JUSTICE AS A VIRTUE OF THE SOUL PAUL WOODRUFF DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199646043.003.0006 Abstract and Keywords Platonic justice in the Republic is essentially a pragmatic notion: justice is whatever virtue is most important to the success of the city, where success is understood in terms of the growth of other virtues and the prevention of civil war. This pragmatic assumption about justice puts no direct constraints on what counts as justice in principles, in procedures, in behaviors, or in the distribution of goods. Plato instead calls attention to a matter in ethics or to the psychological character that citizens must have in a city that is successful success ful on his terms. Plato is right about this: an adequate pragmatic account of justice must privilege ethical character over elements of justice such as principles or procedures.
Keywords: Plato Plato,, Republic Republic,, justice justice,, virtue virtue,, character , soul soul,, polis polis,, stasis AS a virtue, Plato’s justice is in the soul, and it has nothing to do with fairness. 1 His account of justice in the Republic puts Republic puts no direct constraints on what counts as justice in principles, in procedures, in behaviours, or or even in distribution (apart from the distribution of offices). Plato instead calls attention to ethics—to the psychological character that citizens should want to have. He does so by way of looking into the character of the just city, holding it up as an enlarging mirror for the soul.
In this paper I argue for two theses, a scholarly one about Plato’s text, and a philosophical one about justice. My scholarly thesis is that Plato is committed to the view that the citizens of a healthy polis healthy polis are personally just, that failures of personal justice undermine civic justice. A healthy polis healthy polis is is one that resists stasis resists stasis —crippling division division or civil war. The health of such a city consists mainly in what I call civic justice. Plato develops his concept of civic justice by
constructing an ideal city, Callipolis, which cannot survive unless its citizens maintain a package of personal virtues that includes personal justice. Plato defines justice in persons as an ethical concept in its own right; it is not merely derived from justice in institutions— as it would be if he had defined justice in persons as the attitude that supports a previously defined justice in institutions.
The philosophical thesis of this paper is that Plato is right about the link between personal and civic justice—a position we can take (p.90) without agreeing to the organization and controls he provides for Callipolis. Justice is not a matter of principle, either as a virtue of individuals or as a quality of the polis, and in this it contrasts with fairness.2 Civic justice—justice in communities—may or may not require adherence to principles; it belongs to communities in virtue of their ability to resolve disputes in such a way that no division or stasisarises severe enough to prevent the community from achieving its goal. Justice depends on fair procedures in some cases, but not in all, and sometimes justice requires us to ignore fairness altogether. 1. Soul and city Julia Annas has written a powerful chapter on my topic, entitled ‘ The Inner City: Ethics without 3
Politics in the Republic’. The title states the main point: the ancients who followed Plato understood the Republic not as an idealist venture into political theory but as an ethical work continuing the Socratic project of investigating virtues as qualities of individual souls. The ancients were right, Annas argues, and I agree. Plato has Socrates construct Callipolis through logoi in order to illustrate justice in the soul; he does not do this from the thought that we must start by building the ideal city in fact—as if we could not cultivate virtue outside an ideal state. Ancient political theorists wisely did not start from the Republic; Plato comes closer to political theory in later works, the Statesman and the Laws.4 But the ethical theory of the Republic cannot be unbreakably tied to Callipolis, as it is meant to apply to us in the non5
ideal world, and indeed, it is not essentially tied to life in the polis at all.
I agree with all that: Plato’s theory of justice in the Republic is (p.91) ethical. It is nevertheless related to a theory of the polis in general, whether ideal or not. And on this too I believe I am in harmony with Annas’s thinking about ancient ethics in general. 6 Plato does not require us to dwell in an ideal polis if we wish to have justice in our souls, but he does appear to require that we have some measure of justice in our souls in order to dwell in a polis at all—assuming, of course, that we cannot properly dwell in a polis that is fractured by civil war. This necessity of personal justice to community is an idea Plato represents elsewhere as due to Protagoras,7 but here in the Republic he shows how failures of ethical virtue may be correlated with civil disturbance and political collapse. Plato is right about this: the justic e that sustains a community is an ethical virtue. Cultivating personal justice while in a degenerate polis is not the same as trying to turn it into Callipolis, however desirable that might be. Plato connects personal and civic justice first through the image of a text presented both small and large. Justice in the city is like a text written in large letters above smaller ones that are harder to make out; after reading the larger text we may look to see whether the smaller text, justice in the soul, is the same (368 D 1–7, cf. 435 A 5–B 2). In book 4 and again in book 8 Plato explores the analogy, finding it apt again and again. 8 He does very little to examine the relation between the two, however. Some readers have supposed that no one can be just outside of the ideal city,9 but (as Annas shows) Plato cannot intend this. It would make a mockery of the Republic’s grand argument, which is an answer to Glaucon and Adimantus. (p.92) They want to know why we should try to be just in the non-ideal world; if no one could be just except in the ideal atmosphere of Callipolis, then Socrates’ effort would be wasted. In the end Socrates allows only one limitation for the non-ideal world: outside Callipolis the wise and just person may not engage in politics (592 A). The justice Socrates urges on the wise person is not otherwise curtailed by non-ideal political circumstances; we can see from 591 E that wise people outside Callipolis may have money, so long as they do not value it too highly.
