Plato's Treatment of Injustice in the Republic

Abstract

At the most general level, Plato’s Republic addresses the question of whether I should live justly or unjustly to live the best and happiest human life. This dissertation examines Plato’s arguments about injustice and explores three key puzzles concerning injustice in the Republic.The first puzzle concerns Glaucon and Adeimantus’ speeches praising injustice that open Book 2. They both argue that Socrates’ defense of justice should not reference the rewards of a just reputation. Instead, Socrates must only appeal to the intrinsic rewards of justice. However, the puzzle is this: if what I have said exhausts the functions of Glaucon and Adeimantus’ speeches, then Adeimantus’ speech is unnecessary. Adeimantus speaks after Glaucon, and his argument seems to come to the same conclusion as Glaucon’s. So, in what way does Adeimantus’ speech contribute to shaping the rest of the Republic? I argue that Adeimantus' speech articulates a different perspective on injustice than Glaucon’s. Glaucon’s defense of injustice treats injustice as a virtue, and as such Glaucon argues that my aim should be to be as unjust as possible. Adeimantus, like Glaucon, praises injustice, but the view that Adeimantus voices aligns more closely with conventional norms—such as recognizing justice as a virtue. When Adeimantus describes people who choose to do injustice, they make their decisions while accepting that justice is a virtue, and this means that their pursuit of injustice will be more constrained that someone who believes that injustice is a virtue. In the following chapter, I consider a puzzle concerning psychology. As is well known, Plato, in the Republic, divides the human soul into three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. Broadly speaking, Socrates characterizes appetite as desiring pleasure and physiological needs. Unfortunately, Socrates does not explicitly delineate the principle of unity, explaining which pleasures count as appetitive or not. The most prevalent interpretation is that all appetitive desires are related to the body; I call this corporeal interpretation. I argue that the domain of appetite is not so narrowly constricted to bodily needs and pleasures. While many appetites are connected to the body, Socrates does not exclusively use examples connected to the body, as the corporeal interpretation seems to assume. Instead, Socrates frequently includes pleasures of the imagination and activities that only aim at superficial pleasure. Additionally, I argue that the corporeal interpretation of appetite does not make sense with Socrates’ definitions of the subclasses of appetitive desires. Socrates’ definitions of the subclasses may support a broader interpretation of appetitive desires because these definitions intentionally leave open-ended the sorts of objects that unnecessary and lawless appetites aim at. The tyrannical character is the central puzzle of my final chapter. The tyrannical character is the culmination of Socrates’ arguments about injustice, as the tyrannical character represents the greatest degree of human injustice. However, many scholars have found Socrates’ depiction of the tyrannical character bizarre or dissatisfying. This is partly because the tyrannical character is often read as a hedonist, and a hedonist is not a likely candidate for a political tyrant. I argue that the tyrannical character seeks freedom from constraint as his dominant end, disregarding laws, conventions, and normative beliefs. When I say that the tyrant seeks freedom from constraint, I mean that he places no limits or restraints on what objects of desire he may choose to pursue, nor does he restrict the means he uses to achieve his desires. The tyrant is ruled by the appetitive part of his soul, specifically his unnecessary desires, so he places no constraint on the objects of his unnecessary appetites. This understanding reflects Glaucon’s depiction of complete injustice while aligning with the progressive decline of unjust souls described by Socrates.