Cohen Gerald

What Is To Be Common?
Joshua Cohen
February 2001 Notes for Political Philosophy, Spring 2001 Please Do Not Cite Without Permission
1. The Problem of Civic Unity

In Book 2 of the Politics, Aristotle says that the purpose of his inquiry is to consider what form of political community is best for all those who are most able to realize their ideal of life.1 The natural starting point of that investigation is, he continues, to determine how much the members of a political society should have in common. To be sure, members have something in common simply in virtue of living in a single political society: they share a territory, political regime, and legal rules. But how far should this commonality extend: a common political culture? language? ethnicity? religion? societal culture? conception of the best way to live? To what extent, and in what ways, is the best political society a community? Aristotle associates the limiting viewthat members should have all things in common, and that the political society should be, in a very strong sense, a community with Platos Republic. Aristotle illustrates this view by referring us to and then criticizing a surprising claim that Plato adumbrates in Republic Book 3, and
Plato, Spring 2001, 2
subsequently discusses in detail in Book 5: that the guardian-rulers in the ideal polity should have neither separate families nor private property. Plato endorses these proposals, Aristotle says, because he begins with the false premise that the greater the unity of the state the better. Or, again, he says that the error of Socrates [he is here referring to Platos case against private property in the guardian class] must be attributed to the false notion of unity from which he starts.2 Though Aristotle wonders whether Platos own institutional proposals about family and property can genuinely be expected to achieve the complete civic unity to which Plato aspires, his principal concern and criticism is directed against what he sees as an exaggerated ideal of civic unity, not against Platos ideas about how best to implement that ideal. The Platonic ideal of unity, Aristotle says, is fundamentally misconceived because of the essentially plural nature of political society: Is it not obvious that a state may at length attain such a degree of unity
1 Aristotle, Politics, 1260b28. 2 Aristotle, Politics 1263b30-1.
as to be not longer a state?since the nature of a state is to be a plurality.3 If by the nature of a state Aristotle means to refer us to common features of actual states, then Plato would doubtless have agreed that states are pluralities by which I mean, at first approximation, that they are not unified around a set of shared purposes and values that guide the lives of all members. Indeed, he thinks that most polities are dividedindeed so deeply divided as to be single polities only in name. Thus, describing how the ideal polity can preserve itself despite its relatively small size and modest wealth, Plato urges that the rulers must play off the internal divisions in other cities, as each of them is a cluster of cities, not one city . . . . Each of them consists of two hostile cities, that of the poor and that of the rich, and each of these contains many. It would be a grave mistake to approach them as one. . . . (422E-423A). But ifas is surely trueAristotle meant to point us to a political idealif by the nature of the state he meant the state when it achieves its best formthen Plato sharply disagreed that the nature of the state is to be a plurality. Actual states are divided, and weaklacking in true greatness
3 Aristotle, Politics 1261a18.
(423A)because of their divisions. Indeed, as his remarks about mere clusters and hostile cities indicate, Plato thought that the absence of unity implies that most of what we commonly think of as single political units are not single cities at all, but only a collection of groups, perhaps warring factions, all occupying the same territory. Platos political thought is guided by an ideal of civic unity: he endorses a particularly strong formulation of the view that an ideal political society must be a community:. In what is arguably the strongest affirmation of the value of unity, he asks: Is there any greater evil we can mention for a city than that which tears it apart and makes it many instead of one (462A/B; also 423D). Elsewhere, in a discussion of the tasks of the guardian-rulers, he says that the guardians should be use the concern for unity in judging the proper size of the city: As long as any increase in size is unlikely to stop the city remaining united, they should let it go on increasing. But not beyond that point (423B). Moreover, in that same discussion, he associates the value of unity with the fundamental principle that in a well-regulated polity, each person does the work for which he or she is naturally best suited: they [the guardians] should assign each individual to the one task he is naturally
fitted for, so that by applying himself to his own one task each person may become a single person rather than many people, and in this way the entire city may be a single city rather than many cities (423D). As an institutional matter, the attachment to civic unity is sharply underscored by Platos critique of the existence of separate families and private property in the guardian class, which are the aspects of his view to which Aristotle calls our attention in his criticisms of the ideal of civic unity. But that attachment is suggested by a number of other ideas in the Republic, more fundamental than the striking institutional proposals.4 Here I mention ten, which together give substance to the ideal of civic unity by indicating the various dimensions along which members of the ideal polity must have things in common: 1. The ideal republic is to be ruled by philosophers who have genuine ethical knowledge. The philosopherrulers in the ideal city do not simply have true ethical beliefs, but true beliefs along with a rational understanding of why those beliefs are true. More particularly, the philosopher-rulers share knowledge of
4 For example, the argument for eliminating separate families in the
guardian class derives from the fact that common pleasures/pains in the guardian class is a form of unity.
what is good in human life, especially the importance of a well-ordered soul ruled by the souls rational part, and use that shared knowledge to guide their own political conduct, and the life of the political society more broadly, including its cultural environment (484BD). 2. Whereas the non-rulers lack ethical knowledge, they do share the true belief that the rule of the philosopher-guardians is for the best (431D/E, 499D502A): they can recognize this to be true, and so have correct opinions, though they lack genuine knowledge in that they cannot give a proper, reasoned explanation of why that correct opinion is true. 3. Members of the guardian class, who are responsible for the overall good of the societyits good relations both internally and with other cities (428D) identify their own good with the good of the political society: they believe that they are doing well as individuals if and only if the political society is doing well (412D), and are happy in part because they understand the importance of their political responsibility: they are happier than any Olympic victor because the victory they win is the safety of the entire city (465D-E). Indeed, they key test for
suitability for membership in the class of guardian rulers is the stability of this belief in the identity of their own good and the good of the political society over the course of a life: we must select from the guardians the kind of men who strike us most clearly, their whole lives through, as being utterly determined to do what is in the citys interests, and who preserve their conviction that they should do what is best for the city (412E). 4. Members of the guardian classit follows from point 3identify their own good with the good of other guardians: each guardian thinks he or she is doing well if and only if the other guardians are faring well (463E). 5. Because of limits imposed by rulers on the extent of economic inequalitylimits imposed for the sake of preserving incentives to perform well at social tasks (421E-422A)the members of the polity regard themselves as belonging to a single polity, not to distinct groups, and are difficult to divide from one another (423A). 6. Because of the absence of separate families and private property in the guardian class (416D, 423E-424A), the members of that group think of the same things as
mine and not mine and therefore experience common feelings of pleasure and pain (462B, 464A). 7. The heart of political stability is not good laws and well-designed institutions, but the common upbringing and education of the guardian class, which forms the common ethical understanding and feelings that bind political society together, and which should be called sufficient [rather] than great (423D/E). 8. Achieved through a design of the overall cultural environmentthe music, poetry, and painting of the society, as well as the material surroundings provided by its architecture and furniture (401A)aimed at fostering the best human lives, this common upbringing generates, at least within a guardian class, a shared sense of and love for what is gracious and beautiful, and corresponding hatred of what is uglya sense that is itself prior to reason (402A). 9. All members of the political society contribute to it by doing what they are best suited, by their nature, to do, and irrespective of their own judgments about how best to live their lives5: put otherwise, the common object of the activities of the members of the
5 Plato thinks that it is quite generally true that a persons life is
better when the person does what is naturally best suited to him or her. See 407A and 590C/D. As the second passage makes clear, living this
political societymore precisely, of the different groups it comprisesis to ensure that the various requirements of the society are optimally fulfilled. 10. Moreover, all membersguardians and soldiers, as well as farmers and other workersare to be told the noble lie that they have common origins: that they are brothers, made from the same metals, though in different proportions (415A-C). Though they do not (or need not) have common origins, and certainly are not made of common metals, they are to believe that they have common originsmuch as people who share an ethnic or ethnonational identity may believe that they share blood ties that unite them and distinguish them from other groups, even if that belief is completely mythological. Thus the ideal political society is like an ideally integrated single individual (462C)a single, unconflicted person. Just as a person experiences a pain in the finger as his or her pain, not simply as the fingers pain, so, too, members of a well-regulated city experience the good or bad fortune of a member as the good or bad fortune of the city. Take the example of someone hurting his finger. It is the while community extending through the body and connecting with the soul
better life may require control imposed from without.
this entire community notices the hurt and feels the pain of the part that hurts, which is why we say the man has pain in his finger. By analogy, When anything at all good or badhappens to one of its citizens, a city of this kind will be most inclined to say that what is affected is a part of itself. The whole city will rejoice together or grieve together (462C-E). To be sure, most members of the community play a subordinate role in establishing this civic unity. The essential unity is the unity of the class of guardian rulers: thus, it is a simple principle that the cause of change in any government is to be found in the ruling group itself, whenever discord breaks out in this very group. While it remains of one mind, even if it be quite small, it cannot be removed (545C-D, 465B). Still, the unity of the polity is not confined to the unity of the rulers: the polity is unified in being guided by a single system of evaluative thoughts realized in the knowledge of the rulers and correct opinions of others, and characterized by shared attachments to the community and to one another, by common circumstances, upbringing, feelings, emotions, objectives, and (or so they believe) origins. As this brief sketch of the ingredients of Platos conception of civic unity or community suggests, the
realization of this political ideal in the lives, thoughts, emotions, feelings, and practices of the polity imposes substantial restraints on the liberty of the members of the political society and is incompatible with their equality. Civic unity imposes restraints on their liberty in two fundamental ways. First, members are to perform the social-political functions for which they are naturally best suited, and, if need be, they should be required to perform those functions. In fashioning the polity, Socrates says, We prevented the cobbler trying to be at the same time a farmer or a weaver or a builder, and we said he must remain a cobbler so that the product of his craft be good; so with the others, each was to have one trade for which he had a natural aptitude, stick to it for life, and keep away from other crafts.... (374B-C). More strikingly, he says that if an offspring of the guardians is inferior, he must be sent off to join the other citizens, and if the others have an able offspring, he must be taken into the guardian group. This was meant to make clear that the other citizens must each be directed [emphasis added] to the one task for which each is naturally fitted.... (423C-D, 415B-C). Socrates offers no justification for this prevention or direction, nor does he seem to think that any special
justification is called for, perhaps because he does not recognize the value of individual independencethe value of guiding ones personal conduct by a set of values and principles with which one reflectively identifies, which may well be different from the values and principles of the political society and those of the other citizens of that society. To say he offers no justification may seem wrong. After all, Plato does plainly think that it best for each person to do the work for which he or she is best suited by nature, and also thinks that a person who does that work thereby makes his or her greatest contribution to the common good. I will come back to these claims later. In saying here that Plato offers no justification, I mean only to emphasize that he appears not to acknowledge any counter-value to the value of doing the work for which one is naturally best suited and the work which provides the greatest contribution to the good of the city. In particular, there is no indication that he thinks that the value of individual independence might need to be weighed against the common good, perhaps overriding it in some cases. So in saying that he provides no justification, I do not mean to suggest that he sees no reason in favor of requiring members to do what they are
naturally best suited to doingthat he thinks of this activity as in some way necessarybut that he sees no important considerations that weigh on the other side. The rich demands of commonality restrict liberty in a second way as well. In addition to requiring that members perform the work for which they are naturally best suited, the guardians ensure agreement in evaluative thought, emotion, and feeling through strong controls on the overall cultural environment. In discussing the cultural environment suited to educating young guardians, Socrates says that they must control the story tellers. Whatever noble story they compose we shall select, but a bad one we must reject (377B). Similarly, to say that the god, himself good, is the cause of evil for anyone, that we shall fight in every way, and we shall not allow anyone to say it in his city, if it is to be wellgoverned, nor must anyone hear it said, neither young nor old, neither in verse or prose (380B/C). The rejection being contemplated here is not exclusion from a formal curriculum, as in a school, but from the public culture: the rules concerning poetry about the gods are to be made into laws (383C) banning what can be said. The concern is with the culture that pervasively surrounds members as they grow upwith the popular, public culture, which is
taken in through the senses and exercises a constant influence on their souls.6 And the reform of the culture is to extend to the content of cultural products (what they say about the gods, and about such human virtues as courage, moderation, shame, sobriety, and honesty), the manner of performance (the ban on mimesis), the mode of performance (only Dorian and Phrygian are permitted in poetry), and the material culture (graceful environment. The idea that the concern about poetry and music is a concern about popular culture may strike us as odd, but tragedy and comedy were performed before a crowd of 14,000 people at the great Dionysia and other civic festivals. We hear of 20,000 people attending as recital of Homer. So the poetry that concerns Plato is the main vehicle of cultural transmission.7 This control of the culture extends not only to censorship of the bad, but also to instructions about what should be presented. Thus Plato is said to have excluded the poets from the ideal city: it was not all the poets, but only those (such as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes) who conveyed the wrong messages (for example, about the gods) or in the
6 See Miles Burnyeat, Culture and Society in Platos Republic, Tanner
Lectures.
