure that psychological harmony is justice. Unfortunately, 
Socrates does not give any explicit attention to this worry at the 
end of Book Four or in the argument of Books Eight and Nine. But 
there are other places to look for a solution to this worry. First, 
we might look to Books Five through Seven. Second, we might look to 
Books Two and Three.


### 2.3 Perfectly Virtuous Motivations




In Book Four Socrates says that the just person is wise and thus knows
what is good for him, but he does not say anything about what
knowledge or the good is. In Books Five through Seven he clearly
addresses these issues and fills out his account of virtue. He shows,
in sum, that one is virtuous if and only if one is a philosopher, for
he adds to Book Four's insistence that virtue requires knowledge the
new claim that only philosophers have knowledge (esp. 474b-480a). His
account also opens the possibility that knowledge of the good provides
the crucial link between psychological justice and just actions.




The philosophers are initially distinguished from non-philosophers 
because they answer questions like 'What is beautiful?' 
by identifying the imperceptible property (form) of beauty instead of 
some perceptible property or particulars (474b-480a). Socrates does not 
name any philosophers who can knowledgeably answer questions like 
that. In fact, his account of how philosophers would be educated in 
the ideal city suggests that the ability to give knowledgeable 
answers requires an enormous amount of (largely mathematical) 
learning in advance of the questions themselves (521b-540a). How 
would this mathematical learning and knowledge of forms affect one's 
motivations?




One effect can be found by interpreting the form of the good that the
philosopher comes to grasp, since this should shape the philosopher's
rational conception of what is good for her. The form of the good is 
a shadowy presence in the *Republic*, lurking behind the images
of the Sun, Line, and Cave. But it is clear enough that Socrates 
takes goodness to be unity (Hitchcock 1985). He explicitly emphasizes that a virtuous 
person makes himself a unity (443c-e) and insists that a city is made
good by being made a unity (462a-b). The assumption that goodness is 
unity also explains why mathematics is so important to the ascent to 
the good (through mathematics an account of the one over the many is 
learned) (cf. Burnyeat 2000), why the good is superior to other forms (the good is the 
unity or coherence of them, and not another alongside them), why the 
other forms are good (by being part of the unified or coherent 
order), and why goodness secures the intelligibility of the other 
forms (they are fully known teleologically). (It also comports with 
the evidence concerning Plato's lecture on the good (e.g., 
Aristoxenus, *Elementa Harmonica* II 1; cf. Aristotle 
*Eudemian Ethics* 1218a20 and *Metaphysics* 988a8-16 
and b10-15.) So the philosophers, by grasping the form of the good, 
will recognize goodness in themselves as the unity in their souls. 
They will see that the harmony or coherence of their psychological 
attitudes makes them good, that each of their attitudes is good 
insofar as it is part of a coherent set, and that their actions are 
good insofar as they sustain the unity in their souls (cf. 443e).




But there are other ways in which mathematical learning and knowledge
of forms might affect one's motivations. Socrates suggests one way 
when he says that a philosopher will aspire to imitate the harmony 
among the forms (500b-d). Some scholars have understood Socrates to 
be saying that philosophers will desire to reproduce this order by 
cultivating more order and virtue in the world, as Diotima suggests 
in the *Symposium* (Irwin 1995, 298-317; cf. Waterlow 1972-1973, Cooper 1977, Kraut 1991). On this reading, knowledge of the forms 
motivates just actions that help other people, which helps to solve 
the standing worry about the relation between psychological justice 
and practical justice.




Unfortunately, it is far from obvious that this is what Socrates
means. He does not actually say in the *Republic* that
knowledge of the forms freely motivates beneficence. In fact, he says
eight times that the philosophers in the ideal city will have to be
compelled to rule and do their part in sustaining the perfectly just
city (473d4, 500d4, 519e4, 520a8, 520e2, 521b7, 539e3, 540b5). It is
possible to understand this compulsion as the constraint of justice:
the philosophers rule because justice demands that they rule. But
Socrates himself suggests a different way of characterizing the
compulsion. He suggests that the compulsion comes from a law that requires those
who are educated to be philosophers to rule. Moreover, this
characterization better fits Socrates' insistence that the
philosophers are the best rulers because they prefer not to rule even
while they are ruling (520e-521b, with 519c and 540b). For on this
account, the philosophers' justice alone does not motivate them to
rule; rather, their justice motivates them to obey the law, which
justly compels them to rule (E. Brown 2000).




There is another reason to worry about explaining just actions by the
motivating power of knowledge. If the philosophers are motivated to 
do what is just by their knowledge of the forms, then there would 
seem to be an enormous gap between philosophers and non-philosophers.
In addition to the epistemic gap--the philosophers have 
knowledge and the non-philosophers do not--we have a 
motivational gap: the philosophers' knowledge gives them motivations 
to do what is required by justice, and the non-philosophers are not 
similarly motivated. This gap suggests some rather unpalatable 
conclusions about the character of non-philosophers' lives even in 
the ideal city, and it also sits poorly with Socrates' evident desire
to take the philosophers' justice as a paradigm that can be usefully 
approximated by non-philosophers (472c-d).


### 2.4 Imperfectly Virtuous Motivations




Socrates' long discussion in Books Two and Three of how to educate 
the guardians for the ideal city offers a different approach (E. Brown 2004, Singpurwalla 2006; cf. Gill 1985, Kamtekar 1998, and Scott 1999). This 
education is most often noted for its carefully censored "reading 
list;" the young guardians-to-be will not be exposed to inappropriate
images of gods and human beings. Less often noted is how optimistic 
Socrates is about the results of a sufficiently careful education. 
A well-trained guardian will "praise fine things, be pleased by them, 
receive them into his soul, and, being nurtured by them, become fine 
and good," and each will "rightly object to what is shameful, hating 
it while he's still young and unable to grasp the reason" 
(401e4-402a2; cf. 441e). Note that Socrates has the young guardians 
not only responding to good things as honorable (with spirited 
attitudes), but also *becoming* fine and good. Moreover, 
Socrates is confident that the spirited guardians are stably good: 
when he is describing the possibility of civic courage in Book Four, 
he suggests that proper education can stain the spirited part of the 
soul with the right dispositions so deeply that they will be 
preserved "through everything" (429b8, 429c8, 430b2-3).




This optimism suggests that the motivations to do what is right are 
acquired early in moral education, built into a soul that might 
become, eventually, perfectly just. And this in turn suggests one 
reason why Socrates might have skipped the question of why the 
psychologically just can be relied upon to do what is right. Socrates
might assume that anyone who is psychologically just must have 
been raised well, and that anyone who has been raised well will do 
what is right. So understood, early childhood education, and not 
knowledge of the forms, links psychological
justice and just action.




Of course, there are questions about how far Socrates could extend
this optimism about imperfect virtue among non-philosophers. Perhaps
honor-loving members of the auxiliary class have psychological harmony
secured by their consistent attachment to what they have learned is
honorable, but what about the members of the producing class? Can
their attachment to the satisfaction of bodily desires be educated in
such a way that they enjoy, in optimal social circumstances, a
well-ordered soul? Do they even receive a primary education in the
ideal city? These questions will be considered more fully below (and see Wilberding 2012 and Wilburn 2014).




Open questions aside, it should be clear that there are two general 
ways of linking psychological justice to just action: one that 
depends upon the motivational power of knowledge in particular and 
the other that depends upon the early training of a wide range of 
attitudes in the young. If one of these ways works, then Socrates is 
entitled to argue that it is always better to be just than unjust by 
showing why it is always better to have a harmonious soul.


