From the Beginning to Plato

366 PLATO: ETHICS AND POLITICS
recognized as a quality of actions, and the contract introduced justice as a
practice. But how in a state of nature was justice to be understood, and its
extension grasped as a unity? Perhaps Glaucon offers an implicit gloss that
defines justice outside the law: to remain just is to abstain from what belongs to
others (360b5–6). Socrates will not disagree: justice is neither having what
belongs to others, nor being deprived of one’s own (IV.433e6–11). Yet such
remarks rather move within a moral circle than reduce the moral to the natural: it
is equally apposite to say that what is my own is that of which it would be unjust
to deprive me. We should rather suppose that it is retrospectively that the contract
is motivated by fear of injustice as such: what existed before the contract was
not resentment of injustice, but fear of a multitude of unwelcome actions some of
which became unjust, or were deemed to be unjust, by being penalized—a
selection presumably sensitive to practicalities. So the contract may be described
after the event (as it is by Glaucon) as an escape from injustice, but it has to be
explained as an escape from something else, or many other things; these will
have included such cases of losing one’s life or being deceived by one’s partner
as it was thought good to penalize, after the invention of law and morality, as
murder or adultery.
This view is a positive transformation of Thrasymachus that takes laws not to
be imposed by rulers on subjects, but to be adopted by free contractors. The
structure of attack or apology remains the same: it is indirect and instrumental.
Glaucon is recommending justice as the practice of acting in accordance with
laws that human agents need to respect in order to reduce the risk of their being
treated in ways to which they are by nature averse. For all its pretensions,
morality is revealed as an under-servant of felicity.
Plato has two grounds for rejecting this approach. First, it does not work: the
content of a virtue cannot be explicated by concrete rules of conduct. This is first
intimated within the Republic when Socrates objects to Cephalus that it is wrong
to identify being just with telling the truth and returning what one has borrowed,
for these acts are not always just (as when a borrower is asked to return some
weapons by a lender who has gone mad, I.331c1–d3). A more resilient
participant than Cephalus might suppose that one has only to try again, but the
objection falls within a pattern to which Socrates later alludes when he describes
how the young can be corrupted by counter-examples to attempts to define the just
or the fine by appeal to general laws or maxims (VII.538c6–e4). This pattern of
objection was already familiar from early Platonic dialogues (cf. [11.5], 43–6):
on the same ground, temperance cannot be identified with a quiet or gentle
manner (Charmides I59b1–160d3), nor with shame (160e3–161b2), nor courage
with endurance (Laches 192b9–d9)). Unlike quietness, shame and endurance, a
virtue is always good (Charmides 161a6–b2). We need to add that the endurance
is wise, but how is wisdom to be defined (Laches 192d10–193a2)? One way out
is by a special kind of vagueness: perhaps justice is giving all men their due
(Republic I.331e1–4), and temperance is doing one’s own (Charmides 161b3–6).
But such paraphrases either invite the same objection, or move around the moral