wrong ways (for example, with an excess of imitation): be aware that the only poetry we can accept into our city are hymns to the gods and verses in praise of good men (607A). The conditions of civic community impose substantial restraints on equality. To be sure, there is limited economic inequality in the just polity in order to ensure that members are not distracted from their proper functions (421D-423B). Neverthelessand putting aside the assumption of slaverythe division of political labor subjects some to the rule of others, and thus establishes a form of political inequality. Thus we can add, on the side of freedom, that members who are not part the guardian class are subject to requirements which they have no role in deciding, so they are not politically free. In pointing to the conflicts of civic unity with freedom and equality, including equality of political freedom, I am not revealing anything that Plato would have denied or found in any way awkward or embarrassing. In Republic VIII, Plato advances a critique of democracy that sharply underscores his skepticism about values of liberty and equality: democracy distributes a kind of
7 Burnyeat, Lecture 2, pp. 1-2.
equality to the equal and unequal alike (558C)by for example permitting citizens generally (adult males) to participate as equals in making the laws, despite their natural inequality of capacity. Further, it is finally destroyed by an insatiable desire for libertyan unwillingness to regard any restrictions as legitimateas oligarchy is destroyed by an insatiable desire for wealth (562B/C): the insatiable longing for freedom, and the neglect of everything else . . . creates the need for tyranny (562C). By no means the conventional Athenian view, it contrasts sharply with the views of Pericles, in his Funeral Speech: we live as free citizens both in our public life and in our attitude to one another in the affairs of daily life; we are not angry with our neighbor if he behaves as he pleases, we do not cast sour looks at him, which, if they can do no harm, cause pain.8 But for us, the conflict of civic unity with freedom and equality presents two important challenges. First, we need to consider the possibility that Plato was driven to his strong formulation of civic unity by assumptions about what a good human life is, or about the value of community, that we, too, should find compelling, despite
8 For a discussion of contemporary debate about democracy, and
associated values of liberty and equality, see A.H.M. Jones, Athenian Democracy, chap. 3.
our antecedent tastes for liberty and equality. So if there are tensions, perhaps we should resolve them as Plato did, or at least give greater weight to community. Second, even if we do not find the strong formulation of political community attractive or acceptable, we may nevertheless finds elements of it worth preserving: for example, the idea that members of a political society might agree on the fundamental values that should regulate their cooperation; or that members might judge there to be strong connections between their own good, the good of other members, and the good of the political society; or that the exercise of political power might be regarded as an occasion for advancing those shared values; or at least that a good political society requires greater unity than a shared territory or subjection to common rules. But when we see that Plato presents them as parts of a wider conception of civic unity that offends so deeply against values of liberty and equality, we may be inclined to reject those elements, despite their attractions. So we need to know whether some strands of the ideal of communitythose that are less at odds with values of freedom and equalitycan be separated out from the full package. And that means that we need to characterize more fully the content of
the ideal of political community, and to see what drives Plato to value so highly the ideal of political unity. What makes divisions of thought, feeling, emotion, circumstance, and objective so objectionable?
2. Moral and Political Thought in the Republic

Though our principal concern here is with the socialpolitical ideal advanced in the Republic, Platos book is not principally a work of political thought, but of moral thought: the argument, Socrates says, concerns no casual topic, but ones whole manner of living (352D). Though the Republic defends a political ideal, it is organized as a response to a skeptical attack on the ideal of being a just person and on the importance of justice in a good human life. Specifically, it aims to answer the three questions that are stated in the last sentence of the aporetic first book: for when I do not know what justice is, I shall hardly know whether it is a kind of virtue or not, or whether the just man is unhappy or happy (354C). Separating the questions out: 1. What is justice? 2. Is justice a virtue (better for the just person than being unjust); 3. Is the just person happier than the unjust?
More particularly, Plato aims to provide an alternative to the answers to these questions advanced by Glaucon (358E-362C), in his restatement of Thrasymachus critique of justice: First, then, justice is a matter of convention, not something natural: it is the product of an agreement neither to inflict injury nor to suffer it (358E). That agreement is reasonable for each person who makes it because the costs of suffering injury to the sufferer so far exceed the benefits to that same person of imposing it on others. Doing wrong, men say, is by its nature a goodand being wronged an evilbut the evil of being wronged outweighs the good of doing wrong. As a result, when people wrong one another and are wronged by one another, and get a taste of both, those who are unable to avoid the one and achieve the other think it will pay them to come to an agreement with one another not to do wrong and not to be wronged (358E-359A). Given a choice between a general practice of no self-restraint and a practice of compliance with rules that protect each personthe choice faced by people who cant get away with injuring and no being injuredpeople will as a rule choose the practice of compliance. Thus, according to the conventionalist the basic norms of justice are provided
by a set of social rulesconcerning theft, personal safety, promise-keeping, truth-tellingthat we agree to because those rules provide mutual benefit. And to be just, according to the conventional understanding, is simply to comply with these social rules. The rules are mutually beneficial, in that everyone benefits from general compliance: each person who lives under the rules is better off when there is general compliance than when we have no such rules in place. For example, when I act justly by complying with conventional property rights, I benefit others, and when those others similarly comply, they benefit me. The key to Glaucon's conventionalist view of justice, however, does not lie simply in the general preference for universal compliance over universal noncompliance but in the fact that the ideal situation for each individual would be to be a free rider: to reap the benefits of the compliance of othersthey don't steal from me; they dont lie to mewhile not paying the costs of compliance him/herselfI steal from others; I lie when I wish to. According to the opinion of the many, justice stands between the best and the worst, the best being to do wrong without paying the penalty and the worst to be wronged without the power of revenge (359A).
Because most people lack the capacity to get the best optionbecause they may get caught and punished, and because the costs are so much greater than the benefits they do best by complying with the conventions. Thus justice is welcomed and honored because of mens lack of the power to do wrong (359B). But if a person could make himself invisible and avoid detection if he had Gyges ring, which makes it wearer invisiblethen the best thing would be to steal, rape, and kill. That is, best would be to appear just in that one appears to obey the conventionsthus avoiding punishment, while benefiting from the justice of otherswhile really being unjust by violating the conventions, and thus reaping the benefits. So in response to the first question, Glaucon states that justice is compliance with mutually beneficial rules, where it is understood that, while the rules are mutually beneficial in that they are better for each than no rules, the most beneficial arrangement for each individual would be one in which others acted on the rules and I did not and got away with itto be an undetected violator of the mutually advantageous rules. Second, justice is not a virtue: not a trait of character that is good in itself, and apart from consequences contingent on the views of others; it is
"necessary, but not good"(358C). For a trait to be good and admirable in itself, it must be rational to choose it for itself, quite apart from consequences that depend on the opinions of others (see the goods of type 2, at 357C): not necessarily apart from its consequences as such, but apart from consequences that are mediated by the beliefs of others. Lets assume, further, that it is rational to choose something if and only if that thing answers to some current desire. Then justice is not a virtue. For justice, we are now supposing, is a matter of acting on mutually beneficial rules. But the only reason to choose to comply with the mutually beneficial rules is to avoid getting caught. So the advantages do depend on the opinions of others. Far from being an admirable trait, then, justice simply displays the weakness of the agenthis/her inability to take a free ride by violating the rules. No one capable of getting away with injustice rationally chooses justice: those who practice justice do so against their will because they lack the power to do wrong (359B). If justice, then, consists in following the mutually beneficial conventions, and goodnessor choiceworthinessis understood as implying worthiness of choice independent of opinions of others, then justice is not good in itself.
Third, if we assume that a person is happy to the extent that his or her actual desires are satisfied, then the person who violates all the rulesand is therefore fully unjustbut appears to be fully just (361A) by deceiving others into thinking that they comply with the rules, is happier than the person who is genuinely fully just but appears to be fully unjust. Unjust persons reap the benefits of the justice of others, without paying the costs of their own justice, since they do not constrain their actions at all. By contrast, the just person who appears unjust pays the costs of being just, by acting on the rules, and gets no benefits. So according to Glaucons restatement of the Thrasymachian position, it is not justice itself, but only the appearance of justice that brings happiness. Now Plato rejects each of Glaucon's three answers. But not because of any superficial problem with Glaucon's position: a straightforward inconsistency in his reasoning. To the contrary, to understand that justice is good or choiceworthy, not merely necessary given the circumstances of human life and the weakness of human beings, and that the just person is happier than the unjust, we need to revisethrough philosophical argument our initial, conventional understandings of justice,
reason, goodness, and happiness. The account of civic justice is embedded in this argument, to which we will need to have recourse in aiming to understand what fuels the Platos strong formulation of the ideal of community. But our principal focus is on the social-political ideal, not the account of how one is to live.