## 3. Ethics, Part Two: Why a Person should be Just


### 3.1 Psychological Health




It is possible to find in the *Republic* as many as five
separate arguments for the claim that it is better to be just than
unjust, without regard to how other people and gods perceive us. The
first appeals to an analogy between psychological health and physical
health in Book Four (445a-b). The second, third, and fourth are what
Socrates calls his three "proofs" in Books Eight and Nine
(543c-580c, esp. 576b-580c; 580c-583a; 583b-588a). And the fifth is
the image of the human soul consisting of a little human being
(reason), a lion (spirit), and a many-headed beast (appetite) (588b
ff.). Yet the first of these is interrupted and said in Book Eight to
be continuous with the first "proof" of Books Eight and
Nine (543c), and the last of them seems to be offered as a closing
exhortation. This whittling leaves us with the three arguments that
Socrates labels his "proofs" (580c9, cf. 583b), the first
discussing psychological health and disease at length and the second
and third concerning pleasure.




Already in Book Four, Glaucon is ready to declare that unjust souls 
are ruined and in turmoil. But Socrates presses for a fuller 
reckoning. When he finally resumes in Book Eight where he had left 
off in Book Four, Socrates offers a long account of four defective 
psychological types. The list is not exhaustive (544cd, cf. 
445c), but it captures the four imperfect kinds of pure psychological
constitutions: pure rule by spirited attitudes, pure rule by 
necessary appetitive attitudes, pure rule by unnecessary but 
regulable appetitive attitudes, and pure rule by lawless appetitive 
attitudes. At the end of this long discussion, Socrates will again 
ask which sort of person lives the best life: the aristocratic soul 
of Books Six and Seven, or one of the other souls of Books Eight and 
Nine?




We might expect Socrates and Glaucon to argue carefully by 
elimination, showing the just life to be better than every sort of 
unjust life. But they do not. Instead, they quickly contrast the 
tyrannical soul with the aristocratic soul, the most unjust with the 
most just. This might seem to pick up on Glaucon's original demand 
(in Book Two) to see how the perfectly just--who is most 
unfortunate but still just--is better than the perfectly 
unjust--who is unjust but still esteemed. But it does not even 
do that, since Socrates is very far from portraying the best soul in 
the least favorable circumstances and the worst soul in the most 
favorable circumstances. Nevertheless, Socrates' limited comparison 
in Book Nine might provide the resources to explain why it is better 
to be the unluckiest philosopher than the luckiest tyrant and why it 
is better to be just than to be unjust in any way whatsoever, for it 
might provide general lessons that apply to these other comparisons.




Socrates and Glaucon characterize the person ruled by his lawless 
attitudes as enslaved, as least able to do what it wants, as full of 
disorder and regret, as poor and unsatisfiable, and as fearful 
(577c-578a). These characterizations fit in a logical order. The 
tyrant is enslaved because he is ruled by an utterly unlimited 
appetite, which prompts in him appetitive desire whenever any chance 
object of appetite presents itself to his consideration. Given this 
condition, he experiences appetitive desires that he cannot satisfy, 
either because they are too difficult for him to satisfy or because 
satisfying them would prevent satisfying other of his desires. His 
experience of unsatisfied desires must make him wish that he could 
satisfy them and feel poor and unsatisfiable because he cannot. 
Worse, because his unsatisfied appetitive desires continue to press 
for satisfaction over time, they make him aware of his past inability
to to do what he wants, which prompts regret, and of his likely 
future inability to do what he wants, which makes him fearful. The 
result is a miserable existence, and the misery is rooted in 
unlimited attitudes that demand more satisfaction than a person can 
achieve. In a nutshell, the tyrant lacks the capacity to do what he 
wants to do.




The philosopher, by contrast, is most able to do what she wants to 
do, for she wants to do what is best, and as long as one has agency, 
there would seem to be a doable best. (Should circumstances make a 
certain apparent best undoable, then it would no longer appear to be 
best.) But this is not to say that the philosopher is guaranteed to 
be able to do what she wants. First, Socrates is quite clear that 
some appetitive attitudes are necessary, and one can well imagine 
circumstances of extreme deprivation in which the necessary 
appetitive attitudes (for food or drink, say) are unsatisfiable. 
Second, the capacity to do what is best might require engaging in 
certain kinds of activities in order to maintain itself. So even if 
the philosopher can satisfy her necessary appetitive attitudes, she 
might be prevented by unfortunate circumstances from the sorts of 
regular thought and action that are required to hold onto the 
capacity to do what is best. Thus, even if a philosophical soul is 
most able to do what it wants, and the closest thing to a sure bet 
for this capacity, it does not retain this ability in every 
circumstance.




This comparison between the tyrannical soul and the philosophical 
soul does all the work that Socrates needs if the capacity to do what
one wants correlates closely with human success or happiness and if 
the lessons about the tyrant's incapacity generalize to the other 
defective psychological constitutions. 




Socrates does not need happiness to *be* the capacity to do 
what one wants, or the absence of regret, frustration, and fear. He 
could continue to think, as he thought in Book One, that happiness is
virtuous activity (354a). But if his argument here works, happiness, 
whatever it is, must require the capacity to do what one wants and be
inconsistent with regret, frustration, and fear.




How does the argument apply to unjust people who are not 
psychologically tyrannical? Anyone who is not a philosopher either 
has a divided soul or is ruled by spirit or appetite. Division in the soul 
plainly undercuts the ability to do what one wants. Can one seek 
honor or money above all and do what one wants? Although the ability 
to do what is honorable or make money is not as flexible as the 
ability to do what is best, it is surely possible, in favorable 
circumstances, for someone to be consistently able to do what is 
honorable or money-making. This will not work if the agent is 
conflicted about what is honorable or makes money. So he needs to be 
carefully educated, and he needs limited options. But if he does 
enjoy adequate education and an orderly social environment, there is 
no reason to suppose that he could not escape being racked by regret,
frustration, or fear. This explains how the members of the lower 
classes in Socrates' ideal city--who are probably not best identified as the timocrats and oligarchs of Book Eight (Wilberding 2009 and Jeon 2014)--can have a kind of capacity to do 
what they want, even though they are slavishly dependent upon the 
rulers' work (cf. 590c-d).




The characterization of appropriately ruled non-philosophers as 
slavish might suggest a special concern for the "heteronomous" 
character of their capacity to do what they want and a special 
valorization of the philosophers' "autonomous" capacity. But we 
should be hesitant about applying these frequently confused and 
possibly anachronistic concepts to the *Republic*. Plato would
probably prefer to think in terms of self-sufficiency (369b), and for the 
purposes of Socrates' argument here, it is enough to contrast the way
a producer's capacity is deeply dependent upon social surroundings 
and the way a philosopher's capacity is relatively free from this 
dependence, once it has been cultivated.




This contrast must not be undersold, for it is plausible to think 
that the self-sufficiency of the philosopher makes him better off. 
Appropriately ruled non-philosophers can enjoy the capacity to do 
what they want only so long as their circumstances are appropriately 
ruled, and this makes their success far less stable than what the 
philosophers enjoy. Things in the world tend to change, and the 
philosopher is in a much better position to flourish through these 
changes. Those of us living in imperfect cities, looking to the 
*Republic* for a model of how to live (cf. 592b), need to 
emulate the philosopher in order to pursue stable, reliable success or 
happiness.




Nevertheless, so far as this argument shows, the success or happiness of 
appropriately ruled non-philosophers is just as real as that
of philosophers. Judged exclusively by the capacity to do what one wants 
and the presence or absence of regret, frustration, and fear, 
philosophers are not better off than very fortunate non-philosophers. 
(The non-philosophers have to be so fortunate that they do not even 
recognize any risk to their good fortune. Otherwise, they would fear 
a change in their luck.) The philosopher's success is more secure 
than the non-philosopher's, but if it is also better as success than the 
non-philosopher's, Socrates' first argument does not show that it is. (See also Kenny 1969 and Kraut 1992.)




