- Thrasymachus
- Wants money for his ideas: pay for teaching: he is competitive and greedy
- Wants credit and honor: he is competitive and greedy
- He wants to win the argument: he is competitive
- Uses reason and argument as means to the end of winning
- “Justice is nothing other than the advantage of the
stronger” (338c2–3) and 'Justice is the advantage
of the ruler'
- Those who rule make laws in their own interest, whether it is an individual, a small group, or the people.
- Each regime has its version of justice, and it is whatever the ruling deem advantageous to themselves (possibly within some constraints, but basically whatever they can get away with)
- This is not a perfect reflection of T's idea (perhaps because T's ideas are slippery and hard to pin down): it is "conventionalism": justice is what the laws say it is combined with authoritarianism (the ruler says what the law is: it is whatever the ruler says it is whenever the ruler says it is)
- if this is true, then consistency may not be a
contraining value that trumps other considerations in
this system
- But 'nature' has its own 'rules' which the laws often contravene: hence the 'natural hero'
- Greek terms: nature = physis : law/convention/norm = nomos.
- So you may live in a democracy, but as a natural hero,
if you can do it, you do do what you like.
- ‘Justice is the advantage of another person’ (343c)
- i.e. 'justice' is just a way for other people to control you or take advantage of you
- the tyrant is perfectly 'unjust' (344a-c)
- 343b-344c assumes 'justice' is obedience to nomos
and restraint of greed and over-reaching.
- Many efforts have been made to find/attribute a precise and consistent position for Thrasymachus
- None of them have clearly won the day.
- Perhaps Thrasymachus is not even attempting to define justice: perhaps he is merely critiquing it, offering slogans, or observing what he thinks are the effects of what is called 'justice' by Greeks generally. He's clearly not wanting to play Socrates' game.
- Glaucon and Adeimantus will go on to suggest that traditionally just behavior works to the advantage of other people.
- Much of what is said in the name of justice (not just in Greek times) does have the effect of social control of those who are not in power.
- If these two things are true, then acting 'justly' is what a patsy or a fool or a weakling does, namely acting docilely in other people's interests.
- Two further important assumptions that Thrasymachus' words commit him to (if we can hold him to them: he may not value consistency much):
- wealth/power/possessions and apparent pleasures are the goods by which our 'happiness' or 'welfare' is measured.
- they are a zero-growth ('zero-sum') game: if I get more, someone else must get less
- this need not actually be true about pleasure or
possessions, really, but the argument seems to assume it
is, and it's not completely implausible (But Bailly is
highly sceptical of it, just saying).
- So the intelligent and perceptive human will see this and try to win within those constraints
- winning means getting more,
- winning means ruling.
- championing 'justice' as a constraint on the above two bullet points is simple and naive (348c-e)
- "Socrates begins by subjecting Thrasymachus to a classic elenchus—that
is, a refutation which elicits a contradiction from the
interlocutor’s own assertions or admissions (339b–340b).
Thrasymachus has claimed the following:
- (1) doing what rulers prescribe is just, and
- (2) doing what is to the rulers’ advantage is just;
- (3) rulers sometimes prescribe what is not to their
advantage.
- It follows that
- (4) in some cases, it is both just and unjust to do as
the rulers prescribe.
- Compare Euthyphro where different gods say
different things are pious: consistency and agreement are
important to Socrates.
- On the assumption that nothing can be both just and
unjust, one of claims (1)–(3) must be given up.
- ...Thrasymachus chooses to repudiate (3), which seems to be a matter of obvious fact, rather than (1) or (2).
- Bailly: compare Callicles in the Gorgias, who apparently believes that people can simply decide that something is intrinsically desirable, i.e. in their own self-interest, and that decision makes it so.
- Plato emphasises the point by having Cleitophon and Polemarchus provide color commentary on the argument, with Cleitophon charitably suggesting that Thrasymachus meant that the just is whatever the stronger decrees, thinking it is to his advantage—in effect, an amendment to (2) which would make it equivalent to (1). But this solution is vehemently rejected by Thrasymachus (340a–c). Instead, he affirms that, ‘strictly speaking’, no ruler ever errs. For a ruler is properly speaking the practitioner of a craft [technê], just like a doctor; and, Thrasymachus explains, when in premises (1) and (2) he speaks of the ruler it is in this strict sense. And this expert ruler qua ruler does not err: by definition he acts as his craft of ruling demands"
- NOTE: Thasymachus has introduced the "ruler as expert"!