3. Background Assumptions
Platos views about civic justice and the value of civic unity are located against the background of a set of assumptions about the circumstances of human social cooperation, human psychology, and human capacities that help motivate and make intelligible the content of the political conception. It is difficult for us to feel the force of the political conception, presented in a freestanding wayapart from the background. If we are to feel that force, we will need to see it as emerging from an argument whose premises strike us as compelling, or at least plausible. And even if, in the end (as in the beginning) we remain unmoved by much of it, still we want to separate its pieces out, so that we are not led to reject it whole cloth: more particularly, to deny entirely the force of its ideal of community by supposing
that the compelling and implausible aspects of that ideal are inseparable. Acknowledging that the distinctions are somewhat artificial, I want to separate out three principal categories of background.
Circumstances of Organized Social Cooperation Platos account of polis-justice proceeds against a background of five assumptions about the circumstances that give rise to organized social cooperation. First, human beings have certain basic biological needs that can only be met if they have suitable external goodsfood, clothing, and shelterthat are not themselves available in natural abundance. These needs lie at the roots of organized social cooperation: a city comes to be because not one of us is self-sufficient, but needs many things (369B). Moreover, we are endowed with appetites for the goods that meet these needs. Second, we tend to desire other goods that go beyond those necessaries, though the precise scope of these goods is unclear. Plato first introduces a distinction between necessities and luxuries when he distinguishes the first citythe healthy city of swinefrom the luxurious city, where people desire, among other things,
couches, tables, cooked dishes, arts, music, poetry. Later, in Book 8, he distinguishes necessary from unnecessary desires, characterizing the latter as desires that we couldthrough proper education and training avoid, and whose absence would make our lives no worse, whereas in the case of the necessary (for example, a desire for healthy food) their satisfaction benefits us (558E). So lets distinguish three categories: we desire goods that are biologically necessary. In addition, we may also acquire desires for goods that, though not necessary for life, do make our lives better when we possess them, and arguably are needed for a good life: for example, the desires for a graceful and beautiful social and material culture (401E), and the companionship of graceful people (402D) that remain when the luxurious city has been purified through an arrangement of the culture, designed to encourage the sense of shame (378C), courage (386A-388E), sobriety (388E-389B), love of truth (389B-D), and moderation (389D-391E) that the guardian rulers need if they are to combine gentleness with spiritedness to outsiders (399E). And we also tend to develop desires for things whose possession does not make our lives better, though such desires can be avoided through proper education and training.
I should add here that the necessary/unnecessary distinction appears only to apply to goods that have some connection with biological functioningeither with continued existence, or biological health, or sexual reproduction (perhaps with the objects of the appetitive part of the soul). Other goodsfor example, philosophical reflection, or political deliberation, or the virtues that make a human life goodare not in contemplation when Plato constructs his healthy and luxurious cities, though why that is so is not clear.9 The first state is constructed as though the point of an organized society were merely to supply the necessaries of life, rather than for the sake of the good,10 though it is clear that, to paraphrase Aristotle, is the polity comes into being for the sake of life, it continues for the sake of the good life. 3. The goods that answer to both necessary and unnecessary desires are produced in greater quality and abundance when producers of them specialize and exchange produce (as craftsmen) a particular good rather than aiming at individual self-sufficiency (indeed
9 On this, see Aristotle, Politics 1291a-b, and the discussion in T. H.
Irwin, Aristotles Defense of Private Property, in David Keyt and Fred Miller, eds., A Companion to Aristotles Politics. 10 Aristotle, Politics, 1291a18.
specialization seems to be the only way to increase productivity). Indeed Plato defines a city as a settlement of many people who gather in a single place to live together as partners and helpers (369C), where the context makes clear that partners and helpers are people who are assisting in meeting one anothers needs by supplying goods of the kind just described. Part of the explanation of the advantages of specialization is stated in the principle, of which more later, that we are each best at some particular task and that tasks will be best performed if performed by those who are most suited by nature to them: each one of us is born somewhat different from the others, one is more apt for one task, one for another (370AB). He adds later, by way of explanation: Is that what you meant by one person being naturally well-suited for something and another being naturally unsuited? That the one learned it easily, the other with difficulty; that the one, after only a brief period of instruction, was able to find out things for himself, while the other, after much instruction, couldnt even remember what hed learned; that the body of the one adequately served his thought, while the body of the other opposed his (455B). But Plato offers two other considerations that support a division of labor and
social specialization, and that make no such strong assumptions about natural differences of aptitude: first, that tasks are better performed when the persons responsible for them are free from the competing demands and distractions of other tasks (sowing the field before the crop starts to rot): I do not think the thing to be done awaits the leisure of the doer, but the doer must of necessity adjust himself to the requirements of the task, and not consider this of secondary importance (370B/C). And second, that specialization has advantages because the learning that comes from experiencenecessary knowledge and sufficient practice (374D)is important in improving ones ability to perform socially responsible tasks. 4. We are assuming a world in which there are a plurality of political societies: thus when members of the luxurious city develop unnecessary desires, they may seek to satisfy those desires through expansion, which brings them into conflict with other states. Indeed, when Plato first introduces the ruling guardians, he presents them as having a military function, as members of a specialized army that defends the city from attacks aimed at annexation (374). And the special educational demands on the guardians emerge from the need to produce a class
suited to that task: a class that is strong, harsh, and gentle: they must be gentle to their own people, but hard for the enemy to deal with. Else they will not wait for others to destroy the city but destroy it themselves first (375B). 5. Because of the tendency to form unnecessary desiresa tendency that cannot be avoided and must be addressed once we move beyond the simplest cooperative systemany stable system of social cooperation requires a political organization. To explain: Plato appears to assume that the stability of the first city (the city of swine), with only necessary desires, is unproblematic, that it works simply by each member specializing in a task (suggested at 372D). No one needs to be concernedso it would seemwith the preservation of the system of specialization itself in order for that system to be preserved: they will live at peace and in good health, and when they die at a ripe age, they will bequeath a similar life to their offspring (372D). Each person specializes in a task, and benefits from the similar specialization of others: they are bound together as parts of the division of labor. Having stipulated that desires are limited to the necessary ones, Plato supposes (without argument) specialization and market exchange
(with money) proceed without an agency whose role is to establish or enforce property rights or contracts. In contrast, the pressures to territorial expansion that emerge in the world of unnecessary desires impose a new demand and thus establish a new social taska task which is not directed to producing a particular good additional to the various goods produced by specialized workers, but to preserving the social order, or system of specialized cooperation, itself. The performance of this new function can apparently proceedthough this is never said in precisely so many wordseither through forms of military expansion that secure the territory needing for producing goods that fulfill desires, or through a combination of protecting the polity from expansion by others (in part by provoking internal divisions in other cities) and moderating the unnecessary appetites that do not aim at the good of the person who has them through educationthat is, through the appropriate arrangement of the overall cultural environmentthus mitigating pressures to expansion. Whether the emphasis is on expansion, protection, or cultural formation, however, a new kind of function is demanded by the conjunction of unnecessary desires and the plurality of polities. The function is new in kind, for two related reasons: first,
the function is concerned with the good of the whole system of cooperation through which specific needs are met and specific goods are provided, whereas the other functions in the division of labor aim to produce a particular good that meets the desires of others. It is not concerned about any particular matter but about the city as a whole, how best to maintain good relations both internally and with other cities (428D). Second, as a consequence, its role is to establish norms, laws, patterns of instruction, and practices that others will be required to followin short, to rule. Lets call this the political function. This conception of the roots of the political function is a mix of familiar and unfamiliar considerations about the bases of political rule. One familiar part is that the political function emerges to protect a collection of people from outsiders: to provide security. Moreover, the political function also emerges because of a need to ensure that people cooperate for the common good by specializing in the tasks they are best at. A less familiar elements, though, is that the political function emerges from the need to provide a cultural-educational setting that will diminish the unnecessary desires and desires for things in excess that
do not aim at our good, thus diminishing the tendencies to conflict emerging from those desires, and that will encourage desires for what is good and beautiful. Thus Rousseaus remark: Platos Republic is not at all a political work.... It is one of the most beautiful educational treatises ever written.11 And thus Platos remark in the Laws that politics is the art whose business it is to care for souls, and which thus requires knowledge of the natures and the habits of souls (650B). I emphasize here the distinctiveness of the political functionits concern with the overall good of the system of organized cooperation, rather than with some specific good, and the responsibility it implies for making binding rulesbecause Plato immediately, and with little argument, extends his general claim about the benefits of specialization to the political tasks. That is, he argues that the function of ensuring the good of the whole order by establishing and preserving rules and practices that others will be required to follow, should itself be the specialized work of one group. Indeed, it will eventually emerge that the political function must, above all, be the specialized work of a single group:
11 Emile, trans. Allan Bloom, p. 40.
Socrates: If a carpenter tried to do the job of a shoemaker, or a shoemaker the job of a carpenter, either because they exchanged tools and positions in society, or because one person tried to do both jobs, do you think that changes of this sort would do much harm to the city. Glaucon: No, not really. Socrates: But I imagine it is different when someone who is naturally a skilled worker or businessman of some kind is puffed up by wealth, popularity, strength, or something like that, and tried to enter the warrior class, or when one of the warriors tried to enter the decision-making and guardian class, without being up to it. If these people exchange
tools and positions in society, or if one person tries to do all these jobs at the same time, then I think you will agree with me that this change and interference on their part is destructive of the city. In thus extending the norm of specialization to the political function, Plato sharply rejects the fundamentals of contemporary Athenian politics, in particular, the institutionalized norm of citizen participation. Citizens fell into four social classes:
larger landholders (older families, aristocrats), wealthy manufacturers, smaller landholders, and landless citizens. To be sure, not all residents, indeed not close to a majority of all adult residents, were citizens. Among the non-citizens were all women, metics (free foreigners living in Athens, including Polemarchus, who owned the home in which the dialogue takes place), and slaves. There were some 80-100,000 slaves, and roughly 40,000 citizens. Still, the Athenian assembly (ecclesia) was open to all citizens: citizens were paid to attend, and any citizen could speak, or propose motions; it decided questions of war and peace, taxes, and legislation; and was commonly attended by 5,000 and more citizens. The agenda for the ecclesia was chosen by the Council of 500, composed of 50 members chosen by lot from each of the 10 territorial tribes. The judicial system, too, had a strongly democratic aspect, with a panel of 6000 jurors chosen by lot each year to serve on various courts (they, too, were paid for their service). Finally, there was no professional bureaucracy, the officials rather being chosen in general by lot, and all subject to the supervision by the ecclesia. Thus Pericles observation in his Funeral Speech: that Athenians do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man
who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.12 It might be saidand Plato certainly suggests this that part of the reason for having a specialized political class is that politics, like any other task, makes demands of technical knowledge and diligence. If the point of politics is simply to ensure, in the most efficient way, the preservation of a cooperative order that satisfies necessary (and unnecessary) desires, then it might be argued that Plato means to be arguing that politics, like other areas that require technical knowledge about how best to advance a relatively determinate goal, goes best when it is dominated by specialists with experience and knowledge. But we should resist this particular rationale for a specialized guardian class. Recall the two specific features about the political function noted earlier: first, that politics takes as its concern the good of the whole political city, and second, that it involves ruling and
12 It might be argued that I making too much of the extension of the
requirement of specialization to the political function. At least as Plato first introduces it, the function of guarding the city is military in nature (see 374). Three points in response: first, Plato is rejecting [earlier] Athenian practice of relying on citizen armies. Second, as subsequent discussion nearly immediately shows, the guardian class is not exclusively military (there is, for example, a need to decide whether and when to fight). Third, I am not suggesting that Plato has nothing to say in favor of extending the claim that specialization
being ruled. As to the first element: there is substantial disagreement about how best to specify this goal of the good of the whole political societyin particular about how to understand the relationship between the good of the whole and the good of the members. So the idea that politics is, in the first instance, a matter of technical knowledge about how best to advance a relatively determinate goal requires argument. And until we have that argument, we may want to resist the extension of the principle of specialization to this arena. As to the second element: the fact that politics involves making rules that others will be compelled to follow distinguishes the political function from the other specializations, for example, farming, doctoring, cobbling, that Plato discusses. And before we extend the principle of specialization to it, we need to consider whether this distinctive feature should make us resist the case for specialization. To be sure, Plato has other arguments for political inequality than an appeal to the idea that politics is essentially a matter of technical knowledge, and we will want to explore them. But they reflect more controversial
produces better results to this case: only that his extension is not
claims about human capacities and value: in particular, the claim that only some people have the capacity to know the aims that are proper to a political society; that stable justice requires that rulers have knowledge of the proper aims (484B-D)13 and that it is better for a person to be ruled by someone elses reason than to live without the rule of reason (590C/D). I will come back later to these points about political specialization.
Psychology Platos views about the conditions of social interdependence that give rise to political order are supplemented by two sets of views about human psychological capacities: first, an account of the parts of the soul and the distinctive powers of those parts; second, an accountassociated with his views about natural differences and specializations of functionof how those powers are distributed among people. Lets first, then, consider the account of psychic parts and harmony, and then the account of specialization whose key elements are best understood against this background.
well defended when first introduced. 13 At 412D/E, Plato emphasizes that guardians must have stable beliefs in the correspondence between their own good and the civic good. The importance of knowledge, as distinct from stable belief, comes at 484B-D in the defense of rule by philosophers who look to what is most true,
The case for the thesis that soul has parts emerges as Plato pursues the analogy between the justice of a political society and the justice of persons. By 434C, Plato has argued that polis-justice is a kind of civic harmony of the three separate classes in the political community (guardian-rulers, auxiliaries, and producers): not simply the harmony of groups who get alongthough agreement on who is to rule is a condition of the ideal polity, constituting it as moderatebut the objective harmony that consists in each of the three classes doing the work for which it is naturally suited, and not meddling in the work of other groups. Thus the account of civic justice is completed with a definition that answers, at least at the civic level, to the first of the three questions that Socrates notes at the end of Book 1: And let us repeat that the doing of ones own job by the moneymaking, auxiliary, and guardian groups, when each group is performing its own task in the city . . . is justice and makes the city just. Thus, the guardians provide guidance, making the rules and securing education through the proper organization of the public culture; the auxiliaries ensure military security; and the rest provide the goods needed by members. With
make constant reference to it.
that idea in place, he returns to individual justice, and aims to show that it, too, is a kind of harmony among parts. Thus, he deploys the strategy of determining what justice is by first locating the property of justice in the large, and then seeing whether the provisional answer for the political society also works out for the case of individuals. To make the case that individual justice is also a harmony of parts, each doing its own work, he first needs to show that the soul has parts (see 435C)in particular that there are three parts, appetitive, spirited, and rational, corresponding to the three classes in the polity. (Of course it will also need to be the case that each part can be said to have a proper task, such that justice might consist in each doing that task.) 1. Soul Parts. The argument that the soul has three separate parts (436B-441C) rests on the principle of individuation, which is stated at 436B and then again at 436E: Principle of Individuation: One thing cannot act in opposite ways or be in opposite states at the same time and in the same part of itself in relation to the same other thing (436D).
This principle is given a provisional defense by reference to the examples of a man standing still but moving hands and head and a top spinning without changing its location. But the argument is not treated as conclusive, and the principle is presented as an hypothesis rather than as definitively established (437A). In any case, the status of the principleits cognitive roleis not entirely clear, and can be interpreted in either of two ways. We might first be inclined to think of it as a way to determine when two properties are opposites. Thus understood, if we find that a thing has two properties in the same part of itself, etc., then we are to conclude that the properties are not really opposites. We would, on this first understanding, be assumed not to have an antecedent grasp of when properties are opposites, but instead to have an antecedent grasp of when we are faced with a single thing. But Plato seems not to think of it this way: he supposes instead that we have an antecedent grasp of when properties are opposites or incompatible, and then can use the Principle of Individuation to determine when we have a single thing, and when we have more than one thing, or a single thing with different parts (its role
is individuation, not property differentiation). Thus, using the principle we may come to know that we are not dealing with one thing but with several (436B). So, for example, we premise that standing still and moving are opposites; it follows that a man cannot stand still and move at the same time, though parts of him can stand still while other parts move. We dont decide whether the properties are really opposites by first determining whether they can both be applied to a single thing; instead the cognitive role of the principle is that we use it to decide whether what appears to be a single thing is genuinely a single thing by determining whether opposites are true of the apparently single thing. Applying the principle to the problem of soul parts, Plato reasons, very roughly, as follows: 1. Acceptance and refusal are opposites (437B); 2. Desire is a form of acceptance, and unwillingness to pursue a form of refusal (437C); 3. So it can't be that a single thing, at a single time, and in a single part of itself both desires something and refuses to pursue that same thing. 4. Sometimes a single person does appear both to desire something and to be unwilling to pursue it: for
example, to desire a glass of water but be unwilling to drink it. 5. Applying the principle of individuation, we conclude that there are different parts of the person parts of the soulone of which desires the thing whereas the other is unwilling to pursue it. To clarify this last point: Accepting the Principle of Individuation, we should not, strictly speaking, say that the person both desires the thing and is unwilling to pursue it, and that this is true of the person in virtue of the separate parts being motivated as described. Instead, the proper way to put it (436D) is that one part desires while the other part refuses: neither one can properly be said of the person. This last conclusion is not mandated by the principle of individuation itself. After all, we could argue that one motive really belongs to the person, whereas the conflicting motive does not (I wish to be free of the addiction, but the addiction keeps hold of me). But Platos conclusion seems to be that we can, without trouble, assign the motivations of the different parts to the person only when the motivations are fully harmonious. Since harmony, we will see, is what justice consists in, only the just person is genuinely a single
personas only the just city, with its harmonious parts, is genuinely a single city, as opposed to a territory where factions gather. 2. Types of Motivations: Rational, Appetitive, and Spirited Desires. I do not want to dwell on the metaphysics of soul parts, however, because I do not see that Plato needs itor the associated view that conflicting motivations are to be attributed to separate parts of the soul rather than to the personto say anything he wants to say either about different types of human motivation, or about conflicts and harmonies between motivations (and about justice as such harmony), or about interpersonal differences in capacity. So we will want to consider each of these three along the way, restating the central ideas without the arguably extraneous metaphysics. Taking the first point, then: The central point of the doctrine of soul-parts is to provide an account of human motivation that does justice to its complexity, in particular to motivational conflict and weakness of will. In particular, we want to understand cases of conduct that we are inclined to describe as the persons knowing what is better, but doing whats worse because he or she succumbs to a stronger desire. In the early dialogues, in
particular in the Protagoras, Socrates famously denied the possibility of weakness of will. He argued that desiring something is a matter of believing that it is good, and that desiring one thing more than another thing is a matter of believing the former to be better than the latter. So theres no possibility of believing that one activity is better than another activitysay dieting is better than eatingbut nevertheless doing the latter because one desires it more stronglysay, succumbing to a stronger desire to eat. Whatever its metaphysical import, the psychological force of the distinction between parts is that motivations are more complex than that this earlier Socratic theory would suggest. The crux of the account lies in the idea is that there are distinct types of motivation that may conflict, and not simply a plurality of motives of different strengths or intensities. In distinguishing types of motivation, the essential idea is that different motivations have different relations to an agents evaluative thoughts, that is, to his or her beliefs that something is good. In particular, desiring and believing good are to be distinguished in a way that the earlier theory denied.
