Ancient PhilosophyAllen Jeffrey GurfelCritical Evaluation

Comment: This is an incomplete paper. There is no introduction or conclusion, so it is difficult for the reader to grasp what thesis you will propose and what arguments are meant to support the thesis.

In The Republic Plato attempts to define justice and toward that end he describes a

perfect city. His reasoning is that it would be easier to see justice writ large in the city. A

perfect city is certainly just, therefore if we describe the perfect city we should be able to

find justice contained in it. Having found justice in the city, we can look for it, analogously,

in the individual soul. And so he describes the perfect city. [Here and throughout, it would

be best if you provide references to the parts of the Republic where these claims are made.]

First, the city must serve its citizens by meeting their basic needs, and this is best done by

assigning to each citizen the task he is best suited for. [What you say is true, but the way

that you state the point seems to downplay the Plato's thesis about the original cause of the

city. It is because we have basic needs and that no one of us can meet these needs by

ourselves that the city comes to be.] But this will give us only the most basic city. In

creating the luxurious city [Why do you expect that your reader knows what the

“luxurious city” is?], we will come into a need for other professions, such as trader,

doctor, and judge. We will also need a special class that will engage in war. This is the

guardian class. Plato describes the guardian class and provides outlines for their education.

Finally, we will need a ruling class whose task it will be to preserve this system of

education. So in the perfect city we find three classes. There are the common people, the

guardians, and the rulers. By listing the virtues and conducting a process of elimination,

Plato locates justice in the functioning of each part in accordance with its role. [Imprecise

formulation.] Having found justice [begin new paragraph] in the city he proceeds to look

for justice in the soul. The first thing to see is whether or not the soul has an analogous

tripartite structure with the city. He finds that the soul does in fact have three parts. [Given

that you go on to question whether Plato is entitled to make this and related assumptions, it

might be appropriate to outline Plato's arguments for these two key claims: (1) that the soul

has three parts and (2) that these parts are the same in kind as the three parts of the

luxurious city.] There is the desirous part, the spirited part, and the rational part. By

analogy to the city, Plato concludes that justice in the soul is for every part to play its

appropriate role. The ruling part is the rational faculty. Allied with the rational part is the

spirited part. Together the rational and spirited part rule over the desiring part of the soul.

There are several related problems with Plato’s approach. [Are they problems or

apparent problems?]

First, it’s questionable whether Plato’s approach makes any sense from the start.

[Too brief. You need to explain why this approach is “questionable”.] He argues that in

seeing something written in small, not easily discernible letters it would be helpful to look

somewhere else, somewhere with clearly visible letters. [This too needs elaboration.]

Second, it may seem an unfounded assumption that justice should be found in the

structure of a person’s soul. There seems to be another possible location for justice. It

may be the case that justice consists in actions. [This is more or less what Cephalus and

Polemarchus suggest. To see why Plato rejects this possibility, you ought to examine

closely the arguments that Socrates makes in this portion of the Republic.] It is actions that

are just or unjust in accordance with some principle, and the just person is the one who

performs just actions and avoids unjust actions.

Third, it isn’t obviously the case that justice in the city resides in each class doing

what it is suited for. Plato’s method of discovering justice by a process of elimination

[Two comments: First, in your exposition of the argument above, you did not show that

this is what Plato does. Second, it is not clear that this is a fair description of the argument.

All I see is this line of thought: A perfect city will have the four cardinal virtues. We

appear to have found three of them. But there should also be the fourth, namely, justice. So,

we should continue to search for justice, since if it is not present, then we know that we

have not found the perfect city.] leaves something to be desired.

These objections might be answerable. [At the end of the day, are they? I am not

sure that I understand your final position.] Plato may have the resources to answer them

already present in the text of The Republic.

With regard to the first objection, it seems one crucial assumption can put it to rest.

This assumption is as follows. If I know for a fact that the letters written large are the same

text as the small letters that I’m not readily capable of reading, then I need only read the

large letters. It follows from my knowledge that the texts are identical that the large letters

say the same thing as the small letters. But does Plato have grounds for such an

assumption? [Plato takes himself to have established that the city and the soul have the

same kind of structure. (This is why it is important to examine Plato's argument for the

existence of the same kind of tripartite structure in the soul – but, curiously, this is

something that you did not do.) If A has structure S and any thing with S is just provided

that condition C obtains, then if B also has S, we may infer that B is just provided that C

obtains.] Maybe. If Plato holds that things are just in virtue of partaking in a Form of

justice, he might be forgiven for not subscribing to the possibility of different senses of the

word “justice”. If he holds that dialectical reasoning is the royal road to knowledge of

the forms, he is justified in applying such an approach in looking for the structure of justice.

The predication “…is just” implies that some similarity must exist. He is taking a sort of

ordinary language in looking for what’s just. [You keep stating that if we allow Plato to

assume X, then Plato can answer our objection. So, will you allow Plato to assume X?]