10
True, the education needed for justice will come easier in Callipolis, but the main argument in the Republic is not about how we may become just, but about why we should make the attempt.
Plato’s text creates a problem, however, by defining justice for all of us in a way that makes it dependent on a kind of knowledge that none of us (barring a miracle) can have. The text leaves us to propose solutions. The Apology gives us a clue: Socrates lacks godlike wisdom, but claims to have human wisdom. Probably Plato holds that there are imperfe ct human versions of all the virtues that the gods perfectly exemplify. In the case of justice, I suppose this must be what he says it is in book 4—the psychological condition of one who is disposed to accept the good judgement (euboulia)11 of reason over the demands of the spirit or the blandishments of sensual desire. This disposition Socrates identifies as inner harmony, making it explicit that this harmony is available to people who engage in business and own property 12 —a class of people who would not be allowed to practise philosophy in Callipolis. Nowhere in book 4 does Socrates define justice in terms of knowledge of the Forms, and here he is urging people who could not possibly know the Forms to maintain psychic justice. Full knowledge may well turn out to be impossible outside Callipolis; after all, not even Socrates claims to have that. Personal justice does not require full knowledge, however, (p.93) and therefore it does not on epistemological grounds require membership in Callipolis. Citizens, then, do not depend on the city for their personal justice. Does the city depend on its citizens’ virtue for its civic justice? Here the question is more complicated. The question divides in two, for Callipolis and for non-ideal communities. In Callipolis, certain virtues of citizens are transferred to the city because of its organization; for example, the city will be wis e because its rulers are wise, and courageous because its Guardians are courageous (428 E; 429 B). But the presence of Socrates did not make Athens wise or courageous. Take away the structure of Callipolis—take the virtuous people out of leadership roles—and their virtues will
not rub off from part to whole. Does the same distinction hold for justice and soundness of mind?
2. Justice and s! phrosun" (soundness of mind) By contrast with courage and wisdom, s! phrosun" (431 E–432 A) and justice (433 A) spread through the whole of Callipolis. They appear to do so in different ways: s! phrosun" in the city puts all the citizens into harmony, singing together, so apparently each of them is to some 13
degree s! phr !n. Callipolis, then, depends on all of its citizens for its s! phrosun" . Each citizen must exhibit what I will call civic s! phrosun" through agreeing that the wisest should rule (431 D–E).
By
itself,
this
result
does
not
entail
that
civic s! phrosun" depends
on
personal s! phrosun" , which Plato defines as the personal agreement that a s! phr !n person maintains within his own soul (442 C).
Plato has further reasons for holding that personal s! phrosun" is necessary for the corresponding civic virtue. Civil war arises in a polis when its people 14 are unable to acquire personal s! phrosun" , (p.94) which apparently would prevent civil war (555 C with 556 E).15 Civic s! phrosun" therefore entails personal s! phrosun" outside Callipolis, and almost certainly inside as well. The justice of Callipolis, by contrast, is expressed in its structure, rather than in properties of its citizens. Like happiness, justice may be analogous to beauty: a sculptor may aim to make a statue beautiful without aiming to make all (or indeed any) of its parts beautiful to the same degree as the whole (420 B ff.). On this analogy, we may aim to put justice in the city without putting it into the parts of the city. Plato would be wrong to hold that justice in a whole entails justice in its parts; that would have two awkward consequences, and for cleanliness of theory Plato should reject the whole–part inference.
The two awkward consequences are these: suppose that justice in the whole entails justice of the same kind—i.e. justice as a harmony of parts—in each part of that whole. If so, we would have to find justice in each part of the soul, which would require further subdivision of the soul; each of the three parts of the soul would have to have three parts, and so on for ever. But that would be absurd. 16 Second, if all the citizens in a just city are just, then either each citizen would have an internal wise ruler, or else would have to submit to an external wise ruler, apparently like a slave (590 D). 17
Nevertheless, the justice of the city does depend on its citizens’ justice, albeit for a different reason: not because of the whole–part inference, but because civic justice depends on civic s! phrosun" for
its
lasting
power,
and
civic s! phrosun" in
turn
depends
on
personal s! phrosun" . We must turn to the relation between justice and s! phrosun" .