In the first place, then, some desiresappetitive desiresare directed to objects without any qualification of them as, e.g. good or bad, large or small, hot or cold. Thus the thirsty person wants to drink and tries to get something to drink without any qualification: in itself, thirst is not for a long drink or a short one, a good drink or a bad one, in a word not for a qualified drink (439A). In this characterization, Plato appears to be making the perfectly general point that the appetitive desire is directed to a drink without any further characterization or qualification at all. Perhaps the thought is that the object of thirst or of any other appetitive desire (what it is directed to) is simply whatever will, if possessed, satisfy the desire by causing the desire to stop. On this understanding, appetitive desires have no intentional content at all: they are not constituted in part by thoughts about what they are desires for, but have their content determined by the conditions that satisfy them by making them go away. It follows from that perfectly general point about appetitive desiresroughly, that there is nothing cognitive about them at all, so that thirst is not a desire for a cold or a hot drink but just aimed at whatever will make the thirst go awaythat the object of
the desire is not qualified more particularly by being thought of as good or bad. Here, I want to emphasize the conclusion, and not the argument for this conclusion. The conclusion is that the desire is not qualified as to being good or bad, while the argument claims, in quite general terms, that the appetitive desires lack any intentional content at all: they are not evaluatively qualified because they are not qualified period. Other desires, by contrast, are for good things. More particularly, there are desiresrational desires, located in the rational part of the soulfor what is best overall: say, desires for particular objects or activities because they are understood as ingredients of a good life. The presence of desires of this second kind is suggested by reflection on motivational conflicts, as when we observe, for example, that a person wants something to drink but at the same time resists the drink because he thinks the drink will be bad. Socrates attributes the desire for what is best overall to the rational part of the soul, which, he says, is really wise and exercises foresight on behalf of the whole soul (441E, 442B), and possesses the knowledge of what is beneficial to each part (442C). Like the
political function in the city, the ruling function in the soul is to be concerned with the good of the whole and how the various partial goods fit together into a coherent system. Such motives are reasoned not simply because reason has played a role in focusing a desire on a particular object: the desire to steal is not a reasoned motive simply because it is a motive that arises from the desire for money and a piece of empirical reasoning that leads me to the conclusion that stealing some is most effective way to get it. Instead, they are reasoned because they are dependent on judgments that arise from reflection about my overall good (the whole soul). So there are at least two types of motivation, as is suggested, once more, by reflection on cases of motivational conflict. One kind arises from our judgments about what is best overall, whereas the other is in itself entirely insensitive to evaluative judgments, perhaps (as Plato thinks) because it is independent of any judgments at all. I say in itself insensitive because we may be able to train and habituate ourselves or educate others not to appetitively desire what we judge to be bad: To train ourselvesor to be trained and formed by the social cultureto lose our appetite when we
have eaten enough, or when food is sweet; or to focus our desires elsewhere, according to what might be called the law of the conservation of desire: when someones desires incline strongly for one thing, they are thereby weakened for others, just like a stream that has been partly diverted into another channel (485D). Still, an appetitve desire is in itself insensitive to evaluative thoughts because we cannot directly control our appetitive desires. In particular, we cannot control them by engaging in practical reasoning and attending to our judgments of value, because the appetitive desires are not directly sensitive to or responsive to such reasoning or evaluative judgments. So, for example, we cannot diminish our appetitive hunger simply by entertaining the thought that it would be best not to eat more, or by reasoning to that result. We could reason to that result, and then take a pill that makes the hunger disappear, but the desire does not diminish simply because the evaluative thought condemns it. And it is therefore not surprising that there will be cases in which there is a desire for some good, but an unwillingness to pursue that good: the desire is an appetitive inclination, independent of evaluative thought; the unwillingness
emerges from the evaluative thought that the pursuit would be bad overall. Thus the distinction between appetitive and rational desires: Appetitive desires are insensitive to judgments of value, and therefore in particular insensitive to judgments about whether the object of the desire is part of the best life. Whereas appetitive desires aim at things regardless of any connection with the good of the agent, the rational desires aim at that overall good. Platos distinction is not the familiar reason/desire distinction, where desires set the ends and reason works out the best means for pursuing them, and the account of motivational conflict is not founded on the relative intensities of different desires. Instead, we have a distinction between motivations that depend on overallevaluative-judgments and are assigned to reason, and motivations that are independent of such judgments and are assigned to appetite; correspondingly, motivational conflicts emerge when we simply want something that we judge bad for us. The third, spirited part is harder to pin down. In some places it is associated with such emotions as anger and shame (see the example of Leontius, the corpse gazer, at (440A)); elsewhere (see 548C) with the good of honor,
as distinct from the good of moneywhich is associated with the appetitive partor the good of knowledgewhich is associated with the rational part. For our purposes, there are two salient points about the third soul-part: it is unlike the appetites in being concerned with what a person values, that is, in being dependent on evaluative judgments. Thus, consider the shame that Leontius feels when he gives in to his desire to look at the corpses. His anger is directed to his irrational desire to look at the corpses, and the anger reflects his sense that the desire is bad to have: he appears to attribute the desire to his eyes, when he says look for yourselves you evil things. Because an emotion is thus evaluation dependent, it is distinct from an evaluation-independent appetite and is potentially an ally of reason (440B)as when a persons emotions of anger and shame, and sense of honor are congruent with their judgments of what is genuinely best. But the motives in the spirited part are different from rational motivations because they are not, in their intrinsic nature, aligned with reasoned judgments about what is best overall, but with less fully reflective judgments of value. Thus I might be angry because I value honor, believing it to be an important good, and think that someones criticisms of my conduct have offended my
sense of honor: I am angry without calculation (441C). But on reflection I might judge that there was no such offense because I had done the wrong thing, and that criticizing me for acting badly is no offense to my honor (440B/C): my anger will then refuse to be aroused (440C). Thus the emotions of the spirited part are constituted in part by evaluative judgments, but the judgments need not be considered judgments about what is best overall. To say that the spirited part is sensitive to reasoned judgmentsat least that, when well-educated and formed it can become sois to say that anger and other emotions that depend on judgments of value dissipate when I recognize that the treatment is justified. But that recognition itself requires a trained capacity for practical reasoning and considered reflection on whether my emotional responses are justified in light of a judgment about what is best overall. So we have three sorts of motivation: one is completely cut off from questions about what is good perhaps because it is cut off from thought altogether), a second is concerned about what is good, but is focused on particular goods and not what is best overall, while a thirdthe rational typeis directed to what is best
overall. This is a very abstract difference, and only adequate as a first cut at the differences among partsin particular, it does not capture fully the distinctiveness of the rational part. The point is essential to the leading argument about the Republic, and for our own concerns about justice and community. To see how, we will need to consider the second use to which the notion of parts is put: the account of the motivational harmonies that constitute justice. But before getting there, we need one more piece of essential background. 3. Differential Human Capacities. The final element of background is Platos view about natural differences in human capacities. That he believes there are such differences is clear enough. That those differences are important in the design of a political ideal is also straightforward: the cities constructed in the Republic are all built around three related claims about natural differences: the claim that people have different natural capacities, the claim that those natural differences of capacity differentially suit them for social roles, and the normative thesis that their social-political roles should reflect those differences (roughly, that people should do what they are naturally suited to doing). Plato himself tends to present these three claims without
distinguishing them, as in the following passage: in the natural order of things, each individual should carry out one task, the one for which he was fitted (453B). But it will be important for our purposes to keep them separate. Plato first introduces these claims about natural differences at 370A/B: we arent all born alike, but each of us differs somewhat in their nature from the others, one being suited to one task, another to another. And he says that the principle that each is to perform the task for which he or she is suited is an intimation of the standard that constitutes civic justice: that each of the major types of social role guardian, auxiliary, produceris to be filled by members of the political society whose nature suits them to that role (434B/C). Other passages that state the idea or its implications include 371C-E, 374A, 374B, 375B-E, 407A, 431C-432B, 433A, 433D (where it is extended to children and slaves), 434A, 435B, 443C, 453Bff. What is less clear are the precise claims he wishes to make about natural differences among people or natural suitabilities to social roles, andcorrespondinglythe precise reasons he gives for the normative thesis that social-political roles should mirror what are assumed to be natural differences in capacities and aptitudes. In
part, the uncertainties reflect the fact (just noted) that a very general claim and thesis about highly specific individual natural differences and differential suitabilities to social tasks appears in the construction of the cities, but a more particular claimconsistent with though less demanding than the general thesisabout types of people and types of tasks appears in the account of justice. What I propose to do, then, is to distinguish weaker and stronger versions of the claims about natural differences and suitabilities. To anticipate what will emerge: the weaker interpretations of the idea of natural differences in capacities and natural suitabilities are more plausible, but they support Platos conclusions about people playing the roles for which the are suited only if we make a very strong and demanding set of ethical assumptionsonly if, in particular, we adopt an ethical view that gives no weight to values of individual independence or equality. Correspondingly, we can get away with less demanding ethical assumptions and still derive the conclusions about a just society being one in which people play very different social roles for which they are naturally suited, but only if we rely on very strong claims about natural differences and suitabilities.
i. Two Theses. By way of background, I want to concentrate on the ideas about natural differences and their social implications that play a role in the discussion of justice in Book 4. Plato believes (as he indicates at 443C) that some people are by nature cobblers, and that it is right for them to practice cobblery, others by nature carpenters, and that it is right for them to practice carpentry; and that some people are naturally doctors, and that it is right for them to doctor (454D). But his more fundamental viewin particular, more fundamental to his conception of civic justice as a harmony of civic partsdoes not depend on such assumptions about fine-grained differences between and among individual capacities and social roles. Instead, it depends in the first instance on distinctions among three social functions in the communitythree requirements that need to be fulfilled if the community is to reproduce itself over time, however the society decides to ensure the fulfillment of these functions.14 The function of guardianship is to deliberate about the good of the community and, guided by those deliberations, to regulate the basic laws, practices, and culture of the
14 In distinguishing these as functions, we are not making any
assumption about a division of labor in fulfilling them.
community; the auxiliary function is military, and consists inn the defense of the community against external attack; and the producer function is to make the goods that satisfy the particular needs of the members of the community. Given these distinctions, then, Plato endorses: First, a coarse-grained discrimination of individuals that reflects the Theory of Mind we have just been exploringroughly, the idea is that individuals can be distinguished according to the relative, natural strengths (very roughly stated) of the three parts of their souls. I will call this the Soul-Classes Thesis. And second, the claim that people who naturally belong to different soul-types are, as a result, naturally suited to different social roles. Lets call this the Soul/Function Correspondence Principle, because it asserts a correspondence between types of soul (strength of different parts) and the three social functions. These two theses are stated very roughly and can be interpreted in different ways, depending on how we interpret the strengths of the parts of the soul and how we interpret the idea of a persons being suited to a role. Before noting the differences, however, I want to
underscore that the two theses are already determinate versions of the much more abstract idea that people have different natural talents that suit them for different social contributions. We might accept that idea without endorsing the viewshared by both interpretations of the two thesesthat there are basic human differences with respect to the capacity for practical reasoningwith respect to deliberative capacitiesand therefore differences in capacity to fulfill the tasks that call for such reasoning. ii. Weak/Strong. That said, lets first distinguish two interpretations of the Soul-Classes Thesis: Soul-Classes: people can be divided into groups according to the relative strength of their natural psychological capacities (for simplicity of exposition, we assume throughout Platos conception of parts of the soul, interpreted as above). The first interpretationthe Weak Soul-Classes Thesis asserts a natural gradation of psychological capacities: in particular, some people have greater rational powers than others in that they are naturally better than others at deliberating about the conduct of their individual life and how the community should conduct its collective life, and better at following the results of such deliberations in their conduct; some people have greater spirited powers than others, in that they are naturally
better able to conform their emotions to their beliefs about how best to live. So: Weak Soul-Classes: there is a natural gradation of rational, spirited, and appetitive capacities. The second interpretation is the Strong Soul-Classes Thesis: Strong Soul-Classes: only some people, indeed at most a small number of adults, have even the natural capacity to develop adequately functioning rational powers.15 So the first interpretation of the idea of a difference in the strength of natural psychological capacities points to an interpersonal gradation in such capacities, whereas the second holds that there is a thresholda cutoff pointwith respect to adequate functioning that most people fall below. The theses asserted by the two interpretations are consistent but not independent. Whereas the Strong Thesis implies the Weak, we can accept the gradation affirmed in Weak SCT, while rejecting the idea that most people fall below the threshold: that is, the Weak Thesis does not
15 See Reeves discussion of the unique upper-bound doctrine (UBD),
according to which a persons ruling desires set a unique upper limit to his cognitive development. C.D.C. Reeve, Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Platos Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 174.
