From the Beginning to Plato

FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO 373
injustice with impunity. As Socrates will calculate with half-comical precision,
the tyrant is 729 times unhappier than the philosopher-king (IX.587d12–e4).
III
Socrates elaborates his defence of justice with some felicity. And yet it raises
two related questions:
(1) Is it coherent? Socrates is using two models to relate justice in society and
soul (cf. [11.5], 331 n. 29). The first is of group-member dependency. Any
quality of a city derives from the citizens who possess it (Republic IV.435e1–6)
and from their displaying it within the city; thus guardians make it wise in
exercising their wisdom on behalf of the city as a whole (428c11–d6), while
auxiliaries make it brave in exercising their courage on its behalf (429b1–3). The
other model is of macrocosm-microcosm: justice is identical in city and in citizen
(II.368e2–369a3, IV.434d3–5). According to the first model the justice of a
citizen is external, but according to the second it is internal: it is said explicitly
that the justice of an individual consists in his doing his own business not
externally, but within his soul and in respect of its parts (443c9–c2). So a just
city is one whose citizens are just in exercising justice within it; yet just citizens
are those who are just in exercising justice within themselves. Which seems not
to cohere.
(2) Is it to the point (cf. [11.16])? When Thrasymachus and Glaucon
questioned the value of justice, their starting-points were concrete and external:
justice is not committing murder, or adultery. They were asking a general
question about conduct of certain kinds. Socrates had already indicated a doubt
as to whether justice can be defined in such terms, but he needs to connect his
definition to their initial conceptions. Otherwise, he risks having quietly changed
the subject from justice commonly conceived as respect for others to justice
idiosyncratically reconceived as mental health. The analogy between soul and
city may have confirmed that it is good for a city to be just, just as it is good for a
soul to be at peace. But the question was not that, but whether it benefits each
citizen to be just towards others.
Both difficulties will be resolved if internal and external justice are related so
closely that operating well within oneself is an exercise of the same disposition
as acting justly towards others. Then internal justice will be an aspect of the
same disposition or practice as external justice; to attempt to evaluate them
separately would be false and artificial. This Socrates tries to make out. He
confirms his own definition by applying a ‘vulgar’ test: the internally just man
will be the last person to commit externally unjust acts such as theft and adultery
(442d10–443b3). The connection also runs the other way: he evidently assumes
that it will not alter the extension of the terms ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ if one calls that
action just which ‘preserves and helps to produce’ internal justice, and that action
unjust which tends to dissolve it (443e5–444a1). (The same reciprocity should
apply within popular virtue, once this has been distinguished: the outer will