Socrates needs further argument in any case if he wants to convince 
those of us in imperfect circumstances (like Glaucon and Adeimantus) 
to pursue the philosophical life of perfect justice. The first 
argument tries to show that anyone who wants to satisfy her desires 
perfectly should cultivate certain kinds of desires rather than 
others. We can reject this argument in either of two ways, by taking 
issue with his analysis of which desires are regularly satisfiable 
and which are not, or by explaining why a person should not want to 
satisfy her desires perfectly. The first response calls for a 
quasi-empirical investigation of a difficult sort, but the second 
seems easy. We can just argue that a good human life must be subject 
to regret and loss. Of course, it is not enough to say that the human
condition is in fact marked by regret and loss. There is no 
inconsistency in maintaining that one should aim at a secure life in 
order to live the best possible human life while also realizing that 
the best possible human life will be marked by insecurity. In fact, 
one might even think that the proper experience of fragility requires
attachment to security as one's end. Instead, to reject Socrates' argument,
we must show that it is wrong to aim at a life that is free of regret
and loss: we must show that the pursuit of security leads one to 
reject certain desires that one should not reject. In this way, we 
move beyond a discussion of which desires are satisfiable, and we 
tackle the question about the value of what is desired and the value 
of the desiring itself. To address this possible objection, Socrates 
needs to give us a different argument.


### 3.2 Pleasure




This explains why Socrates does not stop after offering his first
"proof." Many readers are puzzled about why he offers two
more. After all, the geometer does not need to offer multiple proofs
of his theorem. What might seem worse, the additional proofs concern
pleasure, and thereby introduce--seemingly at the eleventh
hour--a heap of new considerations for the ethics of the
*Republic*. But as the considerations at the end of the 
previous section show, these pleasure proofs are crucial.




Plato merely dramatizes these considerations. Socrates has offered not
merely to demonstrate that it is always better to be just than unjust
but to persuade Glaucon and Adeimantus (but especially Glaucon: see,
e.g., 327a, 357a-b, 368c) of this claim. Insofar as Glaucon shows
sympathy for spirited attitudes (372d with the discussion
in
 section 4.1
 below, and cf. 548d), his attachment
to these attitudes could survive the realization that they are far
from perfectly satisfiable. He may say, "I can see the point of
perfectly satisfiable attitudes, but those attitudes (and their objects)
are not as good as my less-than-perfectly
satisfiable attitudes (and *their* objects)." Glaucon needs to be shown that the
rewards of carrying insecure attitudes do not make up for the
insecurity.




The additional proofs serve a second purpose, as well. At the end of 
Book Five, Socrates says that faculties (at least psychological 
faculties) are distinguished by their results (their rate of success)
and by their objects (what they concern) (477c-d). So far, he has 
discussed only the success-rates of various kinds of psychological 
attitudes. He needs to discuss the objects of various kinds of 
psychological attitudes in order to complete his account. If we did 
not have the discussion of the second proof, in particular, we would 
have an incomplete picture of the *Republic*'s moral psychology.




The two arguments that Socrates proceeds to make are frustratingly 
difficult (see Gosling and Taylor 1982, Nussbaum 1986, Russell 2005, Moss 2006, Warren 2014, Shaw 2016). They are very quick, and though they concern "pleasures," 
Socrates never says exactly what pleasure is. (At one point 
(585d11), the now-standard translation of the *Republic* by 
Grube and Reeve suggests that "being filled with what is appropriate 
to our nature is pleasure," but it is better to read less into the 
Greek by rendering the clause "being filled with what is appropriate 
to our nature is pleasant.") The first argument suggests that 
pleasures might be activities of a certain kind, but the remarkably 
abstract second argument does not provide any special support to that
suggestion. Even if a convincing account of how Plato wants us to 
conceive of pleasure in the *Republic* is wanting, however, we
can get a grasp on the form of the two "pleasure proofs."




The first is an appeal to
authority, in four easy steps. First, Socrates suggests that just as
each part of the soul has its own characteristic desires and
pleasures, so persons have characteristic desires and pleasures
depending upon which part of their soul rules them. The characteristic
pleasure of philosophers is learning. The characteristic pleasure of
honor-lovers is being honored. The characteristic pleasure of
money-lovers is making money. Next, Socrates suggests that each of
these three different kinds of person would say that her own
pleasure is best. So, third, to decide which pleasure really is best,
we need to determine which sort of person's judgment is best, and
Socrates suggests that whoever has the most reason, experience, and
argument is the best judge. Finally, Socrates argues that the
philosopher is better than the honor-lover and the money-lover in
reason, experience, and argument.




It is sometimes thought that the philosopher cannot be better off in 
experience, for the philosopher has never lived as an adult who is 
fully committed to the pleasures of the money-lover. But this point 
does not disable Socrates' argument. The philosopher does not have 
*exactly* the experience that the money-lover has, but the 
philosopher has *far more* experience of the money-lover's 
pleasures than the money-lover has of the philosopher's pleasures. 
The comparative judgment is enough to secure Socrates' conclusion: 
because the philosopher is a *better* judge than the others, 
the philosopher's judgment has a better claim on the truth.




But this first proof does not explain why the distinction in 
pleasures is made; the appeal to the philosopher's authority as a 
judge gives no account of the philosopher's reasons for her judgment.
Moreover, the first pleasure proof does not say that the 
philosopher's pleasures are vastly superior to those of the 
money-lover and the honor-lover. So Glaucon--or anyone else 
tempted to avoid the mathematical studies of Book Seven--might 
think that the superiority of the philosopher's psychological justice
is slight, and given the disrepute heaped on the philosophers (487a 
ff.), Glaucon or anyone else might decide that the 
less-than-perfectly just life is better overall. Socrates needs to 
show that the philosopher's activities are vastly better than the 
non-philosopher's activities in order to answer the challenge 
originally put forth in Book Two by Glaucon and Adeimantus. So it is 
for very good reason that Socrates proceeds to offer a second 
pleasure proof that he promises to be the "greatest and most decisive
overthrow" for the unjust (583b6-7).




Socrates' final argument moves in three broad steps. The first 
establishes that pleasure and pain are not exhaustive contradictories
but opposites, separated by a calm middle that is neither pain nor 
pleasure. This may sometimes seem false. The removal of pain can seem
to be pleasant, and the removal of a pleasure can seem to be painful.
But Socrates argues that these appearances are deceptive. He 
distinguishes between pleasures that fill a lack and thereby replace 
a pain (these are not genuine pleasures) and those that do not fill a
lack and thereby replace a pain (these are genuine pleasures). The 
second step in the argument is to establish that most bodily 
pleasures--and the most intense of these--fill a painful 
lack and are not genuine pleasures. Finally, Socrates argues that the
philosopher's pleasures do not fill a painful lack and are genuine 
pleasures. Contra the epicure's assumption, the philosopher's 
pleasures are more substantial than pleasures of the flesh.




The pleasure proofs tempt some readers to suppose that Socrates must 
have a hedonistic conception of happiness. After all, he claims to 
have shown that the just person is happier than the unjust (580a-c), 
and he says that his pleasure arguments are proofs of the same 
claim (580c-d, 583b). But these arguments can work just as the first 
proof works: Socrates can suppose that happiness, whatever it is, 
is marked by pleasure (just as it is marked by the absence of regret,
frustration, and fear). This is not to say that one should take 
pleasure to be one's goal any more than it is to say that one should 
pursue fearlessness as one's goal. Pleasure is a misleading guide 
(see 581c-d and 603c), and there are many false, self-undermining 
routes to pleasure (and fearlessness).




Socrates' indirect approach concerning happiness (cf. 
 section 1.2
 above) makes sense if he thinks that justice (being just, acting
justly) is happiness (being happy, living well) (354a). Anyone
inclined to doubt that one should always be just would be inclined to
doubt that justice is happiness. So Socrates has to appeal to
characteristics of happiness that do not, in his view, capture what
happiness is, in the hope that the skeptics might agree that happiness
correlates with the absence of regret, frustration, and fear and the
presence of pleasure. That would be enough for the proofs.