imply the Strong Thesis. Borrowing a term from John Rawls, lets say that the property of being a competent rational deliberator is a range property. Rawlss example of a range property is the property like the property of being a point in the interior of a circle.16 Thus, while it is true that some interior points are closer to the circles boundary and some closer to the center, all points inside the boundary are interior, and none are more interior than others (though some are closer to the center than others). Similarly, we might accept that there is a gradation in deliberative capacities, in that some are better able than others either at working out how best to act or at acting on a deliberative judgment about how best to act, while holding that, with few exceptions, people all (or virtually all) have the property of being competent rational deliberators. To be sure, this Strong Thesis is very vaguely stated. Making it more precise would require a specification of the threshold level of adequate functioning as a rational deliberator. Despite this vagueness, it suffices for our purposes. Moreover, the idea is familiar: thus we do not regard some adults as
16 A Theory of Justice, p. XXX.
responsible agents but we think that they lack minimally adequate deliberative capacities. The main point is that, consistent with the Weak Soul-Classes Thesis, we might say that most peopleperhaps the vast majorityhave (or have the capacity to develop) deliberative powers that are above a threshold that enables them to reason acceptably well about either individual or collective conduct, but that within the large class there are differences in capacity: some are better at practical reasoning than others. The Strong Soul-Classes Thesis denies this widespread adequacy, and maintains instead that a wide range of adults fall below the line: Thus, explaining why the condition of the manual worker is despised, Plato says, that in such a person the best part [reason] is naturally weak . . . and cant rule the beasts within him, but can only serve them and learn to flatter them (590C). To be sure, which of these views is plausible depends in part on how we understand the nature of practical reasoning. If we suppose with Plato that practical reasoning is, in the end, indistinguishable from philosophical reasoning about the nature of goodness itself, then the Strong thesis is bound to seem more plausible than if we hold a less demanding picture of such reasoning. Thus suppose we say, paraphrasing a
suggestion by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, that a competent deliberator is someone who is capable of being improved by discussionthat is, capable of participating in a discussion by offering relevant considerations, of following the course of reasoning, and of being moved to change conduct by its results. Then we will be less inclined to endorse the Strong Thesis. We will come back later to Platos own very demanding account of practical reasoning. Corresponding, now, to the two interpretations of the Soul-Classes Thesis, we can distinguish two interpretations of Soul/Function Correspondence. According to the Weak Soul/Function Correspondence Principle, some people are, in virtue of the natural features of their souls, better at fulfilling some tasks than other tasks, and better suited than others to fulfilling particular types of social function: say, better at being a guardian than at being a carpenter and better at being a guardian than others are at being guardians. As a matter of natural endowment, they have, to a higher degree than other members, the capacities needed for performing a particular social function. So, for example, the guardian function is to attend to the good of the whole polity. People who are better at
practical reasoning, then, are better suited for the guardian function than people who are less good at practical reasoning. But, according to given the Weak Social/Function Correspondence Thesis, those who are less good at playing the guardian role are nevertheless capable of doing it at an adequate level: they are over the threshold. The Strong Soul/Function Correspondence Principle, in contrast, states that some peoplemore particularly, most peopleare incapable, by virtue of their natural endowments, of fulfilling the higher social functions.17 In particular, their rational, deliberative powers are below the threshold required either for competent self-regulation or for competent consideration of the good of the whole political society. As a result, they are to be directed by others. Weak SFCP is certainly more plausible, and much of Platos language suggests it. Thus he says at 433A that We stated, and often repeated, if you remember, that everyone must practice one of the occupations in the city for which he is naturally best suited. This passage contains no suggestion that most people are completely unsuited to certain of the functions. And when Plato says
17 Here, I am inclined to agree with Reeve: that the differences in
suitability to social functions basically reflect differences in cognitive capacity. See Philosopher Kings, pp. 172ff.
that a cobbler must remain a cobbler to produce fine work (374B), there is no suggestion that the cobbler couldnt also be a perfectly acceptable farmer, even if he would be less good as a farmer. Moreover, in his criticisms of imitative poetry, Socrates says that the guardians should not be imitative, and that this too follow[s] from our earlier statement that every individual should follow one occupation well, not many, for if he tries to do that, he will touch upon many pursuits and fail in them all, at least to the extent of not attaining repute in any (394E). What is especially striking about this last passage is that it in effect presents the Weak Thesis as an account of how the Strong Thesis is to be understood: failure is understood as failure to do very well, not as failure to perform acceptably well. On the other hand, at a crucial point in the argument for the claim that civic justice is the harmony of the three groups in the cityeach of the soul classes doing what it is naturally suited to doinghe says that when one who is by nature a craftsman or some other kind of moneymaker, is puffed up by wealth, or by the mob, or by his own strength, or by some other such thing, and attempts to enter the warrior class, or one of the soldiers tries to enter the group of counsellors and
guardians, though he is unworthy of it, and these exchange their tools and the public esteem. . . then I think youll agree that these exchanges and this meddling bring the city to ruin (434A/B). Here, the Strong SFCP is suggested, at least as applied to the distinctions between classes, as opposed to the distinctions within them. Plato does not say here that the differences in deliberative power are matters of better and worse, but of capacity and incapacity: if the wrong people are ledby some irrelevant trait, such as wealth or powerto do the job of making political decisions, the polity comes to ruin. If we focus attention on the passage in which Plato provides his most careful discussion of the idea of a natural aptitudea passage appears in the course of his case for women guardianswe find that it does not clearly settle the interpretive question, though it does at least suggest the stronger claims: Is that what you meant by one person being naturally well-suited for something and another being naturally unsuited? [i] That the one learned it easily, the other with difficulty; [ii] that the one, after only a brief period of instruction, was able to find out things for himself, while the other, after much instruction, couldnt even remember the things
he had been taught; [iii] that the body of the one adequately served his thought, while the body of the other opposed his (455B). The first differenceon relative ease of learningsuggests the weaker interpretation of SFCP: both people are capable of learning, but one finds it harder. The second, especially the idea of forgetting what one has learned, suggests the Stronger view: one person is not really able to learn the field, because he cannot remember his past instruction. And the idea that the body opposes the persons thought also suggests the stronger doctrine, though we need to know the precise nature and strength of the opposition. iii. Normative Principles. I have been emphasizing two of Platos ideas: that there are distinct soul classes, and that membership in those classes suits people for different social tasks. But while these claims provide the background for Platos view about justice, they are not the view itself. Platos concern is not simply to assert that there are Soul Classes, or that such classes are differently suited, by nature, to social tasks. Instead, reasoning from these claims, he aims to draw conclusions about the nature of a just society. In particular, he argues that in a just societyand, more generally, a perfectly good societymembers of the
society do the kind of work for which they are naturally suited. Moreover, it is permissible to require such work of individuals: permissible, that is, to direct them to perform the tasks for which they are naturally best suited. As individual justice consists in a harmony of soul parts, civic justice consists in a harmony of soul classes, each doing the work for which it is naturally fit: in particular, and most importantly, one specific group, assumed to have naturally strong deliberative powers, rules. The ability of the commercial, auxiliary, and guardian classes to mind their own business, with each of them performing its own function in the citythis will be justice and will make the city just (434C). But the two interpretations of Soul Classes and Soul/Function Correspondence suggest very different rationales for this conclusion about justice. Consider, then, a set of four ethical principles that Plato plausibly endorses and that together suggest a natural bridge from the weak version of Soul-Classes and Soul/Function Correspondence to the ethical doctrine: from the idea of a gradation of natural capacity and suitability to the account of justice as harmony of soul classes, each doing the work for which it is naturally best suited. Thus, we might say that:
1. Good of Person: The best life for a person is the life in which that person performs the workor the kind of workthat he or she is best able to perform. I emphasize that this first claim is not that it is best, all things considered, for the person to do the task he or she is best able to perform, but that it is best for the person if he or she does that task. This view about the value of a life for the person is stated more or less explicitly at 406D-407A, where Plato imagines a carpenter who falls ill, but refuses to follow a long course of treatment. Hell bid a doctor of this kind good day, and resume his normal routine. If he regains his health, he can get on with his life, and do his work. If he it too weak, he will die, and so escape his troubles. This is the right attitude, because he had a certain function to perform, and his life was worth nothing to him if he couldnt perform it. And the claim the life is worth nothing if he cant do his proper work appears not to depend on the persons own judgment that the work is fitting or that the life is better: To the contrary, It isnt to harm the slave that we say he must be ruled . . . but because it is better for everyone to be ruled by divine reason, preferably within himself and his own, otherwise from without (590C/D). As this last passage
suggests, the best life for a person is the life in which the person does the work that he or she is suited to doing, and does so with an understanding that the work is most suitable; but it is better to be directed to the work that is suitable than it is to be directed by ones own judgment to something that is not most suitable. 2. Good of Community. Add now that it is better for the political community when each person does the work for which that person is best suited (433C): Each of the separate jobs is done well (or as well as can be), and the whole community works for a common objective. Moreover, if we accept the first point, then the good of each member is advanced because each member, by playing a suitable role in the division of labor. Notice that Plato is supposing that what makes my life go best is that I do the very thing that makes our common life go best: This provides one interpretation of the idea that human beings have a social nature, and that there is a basic harmony of individual and social good. By doing what most fully realizes our own powers, our own life goes best and the life of the community goes best. 3. Permissibility of Paternalism. In addition, it is permissibleat least permissible for a government, or a government composed of good deliberatorsto require a
person to do what makes that persons life go best. Thus paternalistic reasons provide acceptable, arguably sufficient, reasons for regulating a persons conduct. 4. Permissibility of Regulation for Common Good. And, finally, it is permissible for the community to require its members to do what makes the life of the community go best. Thus considerations of the good of the community are always overriding. Because Plato supposes, for reasons I just noted, that what makes my life go best is also what makes the largest contribution to the good of the communitynamely doing the thing that I naturally best suited to doinghe doesnt need to consider the relative strength of paternalistic reasons and reasons founded on the general good. Plato nowhere suggests any hesitation about either of these latter claims about what is permissible to require: this is the force of the absence from his view of any recognition of the value of individual independence. He imagines children of producers being taken off to be trained as guardians if they show the right aptitudes (423C), children of guardians being sent off to join the other citizens (423C), and guardians themselves being demoted to the class of producers for failing to show sufficient courage [ref]. He indicates
