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

41 Justice in the City
See 432b-434c. In a flash of insight, Socrates sees what it is for a city to be just: it
is for the virtues of wisdom, courage and temperance to be promoted and
preserved in the city by each person doing, and keeping exclusively to, the work
for which he or she is naturally best suited. Justice is therefore similar to
temperance in being a systemic virtue, an excellence of the whole city. Socrates
emphasizes the importance of the people best suited to serve as rulers actually
serving as rulers, of the people best suited to serve as auxiliaries actually serving
as auxiliaries, and of the people best suited to do one of the “money making” jobs
in the city actually doing one or another of these jobs. It wouldn’t matter much if
someone best suited to make shoes were to do carpentry, or someone best suited to
do carpentry were to make shoes. But if a person who should be doing something
like carpentry were to join the auxiliaries or the rulers, then real problems could
arise. “Meddling and exchange among these three classes,” Socrates declares, “is
the greatest harm that can happen to the city and would rightly be called the worst
evil one could do to it.”
Do you agree with Socrates that justice for a city is basically a matter of
everyone doing the work proper to them? Should we start thinking of career
counselors as part of our society’s justice system?
Some years back, in an interview, the members of the Guarneri String
Quartet were attempting to describe what it is like when they are playing
well together. Each of the four musicians – the first violinist, the second
violinist, the violist, and the cellist – has a separate part to play. And each
must play it and it alone. But in playing their parts they are joining and
interrelating with the others in such a way that their parts come alive and
become deeply meaningful. At times it is as if a fifth voice rises above the
four blended voices, inspiring the musicians as individuals, but unifying
them as one living sound. This sort of thing appears to be what Socrates
means by justice in a city. Can you think of other examples that illustrate
the idea, examples involving sports teams perhaps, or non-dysfunctional