The Intelligent Troglodyte’s Guide to Plato’s Republic, 2016a

31 Doctors and Judges
See 405a-410a. The goal of medicine, Socrates argues, is to restore sick or injured
people to health and active living, not to prolong pointless, inactive living. Life
does not benefit people who cannot do their work, nor does it benefit their cities,
and so it is appropriate to let people die who are suffering from incurable,
incapacitating diseases. Capital punishment is, for the same reason, an appropriate
sentence for people who are incurably unjust. If one is morally unfit to do one’s
work, then one has no proper place in the city. Socrates notices a certain basic
similarity between doctors and judges. Doctors treat illness in the body; judges
treat injustice in the soul. But while the best doctors “are not especially healthy by
nature, and have themselves experienced the illnesses they treat,” the opposite is
true of judges, the best of whom do not discover what injustice is like in youth,
indulging in it themselves, but at a later time, “as an alien thing present in other
people’s souls.” One might think that firsthand experience would benefit doctors
and judges equally, but Socrates thinks that injustice is significantly different from
illness in being an affliction of the soul that tends to pervert a person’s judgment,
leaving them “stupid, distrustful at the wrong time, and ignorant of what a healthy
character is.”
When is it right to let a person die? This has never been a more pressing
moral question than it is at present, physicians now having at their disposal
antibiotics, intravenous feeding, radiologically-supported surgery, blood
transfusions, organ transplants, respirators, blood pumps, dialysis machines,
hormone treatments, and a host of other devices and procedures. Nowadays
it is no longer even necessary for a human being to have a living brain to be
maintained on life support.
Socrates thinks that the only life worth supporting is a meaningful life, and
the only meaningful life is a life of doing good work. So if one cannot do
good work – work that makes good use of what one has to offer and benefits
the city in some way – then one may as well die. Do you agree?
Can a person be incurably evil? What would such a person be like?