Even at the end of his three "proofs," Socrates knows that he cannot 
yet have fully persuaded Glaucon and Adeimantus that it is always 
better to be just than unjust. Their beliefs and desires have been 
stained too deeply by a world filled with mistakes, especially by the
misleading tales of the poets. To turn Glaucon and Adeimantus more 
fully toward virtue, Socrates needs to undercut their respect for the
poets, and he needs to begin to stain their souls anew. But Socrates'
theoretical arguments on behalf of justice are finished. The work 
that remains to be done--especially the sketch of a soul at the 
end of Book Nine and the myth of an afterlife in Book 
Ten--should deepen without transforming our appreciation for the
psychological ethics of the *Republic*.


## 4. Politics, Part One: The Ideal Constitution


### 4.1 Utopianism




Just as Socrates develops an account of a virtuous, successful human 
being and contrasts it with several defective characters, he also 
develops an account of a virtuous, successful city and contrasts it 
with several defective constitutions. So the *Republic* 
contributes to political philosophy in two main ways. I will take 
them up in turn, starting with four disputed features of Socrates' 
good city: its utopianism, communism, feminism, and totalitarianism.




To sketch a good city, Socrates does not take a currently or 
previously extant city as his model and offer adjustments (see 422e, 
and cf. *Statesman* 293e). He insists on starting from 
scratch, reasoning from the causes that would bring a city into being
(369a-b). This makes his picture of a good city an ideal, a utopia.




The *Republic*'s utopianism has attracted many imitators, but
also many critics. The critics typically claim that Plato's political
ideal rests on an unrealistic picture of human beings. The ideal city
is conceivable, but humans are psychologically unable to create and
sustain such a city. According to this charge, then, Plato's ideal
constitution is a nowhere-utopia (ou-topia = "no
place"). But if 'ought' implies 'can', then a
constitution that cannot exist is not one that ought to exist. So, the
objection goes, Plato's ideal constitution fails to be an ideal-utopia
(eu-topia = "good place").




To consider the objection, we first need to distinguish two apparently
ideal cities that Socrates describes. The first, simple city is
sketched very briefly, and is rejected by Glaucon as a "city of
pigs" though Socrates calls it "the healthy city"
(369b-372e). It contains no provision for war, and no distinction
among classes. The second, initially called by Socrates a
"fevered city" and a "city of luxuries" (372e)
but later purified of its luxuries (see especially 399e) and
characterized as a beautiful city ("Kallipolis," 527c2), includes three
classes, two that guard the city and its constitution (ruling and
auxiliary guardians) and one that produces what the city
needs. (At 543c-d, Glaucon suggests that one might find a third city,
as well, by distinguishing between the three-class city whose rulers
are not explicitly philosophers and the three-class city whose rulers
are, but a three-class city whose rulers are not philosophers cannot
be an ideal city, according to Socrates (473b-e). It is better to see
Books Five through Seven as clarifications of the same three-class
city first developed without full explicitness in Books Two through
Four (cf. 497c-d, 499c-d).)




The charge of "utopianism" would apply well to the first city 
Socrates describes. This city resembles a basic economic model since 
Socrates uses it in theorizing how a set of people could efficiently 
satisfy their necessary appetitive desires (Schofield 1993). At the center of his 
model is a principle of specialization: each person should perform 
just the task to which he is best suited. But Socrates' model makes 
no provision for reason's rule, and he later insists that no one can 
have orderly appetitive attitudes unless they are ruled by reason 
(esp. 590c-d; cf. 586a-b). So the first city cannot exist, by the 
lights of the *Republic*'s account of human nature (Barney 2001). It is a 
nowhere-utopia, and thus not an ideal-utopia.




This is not to say that the first city is a mistake. Socrates 
introduces the first city not as a free-standing ideal but as the 
beginning of his account of the ideal, and his way of starting 
highlights two features that make the eventual ideal an ideal. One is
the principle of specialization. With it Socrates sketches how people
might harmoniously satisfy their appetitive attitudes. If reason 
could secure a society of such people, then they would be happy, and 
reason does secure a society of such people in the third class of the
ideal city. (So the model turns out to be a picture of the producers 
in Kallipolis.) But the principle can also explain how a single 
person could flourish, for a version of it explains the optimal 
satisfaction of all psychological attitudes (442d-444a with 
432b-434c). Indeed, this principle is central to the first "proof" 
for the superiority of the just life. The second feature crucial to 
Socrates' ideal enters when Glaucon insists that the first city is fit for 
pigs and not human beings. He objects that it lacks 
couches, tables, relishes, and the other things required for a 
symposium, which is the cornerstone of civilized human life as he understands 
it (Burnyeat 1999). Glaucon is not calling for satisfaction of unnecessary appetitive
attitudes, for the relishes he insists on are later recognized to be 
among the objects of necessary appetitive attitudes (559b). Rather, 
he is expressing spirited indignation, motivated by a sense of what 
is honorable and fitting for a human being. He insists that there is 
more to a good human life than the satisfaction of appetitive 
attitudes. This begins to turn Glaucon away from appetitive 
considerations against being just. It also completes the first city's
introduction of the two kinds of arguments for the superiority of the
just life, by appealing, as the pleasure proofs do, to the 
intrinsic value of different kinds of psychological satisfaction.




Does the "utopianism" objection apply to the second city,
with its philosopher-rulers, auxiliary guardians, and producers? Some
readers would have Plato welcome the charge. As they understand
the *Republic*, Socrates sketches the second city not as an
ideal for us to strive for but as a warning against political
utopianism or as an unimportant analogue to the good person. There
are a couple of passages to support this approach. At 472b-473b,
Socrates says that the point of his ideal is to allow us to judge
actual cities and persons based on how well they approximate it. And
at 592a-b, he says that the ideal city can serve as a model
(*paradeigma*) were it ever to come into
existence or not. But these passages have to be squared with the many in
which Socrates insists that the ideal city could in fact come into
existence (just a few: 450c-d, 456bc, 473c, 499b-d, 502a-c, 540d-e).
His considered view is that although the ideal city is meaningful to
us even if it does not exist, it *could* exist. Of course,
realizing the ideal city is highly unlikely. The widespread disrepute
of philosophy and the corruptibility of the philosophical nature
conspire to make it extremely difficult for philosophers to gain power
and for rulers to become philosophers (487a-502c). Nevertheless,
according to what Socrates explicitly says, the ideal city is supposed
to be realizable. The *Laws* imagines an impossible ideal, in
which all the citizens are fully virtuous and share everything
(739a-740 with
 Plato: on utopia),
 but the *Republic* is more practical than that (Burnyeat 1992; cf. Griswold 1999 and Marshall 2008). So if Plato
does not intend for us to think of the
*Republic*'s ideal city as a serious goal worth striving for, 
something other than Socrates' explicit professions must reveal this 
to us. I consider this possibility in 
 section 6
 below.




But if Socrates would not welcome the "utopianism" charge,
does he successfully avoid it? This is not clear. It is difficult to
show that the ideal city is inconsistent with human nature as the
*Republic* understands it. Socrates supposes that almost all 
of its citizens--not quite all (415d-e)--have to reach 
their fullest psychological potential, but it is not clear that 
anyone has to do more than this.




Nevertheless, we might make the "utopianism" charge stick by showing 
that the *Republic* is wrong about human nature. This version 
of the criticism is sometimes advanced in very sweeping terms: 
Plato's psychology is "too optimistic" about human beings because it 
underplays self-interest, say. In these general terms, the criticism 
is false. Socrates builds his theory on acute awareness of how 
dangerous and selfish appetitive attitudes are, and indeed of how 
self-centered the pursuit of wisdom is, as well. In fact, it might be 
easier to argue in sweeping terms that the *Republic*'s ideal 
city is too *pessimistic* about what most people are capable of, since 
it consigns most human beings to lives as slaves (433c-d, cf. 
469b-471c) or as citizens who are slavishly dependent upon others' 
ruling (590c-d). Still, more specific criticisms of Plato's 
psychology may well be tenable, and these might even show that the 
*Republic* is too optimistic about the possibility of its 
ideal city.




