Socrates Value Of Justice Essay

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In the Republic, does Socrates prove that it pays to be just?

In a dialogue with Thrasymachus, Polermarchus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus in Plato’s The Republic, Socrates radically attempts to prove that it pays to be just, since, justice is good in itself as well as for its consequences. This dialogue holds much significance, because, what people understand justice to be matters a great deal to their past and present life. In this, Socrates turns to psychic health to define justice and splits it up into three parts: the spirited, the appetitive and the rational. He maintains that justice lies in the harmony of the psyche when lead by reason, and, with this account of justice in hand, Socrates proceeds to offer three "proofs" to show that justice is valuable for its own sake. Successively, Socrates goes on to present The Forms to exhibit how a Socratic good equates to the conventional definition of justice. Nevertheless, whether Socrates proves that it pays to be just is debatable. In this paper, I will confront and critically assess Socrates’s ideas, but, I will argue that his attempt to define and show the value of justice is ineffective. …show more content…
He asserts that the psyche is composed of the rational, the spirited and the appetitive. These three parts of the psyche also correspond to the three classes of a society - whether in a city or an individual, justice is declared to be the state of the whole in which each part satisfies its meaning without attempting to restrict in the meanings of others. In the tripartite theory of the soul, Socrates divides the rational from the non-rational by using the intuitive principle of opposition. This is the idea that “at the same time, in the same respect, and in relation to the same thing—undergo, be, or do opposite things” (essentially, this is the idea that nothing can have opposite properties at the same

Plato Essay

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