The "guardians" that rule the Republic described later on
are just that. That is surely not accidental. Is
Plato/Socrates coopting a sophistic idea? (I, Prof.
Bailly, doubt it: Plato's texts are riddled with the
notion that there are experts on various things and they
should be listened to because they know: this is not
sophistic, it's Platonic, perhaps going back to Socrates)
- Thrasymachus' claims seem to commit him to the idea that
the strongest ought to rule and subject the weaker
to their interest.
- Socrates' ideas
- A craft/productive knowledge serves the interest of something other than the practitioner's interest.
- Hence wages. Wages are charged by craftspeople because their crafts do not serve the craftspeople's interests.
- Wages are not all monetary: It could be considered the 'wage' of a good ruler that they are not ruled by worse rulers (which is what would happen if they did not step up and rule)
- NOTE: Socrates' positions commit him to the idea that justice is a craft, crafts benefit others, and so justice is an other-oriented thing.
- Craftspeople do not outdo fellow craftspeople: knowledge aims at an optimum, not a maximum.
- Health is an optimum: once the doctor makes you healthy, you are healthy: it is not the case the you should then keep trying to out-healthy others.
- Being in tune is an optimum: once the guitar is tuned,
you don't try to tune it better than the others that are
in tune.
- Ruling is a craft (a matter of expert knowledge, not
just a knack): there is an optimum that the ruler should
find, using knowledge.
- Areas of expertise do not involve zero-sum goods:
being good at a craft, and producing a good craft-product
does not require that someone else be worse or that some
other product be not as good.
- Generally speaking, the issue is whether whatever is "good" and "goodness" is zero-sum or not.
- Injustice inherently involves conflict/strife, and is thus inherently skewed to be self-stymying and ineffective
- "Justice among thieves": a gang must observe justice amongst themselves: if they are unjust amongst themselves, they self-destroy
- same thing in the soul: its elements must be harmonious
- Socrates adds that as an excellence of the soul, justice inherently allows the soul to perform its function well, and so the just person lives well.
- Details are lacking at this point: the rest of the Republic tries to fill them in.
- "Even Socrates complains that, distracted by Thrasymachus’ praise of injustice, he erred in trying to argue that justice is advantageous without having first established what it is (354a–c)."
- Note well: the challenges that Glaucon and Adeimantus pose to Socrates in Book II may well have significant differences from Thrasymachus' position. The rest of the Republic is more a direct response to their challenge and perhaps a response to the spirit of Thrasymachus' position (if he has a coherent and defined and specific position rather than a loose set of critiques) than a direct specific response to Thrasymachus.
- "Socrates’ philosophical antithesis and polar opposite."
- Conventional justice is just the weak controlling the truly strong, whom they hoodwink into believing that the truly strong should not get a bigger share. (483e-484a)
- This is a critique of democracy: more narrowly focused
than Thrasymachus, who critiqued aristocracy and monarchy
as well.
- While nomos (convention, social construction) varies from entity to entity, society to society, physis is permanent, fixed, the same for all.
- and so physis is inherently authoritative: its permanence makes it authoritative (a questionable idea, but not implausible to many)
- there are those, for instance, who hold that to be
"civilized" is to have one's nature tempered, and that
being "civilized" is undoubtedly a good thing: Callicles
doesn't.
- And physis/nature gives rise to "natural justice": that the strong should get a proportionally bigger share than the inferior (484c)
- This is a 'positive norm' that is 'natural': it is not
just a constraint in a negative way, but rather tells us
what "should" happen.
- "For all its ranting sound, Callicles has a straightforward and logically valid argument here: (1) observation of nature can disclose the content of ‘natural justice’; (2) nature is to be observed in the realms where moral conventions have no hold, viz among states and among animals; (3) such observation discloses the domination and exploitation of the weak by the strong; (4) therefore, it is natural justice for the strong to rule over and have more than the weak. From a modern point of view, premise (1) is likely to appear the most dubious, for it violates the plausible principle, most famously advanced by David Hume, that no normative claims may be inferred from purely descriptive premises (‘no ought from an is’)."
- This appeal to nature is common to virtually all ancient ethics.
- "Socrates’ objection is instead to (2) and (3): Callicles gets nature wrong. In truth, Socrates insists later on, “partnership and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe a world order, my friend, and not an undisciplined world-disorder” (507e–508a). Callicles advocates pleonexia only because he ‘neglects geometry’ (508a): instead of predatory animals, we should observe and emulate the orderly structure of the cosmos as a whole.