Such criticism should be distinguished from a weaker complaint about
the *Republic*'s "utopianism." One might concede to
the *Republic* its psychology, concede the
*possibility* of the ideal city, and nevertheless insist that 
the ideal city is so unlikely to come about as to be merely fanciful.
A hard-nosed political scientist might have this sort of response. 
But this sounds like nothing more than opposition to political theory
proposing ideals that are difficult to achieve, and it is not clear 
what supports this opposition. It is not as though political 
theorizing must propose ideas ready for implementation in order to 
propose ideas *relevant* to implementation. The 
*Republic*'s ideal can affect us very generally: we can 
consider the unity and harmony fundamental to it, and consider 
whether our own cities and souls should be allowed to fall short in 
unity and harmony where they do. But it can also work in more 
specific terms: we should be able to recognize and promote the 
strategies and policies crucial to the *Republic*'s ideal, 
including careful moral education societally and habitual regulation 
of appetitive desire personally, or the equal opportunity for work 
societally and the development of multiple kinds of psychological 
attitudes personally.




So the *Republic*'s ideal city might be objectionably 
nowhere-utopian, but the point is far from obvious. Of course, even 
if it is not nowhere-utopian, it might fail to be attractively 
ideal-utopian. We need to turn to other features of the second city 
that have led readers to praise and blame it.


### 4.2 Communism




One of the most striking features of the ideal city is its abolition 
of private families and sharp limitation on private property in the 
two guardian classes. Starting with Aristotle (*Politics* II 1-5), this communism in the 
*Republic*'s ideal city has been the target of confusion and 
criticism (see Nussbaum 1980, Stalley 1991, Mayhew 1997). On the one hand, Aristotle (at *Politics* 
1264a11-22) and others have expressed uncertainty about the extent of
communism in the ideal city. On the other, they have argued that communism of any extent has no place in an ideal political community.




There should be no confusion about private property. When Socrates 
describes the living situation of the guardian classes in the ideal 
city (415d-417b), he is clear that private property will be sharply 
limited, and when he discusses the kinds of regulations the rulers 
need to have in place for the whole city (421c ff.), he is clear that
the producers will have enough private property to make the 
regulation of wealth and poverty a concern. But confusion about the scope
of communal living arrangements is possible, due to the casual way in
which Socrates introduces this controversial proposal. The abolition 
of private families enters as an afterthought. Socrates says that 
there is no need to list everything that the rulers will do, for if 
they are well educated, they will see what is necessary, including 
the fact that "marriage, the having of wives, and the procreation of 
children must be governed as far as possible by the old proverb: 
friends possess everything in common" (423e6-424a2). It is not 
immediately clear whether this governance should extend over the 
whole city or just the guardian classes. Still, when he is pressed to
defend the communal arrangements (449c ff.), Socrates focuses on the 
guardian classes (see, e.g., 461e and 464b), and it seems most 
reasonable to suppose that the communism about families extends just 
as far as the communism about property does, on the grounds that only
the best people can live as friends with such things in common (cf. 
*Laws* 739c-740b).




To what extent the communism of the ideal city is problematic is a 
more complicated question. The critics claim that communism is
either undesirable or impossible. The charge of impossibility essentially 
extends one of Plato's insights: while Plato believes that most 
people are incapable of living without private property and private 
families, the critics argue that all people are incapable of living 
without private property. This criticism fails if there is clear 
evidence of people who live communally. But the critic can fall back 
on the charge of undesirability. Here the critic needs to identify 
what is lost by giving up on private property and private 
families, and the critic needs to show that this is more valuable 
than any unity and extended sense of family the communal arrangements
offer. It is not clear how this debate should go. Plato's position on
this question is a stubbornly persistent ideal, despite the equally 
stubborn persistence of criticism.


### 4.3 Feminism




Socrates ties the abolition of private families among the guardian 
classes to another radical proposal, that in the ideal city the 
education for and job of ruling should be open to girls and women. 
The exact relation between the proposals is contestable (Okin 1977). Is Socrates 
proposing the abolition of families in order to free up women to do 
the work of ruling? Or is Socrates putting the women to work since 
they will not have the job of family-caregiver anymore? But perhaps 
neither is prior to the other. Each of the proposals can be supported
independently, and their dovetailing effects can be claimed as a 
happy convergence.




Many readers have seen in Plato's *Republic* a rare exception 
in western philosophy's long history of sexist denigration of women, 
and some have even decided that Plato's willingness to open up the 
best education and the highest jobs to women shows a kind of 
feminism (Wender 1973). Other readers disagree (Annas 1976, Buchan 1999). They point to Plato's indifference 
to the needs of actual women in his own city, to Socrates' frequent, 
disparaging remarks about women and "womanish" attitudes, and to the 
illiberal reasons Socrates offers for educating and empowering women.




The broad claim that Plato or the *Republic* is feminist 
cannot be sustained, and the label 'feminist' is an 
especially contested one, but still, there are two features of the 
*Republic*'s ideal city that can be reasonably called 
feminist. First, Socrates suggests that the distinction between male 
and female is as relevant as the distinction between having long hair
and having short hair for the purposes of deciding who should be 
active guardians: men and women, just like the long-haired and the 
short-haired, are by nature the same for the assignment of education 
and jobs (454b-456b). This suggestion seems to express the plausibly 
feminist point that one's sex is generally irrelevant to one's 
qualifications for education or employment.




The second plausibly feminist commitment in the *Republic* 
involves the abolition of private families. The feminist import of 
this may be obscured by the way in which Socrates and his 
interlocutors talk of "women and children shared in common." In fact,
Socrates' companions might well have been forgiven if this way of 
talking had called to mind pictures of orgiastic free love in the 
guardians' camp, for that, after all, is how Aristophanes' 
*Ecclesiazusae* plays the proposal of "sharing women and 
children" for laughs. But as Socrates clarifies what he means, both 
free love and male possessiveness turn out to be beside the point. 
(The talk of "sharing women and children" reflects the male 
perspective of the men having the conversation but not the content of
the proposal.) Then Socrates' proposal can seem especially striking. 
Plato is clearly aware that an account of how the polis should be 
arranged must give special attention to how families are arranged. 
Relatedly, he is clearly aware that an account of the ideal citizens 
must explain how sexual desire, a paradigmatic appetitive attitude, 
should fit into the good human life. Only very recently, with 
feminist interventions, have sexual desire and its consequences come 
to seem crucial to political theory, and we might think that Plato's 
awareness of these as topics of political philosophy shows at least 
proto-feminist concern. All the more might this awareness seem 
feminist when we relate it back to the first plausibly feminist 
commitment, for Plato wants the economy of desire and reproduction to
be organized in such a way that women are free for education and 
employment alongside men, in the guardian classes, at any rate.




Three of the objections to calling the *Republic* feminist say
more about the contest over the label 'feminist' than 
they do about Plato. First, some have said that feminism requires a 
concern for women's rights and have then argued that Plato is not a 
feminist on the grounds that he shows no interests in women's 
rights. This particular argument is not quite to the point, for it 
says nothing about Plato's view of women *per se*. He is not 
interested in women's rights just to the extent that he is not 
interested in anyone's rights. Second, some have said that feminism 
requires attention to what actual women want. Since Plato shows no 
interest in what actual women want, he would seem on this view of 
feminism to be anti-feminist. But the limitations of this criticism 
are apparent as soon as we realize that Plato shows no interest in 
what actual men want. Plato focuses instead on what women (and men) 
*should* want, what they would want if they were in the best 
possible psychological condition. Actual women (and actual men), as 
we might put Plato's point, are subject to false consciousness. 
Third, some have insisted that feminism requires attention to and 
concern for the particular interests and needs of women as distinct 
from the particular interests and needs of men. Since Plato does not 
admit of particular women's interests and needs, he would not, in 
this view, be a feminist (except insofar as he accidentally promoted 
any supposed particular interests by, say, proposing the abolition of
the private family). Again, however, this objection turns on what we 
understand by 'feminism' more than on what Socrates is 
saying in the *Republic*. There should be no doubt that there 
are conceptions of feminism according to which the *Republic* 
is anti-feminist. But this does not undercut the point that the 
*Republic* advances a couple of plausibly feminist concerns.




