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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A Short History of Ethics: a History of Moral Philosophy From the Homeric Age To the Twentieth Century CHAPTER 5: PLATO: THE REPUBLIC THE Republic opens with a request for a definition of δικαιοσύνη, and the first book clarifies the nature of this request.

The definition of justice as “telling the truth and paying one’s debts” is rejected, not only because it may sometimes be right to withhold the truth or not to return what one has borrowed, but because no list of types of action could supply what Plato is demanding. What he wants to know is what it is about an action or class of actions which leads us to call it just. He wants not a list of just actions, but a criterion for inclusion in or exclusion from such a list.

Again, a definition of justice as “doing good to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies” is rejected not just because of the argument that to harm someone would be to make him worse -that is, more unjust-with the consequence that the just man would be involved in making men less just, but because any definition of justice in terms of “doing good” and the like is bound to be unilluminating.

When Thrasymachus comes upon the scene he tells Socrates that Socrates is not to offer him a definition which tells him that justice is “the same as what is obligatory or useful or advantageous or profitable or expedient.” Socrates retorts that this is like asking what 12 is and refusing to accept any answer of the form that it is twice 6, or 3 times 4, or 6 times 2, or 4 times 3.

But Socrates does accept the task of offering a quite different kind of elucidation; it would be a mistake to suppose that when Socrates does offer us a formula, namely that justice is that state of affairs in which everyone has regard to his own concerns, this is in itself the answer that was being sought. This formula is unintelligible apart from the rest of the Republic, and Thrasymachus is right to suppose that the search for expressions synonymous with δικαιοσύνη would not be to the point.

For to be puzzled about a concept is not like being puzzled about the meaning of an expression in a foreign language. To offer a verbal equivalent to an expression about whose meaning we are conceptually puzzled will not help us, for if what we are offered is a genuinely synonymous expression, then all that puzzled us originally will puzzle us in the translation.