- "Callicles goes on to articulate (with some help from
Socrates) a conception of ‘superiority’ in terms of a pair of
very traditional sounding virtues: intelligence [phronêsis],
particularly about the affairs of the city, and courage [andreia],
which makes men “competent to accomplish whatever they have
in mind, without slackening off because of softness of
spirit” (491a–b). These are the familiar
‘functional’ virtues of the Homeric warrior, and the
claim that such a man should be rewarded with a ‘greater
share’ is no sophistic novelty but a restatement of the
Homeric warrior ethic: the best fighter in the battle of the
day deserves the best cut of the meat at night. At the same
time, Callicles is interestingly reluctant to describe his
‘superior’ man as possessing the virtue of justice [dikaiosunê],
... and he explicitly rejects the fourth traditional virtue in
the Republic, sôphrosunê, temperance or
moderation.
"Hedonism: ... of what, exactly, do they (the 'strong') deserve more? ...it is not made clear to us what pleasures Callicles himself had in mind—perhaps he himself is hazy on that point. All he says is that the superior man must “allow his own appetites to get as large as possible and not restrain them. And when they are as large as possible, he ought to be competent to devote himself to them by virtue of his courage and intelligence, and to fill him with whatever he may have an appetite for at the time” (491e–492a).
Note that in the Rudebusch notes linked on the schedule, Rudebusch offers an interesting idea: Callicles is claiming that people have within them a capacity to make any thing they like into something intrinsically desirable: that means that they can make anything into something that they want for its own sake. There is no objective answer to the question "what is desirable for its own sake."
Socrates v. Callicles
The "Pleased coward" argument is the "The most fundamental
difficulty with Callicles’ position:
(1) pleasure is the good; (2) good people are good by the
presence of good things; (3) good people are the virtuous, i.e.,
the intelligent and courageous; (4) the non-intelligent foolish
and the non-brave cowardly sometimes experience as much pleasure
as the intelligent and courageous, or even more; (5) therefore,
bad people are sometimes as good as good ones, or even better.
Here, premises (1) and (3) represent Callicles’ hedonism and his
account of the virtues respectively; (2) and (4) seem
undeniable; but (1), (2), and (4) together entail (5), which
conflicts with (3) and is anyway a contradiction in terms.
"The problem is obvious: one cannot consistently claim both
that pleasure is the good, and that courage and
intelligence (which are manifestly not instances of pleasure, or
derivative of it, or even reliably correlated with it) are goods.
"This is perhaps the first clear formulation of ... the two
ends represented by ‘inclination’ and ‘duty’ (Kant), or the
‘dualism of practical reason’ (Sidgwick). And the case of
Callicles can help us to see an important point often obscured
in later versions, which is that some conflict along these
lines can arise even if one’s conception of virtue has nothing
to do with altruism. Even for an immoralist, there is room
for a clash ... between the advantages it is rational for us to
pursue and the sort of person we ought to try to be.
" “This is the truth of the matter, as you will know if you
abandon philosophy and move on to more important things” (484c).
Callicles is here the first voice within
philosophy to raise the prospect that there are truths which
philosophy itself may hide from us. That is a possibility
which Socrates clearly rejects; but it is hard to see how he
could refute it.
Glaucon:
- Glaucon says he is restating what Thrasymachus said (358c),
- but like Callicles, Glaucon concerns himself explicitly with the nature and origin of justice,
- he classifies justice as a merely instrumental good (or a necessary evil) : it has no intrinsic worth
- and locates its origins in a social contract:
- each of us stands to lose from untempered greed (of others): hence we enter into an agreement called justice which tempers our greed in exchange for others tempering theirs.
- but Gyges' ring shows that if any of us could get away with injustice, we would
- that is because justice is a matter of convention tempering our nature
- but Glaucon does not offer a definition of justice
- and he does not divide humanity into strong and weak or the like.
- he strips down the immoralist challenge to: given the merely conventional character of justice and the constraints it places on our pleonectic (greedy, over-reaching) nature, why should any one of us be just, whenever injustice would be to our advantage?
This is also the challenge posed by the sophist Antiphon, in the surviving fragments of his discussion of justice in On Truth (see Pendrick 2002 for the texts of Antiphon, and Gagarin and Woodruff 1995 or Dillon and Gergel 2003 for translation).