Better ground for doubting Plato's apparent feminist commitments lies
in the reasons that Socrates gives for them: Socrates consistently 
emphasizes concern for the welfare of the whole city, but not for
women themselves (esp. 456c ff.). But Socrates' emphasis in Book Five
on the happiness of the city as a whole rather than the happiness of 
the rulers (and cf. 465e-466c) might have more to do with his worries
about convincing his interlocutors that ideal rulers do not flourish 
by exploiting the ruled. Thus, his emphasis need not be taken to 
represent a lack of concern for the women's interests. After all,
what greater concern could Socrates show for the women than to insist
that they be fully educated and allowed to hold the highest offices? 
Socrates goes on to argue that the philosopher-rulers of the city, 
including the female philosopher-rulers, are as happy as human beings can be.




The best reason for doubting Plato's feminism is provided by those 
disparaging remarks about women. We might try to distinguish between 
Plato's rather harsh view of the women around him and his more 
optimistic view of women as they would be in more favorable 
circumstances (Vlastos 1989). It is also possible to distinguish between the 
traditional sexist tropes as they feature in Plato's drama and the 
rejection of sexism in Plato's ideas. But it is not clear that these 
distinctions will remove all of the tension, especially when Socrates
and Glaucon are saying that men are stronger or better than women in 
just about every endeavor (455c).




Final judgment on this question is difficult (see also Saxonhouse 1976, Levin 1996, E. Brown 2002). The disparaging remarks
have to be taken one-by-one, as it is doubtful that all can be 
understood in exactly the same way. Moreover, it is of the utmost 
importance to determine whether each remark says something about the 
way all women are by nature or essentially. If Plato thinks that 
women are essentially worse than men, then Socrates' claim that men 
and women have the same nature for education and employment is 
puzzling. But if the disparagements do not express any considered 
views about the nature of women, then we might be able to conclude 
that Plato is deeply prejudiced against women and yet committed to 
some plausibly feminist principles.


### 4.4 Totalitarianism




Some of the most heated discussions of the politics of Plato's 
*Republic* have surrounded the charge of totalitarianism 
famously advanced by Karl Popper ([1945] 1971). Like the other "isms" we have been considering, 
totalitarianism applies to the *Republic* only conditionally, 
depending on the definition of 'totalitarianism' offered.
But it is worth thinking through the various ways in which this 
charge might be made, to clarify the way the philosopher-rulers wield
political authority over the rest of the city (see Bambrough 1967, Taylor 1986, L. Brown 1998, and Ackrill 1997).




Critics of Plato's *Republic* have characterized the aims of
Kallipolis' rulers as totalitarian. Socrates is quite explicit that
the good at which the rulers aim is the unity of the city (462a-b). Is
this an inherently totalitarian and objectionable aim?




The problem, Popper and others have charged, is that the rulers aim 
at the organic unity of the city as a whole, regardless of the 
individual interests of the citizens. But this would 
be surprising, if true. After all, the *Republic* provides a 
picture not just of a happy city but also of a happy individual 
person, and in Book One, Socrates argues that the ruler's task is to 
benefit the ruled. So how could the rulers of Kallipolis utterly 
disregard the good of the citizens?




Some readers answer Popper by staking out a diametrically opposed
position (Vlastos 1977). They maintain that Plato conceives of the city's good as
nothing more than the aggregate good of all the citizens. On this
view, citizens need to contribute to the city's happiness only because
they need to contribute to the happiness of other citizens if they are
to achieve their own maximal happiness. Any totalitarian control of
the citizens is paternalistic. Yet this view, too, seems at odds with
much of the *Republic*. When Socrates says that the happiest
city is a maximally unified city (462a-b), or when he insists that all
the citizens need to be bound together (519e-520a), he seems to be
invoking a conception of the city's good that is not reducible to the
aggregate good of the citizens.




So a mixed interpretation seems to be called for (Morrison 2001; cf. Kamtekar 2001, Meyer 2004, and Brennan 2004). In the 
*Republic*, the good of the city and the good of the 
individual are independently specifiable, and the citizens' own 
maximal good coincides with the maximal good of the city. Since Plato
believes that this coincidence is realized only through 
propagandistic means in the ideal city, the propaganda is 
paternalistically targeted at the citizens' own good but not 
exclusively at the citizens' own good. On this view, if the citizens 
do not see themselves as parts of the city serving the city, neither 
the city nor they will be maximally happy.




This does not leave Kallipolis' aims beyond reproach, for one might
well be skeptical of the good of unity, of Plato's assumption that
individuals reap their own maximal good when the city is most unified,
or of the *Republic*'s claims about how this unity (and these
individual goods) might be achieved. But it is not obvious that the
rulers of Kallipolis have inherently totalitarian and objectionable
aims (cf. Kamtekar 2004).




Kallipolis has more clearly totalitarian features. First, totalitarian regimes concentrate 
political power in one bloc and offer the ruled no 
alternative. The ideal city of Plato's 
*Republic* is plainly totalitarian in this respect. 




But the concentration of political power in Kallipolis differs in at 
least two ways from the concentration in actual totalitarian states. 
First, Socrates insists that in the ideal city, all the citizens will
agree about who should rule. This agreement is the city's moderation 
(430d-432a), caused by the city's justice (433b, cf. 351d). Socrates 
also suggests some ways of explaining how the non-philosophers will 
agree that the philosophers should rule. First, he offers a way of 
persuading those who lack knowledge that only the philosophers have 
knowledge (476d-480a), which in effect offers a way of explaining to 
the non-philosophers that only the philosophers have the knowledge 
required to rule. Second, he suggests that the non-philosophers will 
be struck by the philosophers' obvious virtue (500d-502a). (Their 
virtue would be especially striking to the producers, since the 
philosophers do without private property, which the producers love so
much.) Finally, he suggests that in Kallipolis, the producers will be
grateful to the guardian classes for keeping the city safe and 
orderly, wherein they can achieve their good, as they see it, by 
optimally satisfying their necessary appetitive attitudes (463a-b).




The second way in which Kallipolis' concentration of political power
is special that it does not concentrate anything good for the
rulers. Socrates is clear that the philosophers despise political
power (519c, 540a), and they rule not to reap rewards but for the sake
of the ruled (cf. 341c-343a), because their justice obligates them to
obey the law that commands them to rule (see
 section 2.3
 above). In fact, the rulers of Kallipolis benefit the ruled as best 
they can, helping them realize the best life they are capable of. 
These benefits must include some primary education for the producer 
class (see 414d), to make good on the commitment to promote 
especially talented children born among the producers (415c, 423d) 
and to enable the producers to recognize the virtue in the 
philosophers. But the benefits extend to peace and order: the 
producers do not have to face warfare.




A second totalitarian feature of Kallipolis is the control that the
rulers exert over daily life. There is nothing especially totalitarian
about the rule of law pervasive in Kallipolis (see esp. 415d-e, and
cf. the laws that apply to the rulers, such as the marriage law and
the law commanding philosophers to rule) (Meyer 2006 and Hitz 2009). But the rulers control mass
culture in the ideal city, and they advance a "noble lie"
to convince citizens of their unequal standing and deep tie to the
city (414b-415d). This propagandistic control plainly represents a
totalitarian concern, and it should make us skeptical about the value
of the consent given to the rulers of Kallipolis.