that each of the other citizens [other than the guardians] is to be directed to what he is naturally suited for (423D). And much of the program of education, censorship, and regulation falls naturally into place, once we attribute these assumptions to him. iv. Some Doubts. But we have some reason for hesitating both about the account of goodness, and about the account of what is permissible. 1. First, we may resist the claim that a persons life goes better when he or she does the naturally suitable work, irrespective of the persons own judgments about how best to live. If my life is given over to what I am best at doingwhat I am better able to do than other things, and what I am better able than others to doit does not follow that my life is better (or that my activities are better for me) than if I do something I am less gifted at doing but which I judge to be a more valuable thing to do. Suppose I regard the work I am best at doing as drudgery, or not a suitable expenditure of energy: or not as desirable as some other work that I am capable of doing, even if I am not so gifted at doing it. Platos view seems to be that it is irrelevant to the goodness of my life that I follow my own judgments about how best to live: or more precisely, he thinks this, that
it is better for me to do what I am best suited to doing than to do something that I am less suited to doing, though if I am doing what I am best suited to doing, there is still value-added if I know it is best and use my own judgments as guide to my conduct. So self-guidance is a good thing, but only if the self grasps the truth about what is best in human conduct. So lets divide the view into two claims: that what is best for a person is to do what the person is naturally best suited to doing (to develop and express his or her capacities), and that there is no value in being guided by ones own judgments about how to live unless those judgments are true. So self-guidance is not constitutive of goodness, but only adds to the goodness of a life, and then only if the guiding judgments are true. If the guiding judgments are true, then there is additional value in being by ones own reason rather than by another persons judgments. If ones judgments are not true, then there is nevertheless value in doing what one is best suited to doing, even if one needs to be made to do it: it is better for everyone to be ruled by divine reason, preferably within himself and his own, otherwise from without (590C/D). But recall that that we are now assuming the Weak Social Classes Thesis, according to
which most people are competent deliberators, who are over a basic threshold of deliberative powers. So why not say this: that for people who are (as most are) over the threshold of deliberative capacity, it is better to be guided by our own judgments in part because we take a greater interest than others in the goodness of our life, and in part becauseas Mill arguedsuch guidance is itself an exercise of our capacities and therefore an important good? So if we are self-guided, our life is better, even if we dont do what we are best suited to doing. 2. Second, Plato supposes that some people are naturally suited to ruling: and this implies that the lives of others go best when they are ruled by those who are naturally best at ruling. But we may resist the idea that our lives go better when we are in this way subordinate, prevented from exercising our deliberative powers simply because they are not as powerful as the powers of others. Recall the assumption that those powers are adequate: That adequacy may suffice to establish a claim to be treated as an equal, thus not to be subordinated. 3. Furthermore, third, we may resist the fundamental teleological assumption underlying (3) and (4): that what
is right (or even permissible) is determined by what produces the best lives. Requiring people to do what makes their lives go betterirrespective of their own convictions about how best to lead their livesappears to be an insulting denial to them of responsibility for their conduct. Thus, I said before (see point 1) we might resist the idea that we can make peoples lives better by requiring them to live according to values and principles that they themselves do not endorse, as we might reject the idea that a person could be saved by being made to fulfill a religious code that she rejects. Here I want to suggest that we might accept that the persons life could be made to go better if the person were guided by judgments from the outside, but still deny that it is permissible to require people to live the best life possible for them because of the connection between selfguidance and the dignity of a human life. Moreover, if we say that self-regulation is importanteither for its contribution to the goodness of a life or because its denial is insultingthen we may want also to resist the idea that is always permissible to regulate for the communitys good. It will not do to respond by asserting that the people in question are incapable of taking responsibility for the conduct of their lives. For the
regulative assumption now is the Weak SFCP. So we are assuming throughout that, though there are differences in deliberative powers, most people are competent at deliberating: that they wont make a wreck of their lives if they regulate their conduct by their own lights. I am not offering an argument here against Platos ethical conception, only pointing out that he needs a very strong set of ethical claims to get him from the Weak Soul/Function principle to the conception of justicein particular, to extend the claim that there are natural differences from the economic to the political sphere. 4. But the passages I noted earlier about making a ruin of the city and about making a ruin of ones own life suggest an alternative line of thought. Perhaps Plato is not making the strong ethical assertions just under contemplationthat lives go best when people do what they are naturally best at doing, that political society goes best when members do what they are best at doing, ormost importantlythat it is permissible to require of people that they do what is best for themselves or the society. Suppose instead that he is simply proposing that people may permissibly be prevented from making a ruin of their individual lives and of the
politys collective life. That is, people should do what they are naturally suited to doing, but natural suitability is now understood as simply a matter of being over an acceptable threshold: say, having deliberative powers sufficient for forming an overall view of the individual and collective good, and acting in light of that conception. So in particular, I am not naturally suited to making political judgments if but only if I am not a competent deliberator: the mere fact that others are better than me at deliberating does not imply that I am naturally suited to be a deliberator. But if I am, in this sense, not naturally suited, then I ought not to guide my own conduct or contribute to the collective guidance of the polity. Here the ethical outlook is much more plausible. Plato no longer requires a sweeping principle of permissible paternalism or any claim about the priority of the common good, or any general denial of the value of individual independence. He could accept a presumption in favor self-guidance, that is overridden when ruin is threatened. But this outlook only supports Platos conception of the perfect city and of justice as harmonious order of soul-classes in which the political function is confined to a small group of people who are,
so to speak, deliberatively capacitated if we are prepared to accept the Strong SFCPonly, that is, if we think that lots of adults are naturally incapable of making anything but a mess of their own lives, and anything but a mess of their collective life, if they are permitted to have a hand in making decisions about how to ensure its success. If we interpret aptitude for a task in terms of having a capacity for a minimally competent performance of it, then the principle that members are to do their own worktasks for which they have a natural aptitudewill not yield a small guardian class and restrictive regulations. In short, if we think that most people are simply incompetent to make anything but a mess of their individual or collective lives, then we can get to Platos conclusions without making strong assumptions about the appropriateness of requiring people to do what they are best at doing and what they can do to make the greatest contribution to the political society: without norms of compulsory self-realization and contribution to the communitys good. In contrast, if we think they are competent, then we get Platos conclusion only if we make strong assumptions about the goodness of lives and about the permissibility of requiring people to do what is
best. But those assumptions simply give no weight to values of liberty and equality. 4. Justice and Psychic Harmony. I said earlier that the Republic Plato identifies the just person with the person whose soul parts are in harmony, each part doing its own work. Restating the idea in terms of distinct motives rather than separate parts of the soul, the claim is that the just person is the person whose different kinds of motives are in harmony, properly ordered. In particular, reason rules, in that the person has a conception of the good, a view about the proper ends of his/her life; the spirited part supports reason, by being angry at what is bad overall, honored by what is on the whole good, etc.; and the appetites do not conflict with the rule of reason. But this very formal account of psychic harmony, in particular of the rule of reason as coherence of motives, does not fully capture Platos conception, nor could it and still do the work for which he needs the notion of psychic harmony. To see why, recall the principal aim of the Republic, as a work of moral thought. Glaucon claims in Book 2 that justice is conventional, that it consists in complying with mutually beneficial rules that require, for example, promise keeping and security of property; as
a result, justice is it not itself choiceworthy, but followed only from weakness, and does not contribute to happiness. Plato instead identifies justice with psychic harmony, and then argues that justice, thus understoodas inner, motivational harmony rather than external compliance with mutually beneficial rulesis choiceworthy and contributes to happiness. But Glaucon could respond by charging that Socrates has changed the topic. Glaucon wanted to be shown how justice is choiceworthy and contributes to happiness; his concern was not about psychic harmony. And when he put the challenge to Socrates, he was supposing that justice, as conventionally understood, involves acting in ways that benefit others. The puzzle was to understand how acting in ways that benefit others could be good for the person who so acts. Showing that psychic harmony is good for the person who has it is of uncertain interest in addressing that issue. So Plato has only engaged his concern if Plato can show that psychic harmony leads to conduct that is advantageous to others: if there is some connection between what justice truly is, and what justice is conventionally understood to be. To appreciate the force of the point, keep in mind that psychic harmony is meant as an alternative answer
to Glaucons conventionalist answer to the question: what is justice? Socrates does not present psychic harmony as a causally necessary condition for being just. Nor does he think that a person is just if and only if the person does what he/she is naturally suited to doing. Rather, his thesis is that justice (for a person) is psychic harmony: such inner harmony rather than external conduct harmony is what justice consists in. Indeed, even as a property of conduct, justice does not consist in compliance with mutually beneficial conventions. Thus a persons actions are just iff they foster the persons psychic harmony (444C-E), not because they comply with rules that advance the interests of others. Justice does not lie in a man's external actions, but in the way he acts within himself. . . . He does not allow each part of himself to perform the work of another, or the sections of the soul to meddle with one another. [H]e is master of himself" (443D). Or again, concerning justice as a property of actions: he thinks the just and beautiful action . . . to be that which preserves the inner harmony and indeed helps to achieve it" (443E). How does this concern about the state of ones soul engage the doubts that Thrasymachus, and others raise about justicedoubts
that reflect the contribution justice is assumed to make to the advantage of others? To show that it does engage the skepticism about justice advanced by Thrasymachus and restated by Glaucon, we need, as Plato puts it, to test the hypothesis that justice is psychic harmony against common arguments (442E-443B). Thus recall the common opinions reviewed in Book 1. It is commonly thought that the just person (1) returns what belongs to others, (2) does not steal, rob temples, betray anyone, (3) keeps agreements and oaths, (4) refrains from adultery, (5) cares for his/her parents, and (6) is pious (compare 589A ff., where the same examples are explored again, this time with the true account of justice in place). Pursuing this test, Plato argues that the just personnow defined as someone with the proper ordering of the soul, not as someone with a disposition to comply with mutually beneficial rules would characteristically behave in these conventionally just ways, although being just does not consist in behaving in these ways. Again, justice is not simply a matter of conforming to these external rules (443A/B), which we know from the Book 1 critique of the thesis that justice is returning what belongs to others, are not always appropriate to follow (443A-B). Rather, the just
personnow meaning the psychically harmonious person behaves in these ways because the person is just, that is, because of an internal power that leads them to comply with the conventions, and not because of a fear of punishment, or public dishonor, or anything that depends on the opinions of others. So when common opinion fixes on the behavior as constituting justicewhen it defines justice as compliance with mutually beneficial conventionsit is focusing merely on the appearance of justiceon a potentially misleading external manifestation of a persons justicenot its reality. True justice is the power within a person that explains the appearance that common opinion focuses on. So Plato only has a response to Thrasymachus and Glaucon if he can show that the psychically harmonious person would as a general matter comply with the system of mutually advantageous conventions. And he does make the argument connecting inner justice with outer compliance. But given what has been said about true justicemotivational harmony under the rule of reasonwhy suppose that it is at all plausible? To be psychically harmonious is to have reason in the ruling position. But according to the account thus far, reason rules just in case a person has a conception of what is best overall,