S ! phrosun" entails justice. Justice is ‘the power that enables them [ s! phrosun" , courage, and wisdom] to come to be in the city and once (p.95) there to survive’ (453 B 9–10). S ! phrosun" , surely, cannot come to be in the absence of justice, since it consists in agreement that rule should be by the wise (in the city, 431 D 9–E 2), and reas on (in the soul, 442 C 10–D 1). There will be nothing to agree to unless the structures of the soul and the city are just, at l east to some degree; the rational part of the soul must be ca pable of ruling, and the other parts of being ruled. So if all the citizens of Callipolis are personally s! phrones, they will also be personally just. Moreover, when a city fails, or falls from one degree of corruption to a lower one, its citizens are evidently failing with respect to personal justice, though Plato does not make the point explicit. The citizens who lead their city downward are themselves led by personal fealty towards honour or money or desire in place of reason, and so are personally unjust. The decline is not due to faulty institutions. 18 This is evident from Socrates’ admission that Callipolis will decline when its leaders do not carry out their duties correctly—not because they give up on
the institutions, but because of mathematical errors in eugenics (546 C 6–D 8) that lead to a decline in virtue. Good institutions provide no safety from stupidity.
Justice in the city requires s! phrosun" in the city. This is true for Plato not as a matter of logic, but in virtue of the way human beings behave. We can consistently construct in thoughtexperiments a Platonically just entity that lacks s! phrosun" . But if its citizens were human, that entity would be highly unstable and would soon collapse, leaving justice behind. It is robust justice, justice with staying power, that entails s! phrosun" . The examples in book 8 show both souls and cities declining or ruptured by stasis as a result of failures of s! phrosun" . Especially telling is the tale of the miserly moneylover—a clear example of someone who fails at s! phrosun" —who restrains his appetites through fear and compulsion ( anank " ) rather than through persuasion and the gentling effect of logoi (554 C 11–D 3). In this he resembles the oligarchy that is setting itself up for the civil war that will erupt as soon as the downtrodden realize how weak their rulers actually are (556 D 2–E 1). Failure of agreement as to who should rule leads to a decline from justice. So justice without s! phrosun" is fragile, if it can occur at all.
The ruler in a just soul or a just city must secure the harmonious (p.96) agreement of the elements that it rules (519 E 1–520 A 4). This it apparently must do mainly by persuasion, which will begin with education in poetry, music, and gymnastics, and continue through an adult culture involving myth. Socrates does not envisage using force (bia) for this end, probably because it does not appear capable of establishing true harmony. He does speak of anank " in 19
such contexts (e.g. at 519 C 9). Securing agreement among citizens is a political activity, mirrored in the soul. Socrates’ interest in persuasion, even through lies, is evidence for his preference for harmony over force. Manipulative rhetoric is what enables a community of people who are not all perfectly rational to function under direction by reason.
The construction of Callipolis was guided from the start by the concept that turned out to be justice, yet Socrates will not say that justice is the virtue most important to the city; all four virtues are essential (433 D 7–E 1). 20They come as a package; the structure of justice makes no sense unless the rulers have wisdom and the Guardians have courage; it cannot survive unless the whole city is harmonious. The package of virtues in the soul amounts to psychic health.
Although justice on Socrates’ view leads to just actions, Socrates does not define justice in terms of just actions or in terms of rules for just action. And although he holds that justice in the soul supports justice in the city, he does not define justice in the soul as a disposition to support justice in the city. He defines personal justice in terms of an internal division of labour, on the analogy of justice in the city. This internal division of labour does not inevi (p.97) tably bring on fairness or even fair-mindedness, but it does enable us to share in human communities such as poleis. Part of the good at which personal justice aims is the value of being connected with other people.
21
As a virtue, Platonic justice is psychological; it is a character belonging to a soul in which appetite and the love of honour are harmoniously regulated by reason, which aims at what is best for the whole person. So defined, justice benefits the individual, because it prevents the love of honour or appetite from leading to actions that would not be best for the whole person. The main point of the Republic, after all, is that justice benefits the individual who has it. Less obviously, such a character in individuals is also beneficial to the polis in which they dwell, as I have argued above. In fact, Socrates has apparently been known to hold the view that justice is beneficial, without specifying who it is that receives its benefit.22 He probably believes that justice is beneficialhapl ! s —beneficial to all who are touched by it, without qualification; certainly he holds that justice cannot be harmful to anyone (335 E 5).
3. Fairness vs. justice Neither in city nor in soul does Plato show much interest in fairness. Democracy in the city uses the lottery to achieve a kind of fairness that Plato always considers dangerous ( Rep. 557 A 2–5; 558 C 3–6; Laws 757 A 5–758 A 2). In the soul, democracy gives equal weight to desires, with the result that the desire of the moment can lead one into trouble. There is one sort of inequality that Plato decries, which results from mixing people of different abilities in the same class (547 A 2–4), but this is objectionable not because it is unfair but because (like an unequal marriage) it is unstable.