It is one thing to identify totalitarian features of Kallipolis and
another thing to say why they are wrong. Three very different
objections suggest themselves. First, we might reject the idea of an
objectively knowable human good, and thus reject the idea that
political power should be in the hands of those who know the human
good. Here we should distinguish between Plato's picture of the human
good and the very idea of an objective human good, for even if we want
to dissent from Plato's view, we might still accept the very idea. At
least, it does not seem implausible to suppose that some general
psychological capacities are objectively good for their possessors
(while others are objectively bad), and at that point, we can ask
whether political power should be used to foster the good capacities
and to restrain or prevent the bad ones. Given that state-sponsored
education cannot but address the psychological capacities of the
pupils, only very austere political systems could be supported by a
thorough-going skepticism about the human good.




Second, we might accept the idea of an objectively knowable human 
good, but be wary of concentrating extensive political power in the 
hands of a few knowers. We might reject Plato's apparent optimism 
about the trustworthiness of philosopher-rulers and insist on greater
checks upon political power, to minimize the risks of abuse. If this 
is our objection, then we might wonder what checks are optimal.




Finally, we might reject Plato's scheme on the grounds that political
self-determination and free expression are themselves more valuable 
than Plato recognizes. This sort of response is perhaps the most 
interesting, but it is by no means easy. For it is difficult to 
assess the intrinsic value of self-determination and free expression,
apart from skepticism about the knowledge or power of those who would limit 
self-determination or free expression. Moreover, it is difficult to 
balance these values against the concerns that motivate Plato. Where 
does the power over massive cultural forces lie when it is not under 
political control? And to what extent can we live well when our 
culture is not shaped by people thoughtfully dedicated to living a 
good human life? These are not questions that can be easily shrugged 
off, even if we cannot embrace Kallipolis as their answer.


## 5. Politics, Part Two: Defective Constitutions




The best human life is ruled by knowledge and especially knowledge of
what goodness is and of what is good for human beings. So, too, is 
the best city. For Plato, philosophers make the ideal rulers for two 
main reasons. First, they know what is good. Second, they do not want
to rule (esp. 520e-521b). The problem with existing cities is 
correspondingly twofold. They are ruled by people who are ignorant of
what is good, and they suffer from strife among citizens all of whom 
*want* to rule. These flaws are connected: the ignorant are 
marked by their desire for the wrong objects, such as honor and 
money, and this desire is what leads them to seek political power. 
*All* existing regimes, whether ruled by one, a few, or many, 
show these defects. So in the *Republic* Socrates does not 
distinguish between good and bad forms of these three kinds of 
regime, as the Stranger does in the Plato's *Statesman* 
(301a-303b, cf. Aristotle, *Politics* III 7).




Nonetheless, Socrates has much to say in Books Eight and Nine about
the individual character of various defective regimes. He organizes
his account to emphasize appetite's corrupting power, showing how each
defective regime can, through the corruption of the rulers' appetites,
devolve into a still worse one (Hitz 2010, Johnstone 2011). In the timocracy, for example, nothing
checks the rulers from taking money to be a badge of honor and feeding
their appetites, which grow in private until they cannot be hidden
anymore. The account is thus deeply informed by psychology. It does
not purport to be an account of what has happened (despite Aristotle's
treatment of it in *Politics* V 12), any more than Books Two
through Seven purport to give an historical account of an ideal city's
genesis. It is not, for all that, ahistorical, for Plato's concerns
about corruption are clearly informed by his experiences and his
understanding of history. The account, psychologically and
historically informed, does not offer any hint of psychological or
historical determinism. Socrates does not identify the transitions
from one defective regime to the next as inevitable, and he explicitly
allows for transitions other than the ones he highlights. This is just
one story one could tell about defective regimes. But this particular
story is valuable as a morality tale: it highlights the defective
regimes' vulnerability to the corruption of the rulers' appetites.




The political psychology of Books Eight and Nine raises a host of 
questions, especially about the city-soul analogy (see 
 section 1.3
 above). Is the account of political change dependent upon the account
of psychological change, or vice versa? Or if this is a case of 
mutual interdependence, exactly what accounts for the various 
dependencies? It seems difficult to give just one answer to these 
questions that will explain all of the claims in these books, and the
full, complex theory that must underlie all of the claims is by no 
means clear.




But those questions should not obscure the political critiques that
Socrates offers. First, he criticizes the oligarchs of Athens and
Sparta. His list of five regimes departs from the usual list of rule
by one, rule by a few, and rule by many (cf. 338d) because he
distinguishes among three different regimes in which only a few
rule. He contrasts the ideal city, in which the wise rule, and two
would-be aristocracies, the timocracy in which the militaristically
"virtuous" rule and the oligarchy in which the rich
rule. Socrates argues that these are not genuine aristocracies,
because neither timocracy nor oligarchy manages to check the greed
that introduces injustice and strife into cities. This highlights the
deficiencies of the Spartan oligarchy, with its narrow attention to
valor (cf. *Laws*, esp. Books One and Two), and of the Athenian
oligarchs, many of whom pursued their own material interests narrowly,
however much they eyed Sparta as a model. So the
*Republic* distances Plato from oligarchic parties of his time
and place.




Second, Socrates criticizes the Athenian democracy, as Adeimantus
remarks (563d). Many readers think that Socrates goes over the top in
his description, but the central message is not so easy to
dismiss. Socrates argues that without some publicly entrenched
standards for evaluation guiding the city, chaos and strife are
unavoidable. Even the timocracy and oligarchy, for all their flaws,
have public standards for value. But democracy honors all pursuits
equally, which opens the city to conflict and disorder.




Some readers find a silver lining in this critique. They note that 
the democracy's tolerance extends to philosophers (cf. 561c-d), 
allowing such things as the conversation that Socrates, Glaucon, and 
the others are having (557d). But the *Republic* also records considerable 
skepticism about democratic tolerance of philosophers (487a-499a, cf.
517a), and does not say that only a democracy could tolerate philosophers.




Still, some readers have tried to bring 
the *Republic*'s judgment of democracy into line with the 
*Statesman*, where the Stranger ranks democracy above 
oligarchy. I doubt that Socrates explicit ranking in the *Republic* should count for less than some imagined implicit ranking, but we might still wonder what to make of the apparent contrast between the *Republic* and *Statesman*. Perhaps the difference is insignificant, since both democracies and oligarchies are beset by the same essential
strife between the rich (oligarchs) and poor (democrats)
(422e-423a). Perhaps, too, the *Republic* and *Statesman*
appear to disagree only because Plato has different criteria in
view. Or perhaps he just changed his mind. The ideal city of
the *Laws*, which Plato probably wrote shortly after
the *Statesman*, accords a greater political role for unwise
citizens than the *Republic* does (see
 Plato: on utopia).
 


## 6. Conclusions about the Ethics and Politics of Plato's *Republic*




The *Republic* is a sprawling work with dazzling details and 
an enormously wide-ranging influence. But what, in the end, does the 
work say to us, insofar as we are trying to live well or help our 
society live well, and what does it say to us, insofar as we are 
trying to understand how to think about how to live well?