With regard to the second objection, if Plato can reasonably say that if justice exists

anywhere it must exists in either X or Y, and he is capable of saying that it does not exist

in Y, then he is justified in looking for justice in X. The possibilities are two: justice can

be in the soul itself or it can be a feature of the person’s actions. If he can offer some

argument that justice is not a feature of the person’s actions, he can assume justice must

be a feature of the soul itself. Perhaps we can look at his consideration of other possible

arrangements of the city and soul. He finds in every case that alternate arrangements are

undesirable and do not result in anything [actions?] like what we would call justice,

whether in soul or in practice. This suggests that the actions we would ordinarily call just

result from a certain organization of the soul. [I am not sure I see how this will help Plato.

At the very least, you need to say more about how this argument would go.] He can also

rely on a feature of the common use of the word “just”. We call individuals just even

when they are not actively involved, in that moment, in some action we would call just.

[Sure. But that is a rather weak claim. I assume that “we” would not be inclined to call

someone just if he never did just actions. Let us hope that Plato does not rest his claims on

this particular observation!] If an individual can be just even when he is not engaged in the

performance of a just action then even at that time that individual must be partaking,

somehow, in the Form of justice. Therefore, we look for justice in the soul itself and not in

actions. [I think a more promising argument is this: Fred might do the right thing, but for

the wrong reason. If justice merely consisted in doing the right thing, then Fred is just. But

that seems to be wrong. We want Fred to do the right thing for the right reasons. But for

Fred to do the right thing for the right reasons, Fred might need to have the right sorts of

dispositions. I take it that something like this constitutes the intuitive basis for virtue

ethics.] This is a good response, but there is one more. We might be justified in looking to

the city’s structure in our search for justice, since it isn’t clear that there is any sort of

analog to individuals’ specific just actions present in the city. [Again, this does not look

promising, since it appears to beg the question.] In looking for justice, we have to look for

something apparently present in both the individual and in the city. Both don’t perform

actions, but both can be just. Therefore, we look for justice not in actions but in structure.

The third objection is difficult [for whom? For you? For Plato?]. If we grant Plato

that his city is fully described in the dialectic leading up to his listing [word choice] and

search for the four virtues, then we at least know where to look. There is nowhere else to

look, in other words, if his city is fully described. But it remains possible that some other

feature would emerge from the city described which would more appropriately called justice.

What it means to say “more appropriately” however, is that we have some notion of

justice which we are relying on in looking for justice in the city. This is of course a

problem because in the dialectic we do not, as yet, have any such notion to rely on. We

rely on an ordinary language intuition. [I am not sure I follow this.] But doesn’t Plato rely

on such an intuition in searching for all four virtues? If we grant that the three besides

justice are clearly defined and obviously present in elements of the city, then the process of

elimination becomes more reasonable. [See my comment above. I am not sure that Plato

infers that justice is each part playing its proper role by means of “a process of

elimination.”] It is not clear that this is the case. Perhaps in answering this objection it

would be best to rely on a different approach. We can admit a parallel between the city and

the soul as exemplified by the tripartite structure. We can admit that justice is to be sought

in structure as argued above. Then we make a reversal. Justice writ small, in the soul, can

serve to help us discover justice writ large, in the city. We find this similarity and it

confirms that we are on the right track in our search for justice.

It occurs to me that there's one more response to the third objection I make in my critical

evaluation.

Addendum:

A perfect city must possess the four virtues. This is a premise I grant Plato. When it comes to looking for justice, however, we take on an examination of the fevered city, the luxurious city. But, Plato tells us, [actually, it is his character Socrates who says this... is it safe to infer that this is also Plato's position?] as far as he's concerned the perfect city is present before the fever takes hold, before the luxury is introduced.

We can conclude that this basic city must also possess the virtue of justice. In my defense of the process of elimination I argue for a premise that would be very useful to Plato—namely, that the city as it is described in the dialectic leading up to the listing of the virtues is fully described. [Ambiguous] That is, what's been said rightly comprises the entire scope of our search for justice. With the additional elements [what are these?] present, this search isn't perfectly easy.

But consider the basic city fully described. That is, what is said of the basic city rightly compromises [word choice?] the full scope our search for justice ought to sweep over. Next, consider that there really aren't so many places to look. Essentially, the entire elaboration of the city is that everyone does what he is most suited to. Therefore, we might suggest that the search for justice in the basic city makes things very clear. Justice consists in all members doing their parts. There isn't anywhere else to look. Combined with my argument that the search for justice is rightly in structure and not in action, I think we can offer Plato a substantial defense in his location of justice in the proper functioning of each part of the city. [I wonder whether this would really help Plato. The “city for pigs”lacks the hierarchical structure of the luxurious city. But it is the luxurious city that has the same hierachical structure as the embodied human soul.]

Grade: B+