The contrasting concept of justice as fairness has been most clearly stated in modern philosophy by John Rawls in his original statement of his theory of justice as fairness.23 He opens the famous (p.98) paper in which he made public his theory of justice this way: ‘The fundamental idea in the concept of justice is that of fairness.’ There he discusses justice ‘as a virtue of institutions constituting restrictions as to how they may define offices and powers, 24
and assign rights and duties; and not as a virtue of particular actions, or persons’. His discussion of justice from here on is a discussion of principles of fairness, with a view to rejecting any principle that could not be acknowledged by all sides to a dispute. Bec ause justice is fairness, and fairness is based on principles, he contends, utilitarianism cannot account for justice. In the case of slavery, he argues, utilitarianism can reliably yield the right result only when it borrows illicitly from the principle of fairness. 25 Rawls and Socrates are engaged with different kinds of subject; Rawls’s subject is political, while Socrates’ is ethical. For Rawls, justice is primarily a virtue of institutions, while for Socrates it is primarily a virtue of the individual soul.
Plato’s Socrates has no trust in institutions unless they are managed by people with individual virtues. The difference he identifies between a king and a tyrant is not about institutions but
about virtue. Institutions managed by vicious people, Socrates holds, go into decline. Plato’s emphasis on individual virtues continues from the Republic into the Laws: the survival of the city depends on having scrutiny of magistrates carried out by ethically good people; otherwise ‘the sense of justice that unites all interests in the state is destroyed’ (945 D 5–6, Saunders’s translation).
Rawls defines justice in terms of principles, Socrates in terms of the good at which it aims. Fairness has been attractive to recent thinkers because its principles are mostly valueneutral and do not attempt to resolve disputes about what is good. A problem with fairness is that its principles have no way to cope with fundamental disagreements about value, except through the hope that rational (p.99) people can learn to live with differences of opinion about such matters. Consider an example familiar to our profession. A philosophy department must decide how to distribute a small sum of money available for salary increases. One member has a distinguished reputation as a scholar and is being actively courted by other universities; another has devoted herself to teaching large numbers of students and to winning over their minds to philosophical pursuits. Advocates for the scholarly star argue that all members will be better off if the department retains their star, as the department will then be able to tease more money out of the higher administration. Although the distribution will be unequal, the less advantaged members will be better off as a result of the inequality. Advocates for the devoted teacher, however, call it a disgrace for philosophers to set such value on reputation or money; they do not agree that the teacher would be better off if the star is given a greater reward, and so they angrily reject the proposed inequality. There does not appear to be a principled way to resolve this dispute, but a cohesive department, united by respect and good communication, will 26
weather the storm. Persuasion, not principle, comes to the rescue.
Plato’s reluctance to adopt principles of fairness makes him a kind of particularist. His ethics is committed to a dominant concept of the good, which trumps any principle of the kind treated at the opening of the Republic: telling the truth and returning what one has borrowed are not always good, and so cannot be defining of justice (331 C). That is why the wisdom that knows (or aims to know) what is good in each case is central to Platonic ethics.
Socrates seeks to motivate justice through self-interes t, a gambit that is not open to an advocate of justice as fairness. Socrates’ conception of justice is such that he bel ieves he can answer the question ‘Why should I be just?’ by showing how justice is to my advantage. But a principled concept of fairness does not lend itself to an argument of that sort. Contractarians argue that fairness proceeds from (p.100) a notional agreement that people would accept in so far as they are rational. But why should I be swayed today by an agreement made in the past, or in a thought-experiment, if it does not appear to be in my current interest? Socrates, by contrast, insists on actual agreement of all parties (even those with weak rational faculties) in the here and now, because failures of agreement can lead to civic collapse or an unhealthy use of force. Unlike fairness, Platonic justice is not a product of agreement. The reverse holds: agreement is the product of justice. The people are persuaded to agree on Platonic justice because of what it is, because it aims at the good of all.
Here lies another striking difference. Rawls posits an ideal situation in which people with certain qualities and varied conceptions of the good will autonomously agree to principles of fairness. Plato constructs an ideal community in which highly imperfect people are persuaded to agree to a harmonious order based on a rich understanding of the good that is accessible to only a tiny minority of them. The persuasion of the citizens is to be continuous, built into a culture of music, poetry, and dance that Callipolis keeps under tight control. 27
We do not have to accept a tightly controlled culture in order to appreciate the importance of persuasion in a healthy community. A basic level of agreement is essential for any community to maintain its health, as Plato understood very well. Force may hold a group together for a while, but force will not make the group into a community, and the tension that results from force is fundamentally unhealthy, both for the group and for the individuals who comprise it.28 Virtue cannot be forced.
University of Texas at Austin