In ethics, the *Republic*'s main practical lesson is that one
should, if one can, pursue wisdom and that if one cannot, one should
follow the wisest guides one can find. This lesson is familiar from
Plato's Socratic dialogues: the philosophical life is best, and if one
lacks knowledge, one should prefer to learn from an expert. But
the *Republic* characterizes philosophy differently. First, it
goes much further than the Socratic dialogues in respecting the power
of passions and desires. Wisdom still requires being able to survive
Socratic examination (534b-c), but it also explicitly requires careful
and extensive habituation of spirited and appetitive
attitudes (485a-486b, 519a8-b1), sublimation of
psychological energy from spirited and appetitive desires to
philosophical desire (cf. 485d), and continued attention to and
maintenance of the desires that arise from the non-calculating parts
of one's soul (571d-572b, 589a-b, cf. 416e-417b). Second, as opposed
to the Socrates of the Socratic dialogues, who avows ignorance and
is content with the belief that the world is well-ordered, the Socrates of
the *Republic* insists that wisdom requires understanding how
the world is, which involves apprehending the basic mathematical and
teleological structure of things. Third, although the Socrates of the
Socratic dialogues practices philosophy instead of living an
ordinarily engaged political life, he insists that his life is closer
to what the political art demands than the ordinarily engaged life
is. According to the *Republic*, by contrast, the philosopher
prefers to be entirely apart from politics, especially in ordinary
circumstances (496c-e, 592a, cf. 520a-b).




One facet of this advice that deserves emphasizing is the importance 
it places on the influence of others. Plato plainly believes that 
one's living well depends upon one's fellows and the larger culture. 
This is most obvious in the case of those who cannot pursue wisdom 
for themselves. They will live as well as those who lead them allow. 
But even those who can pursue wisdom must first be raised well and 
must later meet with tolerance, which philosophers do not often 
receive. 




The ethical theory the *Republic* offers is best characterized
as eudaimonist, according to which a person should act for the sake of
his or her own success or happiness (*eudaimonia*). Socrates
does not argue for this as opposed to other approaches to
ethics. Rather, he simply assumes that a person's success gives him or
her conclusive reasons to act, and he argues that success requires
acting virtuously. This eudaimonism is widely thought to be an
egoistic kind of consequentialism: one should act so as to bring about
states of affairs in which one is happy or successful. But there is no
reason to suppose that the
*Republic* rejects the identity of *eudaimonia* and 
good activity (*eu prattein*, *eupragia*) which 
Socrates often assumes in Plato's Socratic dialogues 
(*Charmides* 171e-172a, *Crito* 48b, 
*Euthydemus* 278e-282d, *Gorgias* 507c). If
the *Republic* takes this identity seriously, as the function
argument of Book One does (354a), it says that virtuous activity is
good not because it *brings about* success, but because it
*is* success. This is also the explicit view of Aristotle and the
Stoics, who had considered Plato's work carefully.




Metaethically, the *Republic* presupposes that there are
objective facts concerning how one should live. Much of its account of
these facts sounds naturalist. After all, Socrates uses the careful
study of human psychology to reveal how our souls function well or
ill, and he grounds the account of what a person should do in his
understanding of good psychological functioning. Socrates' particular
deployment of this general strategy suggests that good actions are
those that sustain the virtuous soul (443e) and that the virtuous soul
is the one with a maximally unified set of commitments (443d-e,
cf. 534b-c). Whether this is plausible depends upon what careful study
of human psychology in fact shows. It depends in particular on
whether, as a matter of fact, the actions that we would
pre-theoretically deem good sustain a coherent set of psychological
commitments and those that we would pre-theoretically deem bad are
inconsistent with a coherent set of psychological commitments. Ethical
naturalism such as this still awaits support from psychology, but it
has not been falsified, either.




Although this naturalist reading of the *Republic* is not
anachronistic--Aristotle and the Stoics develop related
naturalist approaches, and Plato had naturalist contemporaries in a
hedonist tradition--Plato himself would not be content to ground
his account of good actions on empirical facts of human psychology.
On his view, actions are good because of their relation to good
agents, and agents are good because of their relation to goodness
itself. But goodness itself, the Good, transcends the natural world;
it is a supernatural property. This commits Plato to a non-naturalist
version of ethical realism, which modernity's creeping tide of
naturalism threatens to wash away. But non-naturalism in ethics will
retain some appeal insofar as the other ways of trying to explain our
experiences of the moral life fail to answer the serious objections
they face.




The take-home lessons of the *Republic*'s politics are subject
to special controversy. In the sections above, I take what Socrates 
says about the ideal and defective cities at face value, but many 
readers believe that this is a mistake. Some think that Plato does 
not intend the *Republic* as a serious contribution to 
political thought, because its political musings are projections to 
clarify psychological claims crucial to the ethical theory that Plato
*does* seriously intend (Annas 1999, Annas 2000). Others think that Plato intends 
political lessons strikingly different from what is suggested by the 
face value of Socrates' words. 




One can concede that the *Republic*'s politics are a 
reflection of its moral psychology without thinking that they are 
*merely* that. In antiquity, starting with Aristotle, Plato's 
*Republic* was recognized as part of a large genre of 
politically serious works, many of them inspired by Sparta (Menn 2005), and 
Socrates' explicit claims about the ideal and defective constitutions
were taken seriously as political proposals.




Moreover, one can concede that the *Republic* calls into 
question many of its political proposals without thinking that Plato 
means to cancel them or suggest other, radically different political 
advice (cf. Clay 1988). It is striking that Socrates is ready to show that it is 
better to be just than unjust *before* he has even said that 
the just and wise person must be a philosopher and that the just city
must be ruled by philosophers (444e-445a). It is also striking that 
Adeimantus enthusiastically endorses the idea of "holding the women 
and children in common" (424a) and then later asks Socrates to 
explain it (449c-450a). And it is striking that Socrates recognizes 
that Greeks would ridicule his proposal that women take up the arts 
of war (452a). But Plato might signal for his readers to examine and 
re-examine what Socrates says without thereby suggesting that he 
himself finds fault with what Socrates says. 




But still some readers, especially Leo Strauss (see Strauss 1964) and his followers (e.g., Bloom 1968 and Bloom 1977), want to 
distance the *Republic*'s take-home political message from 
Kallipolis. They typically appeal to three considerations that are 
supposed to indicate Plato's awareness that the political ideal is 
impossible or ruinous. First, they note that the philosophers have to
be compelled to rule the ideal city. But this involves no 
impossibility. The founders of the ideal city would have to make a 
law compelling those educated as philosophers to rule (cf. 
 section 2.3
 above), but founders could make such a law. If philosophers have to 
be compelled to sustain the maximally happy city, one might wonder 
why anyone would found such a city. But one might wonder why anyone 
was inspired to compose the *Oresteia*, as well. People sometimes
do remarkable things. Second, Straussian readers appeal to the ideal 
city's predicted demise, and they assert that the rulers' eventual 
inability to calculate "the marriage number" (546a-547a) shows an 
ineliminable conflict between the eros in human nature and the 
mathematical perfection of a political ideal. But it is also possible
to blame the anticipated degeneration on sense-perception (see 
546b2-3), not calculation, and to see in Kallipolis' demise a common 
fact of life for perceptible entities (546a2). After all, Socrates does
not say that eros makes the creation or maintenance of Kallipolis 
impossible. Finally, the Straussians note that Kallipolis is not 
sketched as an ideal in a political treatise, exactly, but proposed 
by Socrates in a long dramatic conversation, which includes twists 
and turns that come *after* he stops discussing Kallipolis. 
This is true, and it renders difficult inferences from what is said 
in the *Republic* to what Plato thinks. But it does not 
provide *any* reason for thinking that Plato *rejects* the ideal
that Socrates constructs in the *Republic*.




In fact, Socrates expresses several central political theses in the 
*Republic* that appear in other Platonic dialogues, as well, 
especially in the *Gorgias*, *Statesman*, and 
*Laws*. First, the best rulers are wise. Second, the best
rulers rule for the benefit of the ruled, and not for their own
sake. Third, a city is highly unlikely to have the best rulers, in
part because there is a gulf between the values of most people and the
values of the wise. Fourth, the greatest harm to a city is
disagreement about who should rule, since competing factions create
civil strife. So, fifth, a central goal of politics is harmony or agreement
among the citizens about who should rule. Last, harmony requires that
the city cultivate virtue and the rule of law. The consistency of
these messages across several Platonic dialogues might well make us so
bold as to think that they are the take-home message of
the *Republic*'s politics.