and acts and desires according to that conception. But suppose someone has a psychically harmonious life organized around a systematic pursuit of honor or money (the timocratic and oligarchic personalities of Book 8). Such persons are different from disorderly, democratic types, who move from pleasure to pleasure, without any inner plan or coherence. But if all that the rule of reason implies is that a persons life is ordered around a coherent set of aims, then it is not at all clear why we should expect the psychically harmonious person to conform to the conventional norms: after all, the systematic pursuit of honor or money might lead to a regular violation of such norms. And if they do, then we lack any reason for identifying justice with psychic harmony. I have just suggested that a person might at least seem to have psychic harmony while pursuing goals set by the appetitive or spirited partsgoals of money or honor. To which you might respond: But in such a person reason does not truly rule; these are lives in which appetite or emotion rules, for in these cases the aims that reason embraces in organizing a life come from the appetites or emotions. And that is Platos view. But the point of the
examples is to raise a question about just what it is for reason to rule. What the examples reveal is that we have three sensesprogressively more stringentin which reason might be said to rule in the soul and in our lives. Lets call them, in turn, the instrumental sense, the ordering sense, and the authoritative source sense. First, then, the instrumental sense. Thus the rule of reason might mean that the person has a coherent system of ends, and he or she effectively pursues that system, whatever the content of the ends: the ends might be given by the appetites or the spirited part, while reason works out a way to achieve those ends. Second, the ordering sense. Thus, it might be that reason rules only if the coherent system of ends provides a suitable balancing of the different aims of a person (or of a group), not giving exclusive weight to aims of a particular kind. Using the soul-parts idea, it might be said that reason rules only if there is a proper balance of the aims issuing from the three parts, appetitive, spirited, and rational. This would limit the range of possible systems of ends that reason could rely on to those that, as a substantive matter, can plausibly be said to incorporate the good of each part of a whole (either the whole person, or the
whole political society). Or, finally, the authoritative source sense: it might be that reason only rules when aims associated with reason itselfsay, the aim of exercising reasoning powersplay a central, perhaps authoritative role in a persons life. This condition would further limit systems of ends, by in effect requiring that a suitable balancean acceptable conception of the good of the whole assigns an authoritative role to reason itselfsay, to its proper exercise. Plato plainly holds this last view: for reason to rule, a persons most fundamental aims must be those of reason itself. Put otherwise, it not enough that the life is arranged by reason; it must also be arranged around reason. One of the aims of Books 5-7, the central books of the Republic, is to give content to that notion: to indicate what the aims of reason are.18 To see the force of that discussion, consider its role in Platos subsequent account of the aristocratic, timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, and tyrannical persons. The first, aristocratic person is the true philosopher,
18 Nothing in the argument up through Book 4 prepares us for the notion
that reason has its own ends. So the Book 4 defense of the thesis that the PH person will conform to the conventions is not very persuasive. Thus, it is reviewed again at 589ff., after Plato has a fuller account
someone who values truth and contemplation of the truth above all else (474Bff.)a lover of wisdom. The timocratic person values and loves honor; the oligarch values and loves money; the democratic person devotes his/her life to satisfying whatever appetites happen to arisewhether they be necessary or unnecessarywhile the tyrannical person is driven by an constantly beset by lust, a lawless kind of unnecessary appetite (571A-573D). It is clear enough that the democratic and tyrannical persons lack psychic harmony, in that they are beset by appetites: reason does not rule even in the more minimal ways. But what about the timocratic and oligarchic types: why say that they lack psychic harmony? After all, they do have coherent aims and organize their lives around those aims. Now it is suggested in respect of the timocratic man (at 549B) and the oligarchic man (554C-D) that they are conflicted, in particular that they suffer conflicts between their values and their appetites, conflicts between their conception of what is best and their base desires. But this is not, I think, the main consideration that Socrates raises against saying that they have inner harmony. Instead, the happiness of these lives is limited not because of inner
of the rule of reason at his disposal.
conflicts, but because they do not live lives organized around reason: philosophical lives. That is, they fail at psychic harmony because reason does not really rule in them; reason does not really rule because anyone who properly reflected about the conduct of life, in light of the variety of human motivations, would recognize that they ought to organize their lives around reason, and not around appetites or honor. Though timocrats and oligarchs each have a conception of what is best, and live their lives according to that conceptionto that extent, they are ruled by reasonthey have the wrong conception of how to live and the falsity of their conception reflects the fact they have not properly reasoned about the ends of life. For Plato, unlike Hobbes, it is possible to reason about the ends of lifenot just about the best means for achieving endsand if someone does reason about these ends they will reject the ends suggested by appetite and emotion in favor of a life organized around the pursuit and love of wisdom, i.e. the philosophical life. Thus, the psychically harmonious person (the truly just person) is also the philosopher. So psychic harmony is not simply an absence of inner tension, it is a matter of having the proper relationship between parts, which relationship includes the rule of reason. Moreover, given the power of
reason to grasp the correct ends of life, a person in whom reason rules is the person who is devoted to the exercise of reason. To understand why Plato thinks that there is a connection between proper reasoning about conduct and the embrace of particular ends of conduct, consider first how he understands the proper life. Thus he distinguishes the true philosopherthe lover of wisdomfrom the lover of spectacles (475D). Sight-lovers are attracted to the many beautiful things or just things, things that are between not-being and being purely and simply (479D). These things are the objects of imagination and opinionthe lower parts of the divided line (509D-511E)and not of knowledge; and are (1) sometimes beautiful and sometimes not (Unstable) [479A]; (2) in some respects beautiful, and in some not (Impure) [523E]; and (3) may appear beautiful without really being beautiful (Untrue). The philosopher, by contrast, loves the sight of the truth: Not the many beautiful or just things, which are beautiful or just in some respects but not in others, but beauty or justice itself. To consider the example we have already explored, and that come in for attention in Book 1: the philosophers attention is drawn to the internal harmony that justice truly is, and not to such properties
as returning what belongs to a person or truthtelling which are sometimes just and sometimes not, depending on circumstances. The key point here is that the formsthe objects of thought and knowledge, rather than imagination and opinionare (1) stable, i.e. always the same; (2) purely and simply what they are, i.e. unqualifiedly just or beautiful, i.e. pure; and (3) do not appear other than what they are, i.e. they are true. So a life organized around reason is a life devoted to the forms, i.e. to things that are stable, pure, and true, and not to things that are unstable, impure, and untrue. And it is a life in which one's actions aim to express the knowledge of the stable, pure, and unchanging. So now we have two ways to understand the idea that reason rules. Using the terms previously introduced, we have, first, the ordering sense, according to which the life is organized by reason, and reason sets the terms of the life; and second, the authoritative source sense, according to which reason rules if and only if the life is devoted to reasoning about stable, pure, and true things. And we want to know what the connection is: more particularly, why does the rule of reason in the ordering sense of a life organized by reason lead to its rule in
the second senseto a life organized around the purest exercise of reason? The answer, suggested by the cave-image of Book 7, is founded on a model of reasoning about ends, and not simply about the means for achieving our ends. The idea is that insofar as we are rational, we have a desire to pursue what is genuinely best on the whole, even if we are not certain about what is best. That is, the rational desire is a desire for what we think is best, but only because we think that it is truly best. And so the desire is in part a desire to understand what is truly best with a view to doing thatit is in part a desire to know that we have the correct grasp of what is best. When it comes to things which are good, on the other hand, no one has ever yet been satisfied with the appearance. They want things that really are good; they all treat the appearance of it with contempt (505D). Now I think that Platos conception of the ascent of reason in its reflection on the true good is something like this: We begin with two things, a particular conception about what is the best lifefor example, a life devoted to pleasure, or honor, or financial success and also a more abstract concept of goodnessof the sorts of properties that make one thing better than another. In
particular Plato supposes that things are good to the extent that they are stable, pure, and true. A good life, for example, is a life that is not subject to the contingencies of fortune and circumstance: it goodness cannot come and go, with changes of fortune and circumstance. Thus, we can test our view about what is bestmoney or honor or pleasureby considering whether it is maximally stable, pure, and true. Through this process of testing we arrive at the view that the maximally stable, etc. things are the forms and the maximally stable activitythe one that is least dependent on fortune and circumstanceis the study of the forms. This process of assessing our current understandings in light of a very abstract specification of what is good is the process of reasoning about ends. And the upshot of that process is that the best life is the philosophical lifea life that is independent of the contingencies of fortune and circumstance. And so the life in which reason fully rules, i.e. the psychically harmonious life, is the philosophical life. Finally, with this conception of psychic harmony and the rule of reason, we can see why it is plausible to think that the psychically harmonious person will act in conformity with common opinions about right conduct, and
why therefore Plato has an answer to Glauconwhy he has not simply changed the topic. There are two reasons. First, given the values of psychically harmonious persons, they will generally not violate conventional norms because they simply do not value what they might achieve through such violation (589Eff.): they care about knowledge and beauty, not about money and public acclaim. Second, and crucially, Plato thinks that lovers of wisdom understand the nature of justiceboth polis and individual. And since they understand that the Republics argument, they understand that justice is objectively goodnot simply good for them, but good. And because they both understand that justice is good and desire what is good, they desire to achieve justice not only in their own soul but in the souls of others and in the city. Because they have this desire, they take an interest in the true good of others, and therefore conform to the common opinion of the just man as someone who is concerned about the well-being of others. They are concerned to realize what is genuinely good, in their own lives and in the lives of others. To be sure, they would rather philosophize than rule: which is a good thing because the most dangerous rulers are those who want power. But they will be willing to rule since they are
just and recognize that by ruling they contribute to the justice of the city. So if the PH person is the lover of wisdom, and lovers of wisdom know and love what is good, then they will likely conform to the common opinions about justice. And that supports the hypothesis that justice is PH.
4. Civic Unity
I want now to return to the problem from which we started: the value that, as Aristotle emphasizes, Plato attaches to civic unity. We want to see whether, given the background views about circumstances, mind, and natural inequality, we are in a better position to understand the conception of community, the value Plato attaches to it, and whether it is possible to preserve certain elements of that conception, even if we think that Platos own articulation of it is inattentive to other political valuesin particular, values of equality and liberty.
Civic Unity and Civic Goodness. To begin with, then, consider the striking passage that ends the construction of the city, and initiates the search for justice in it: I think our city, if indeed it has been correctly
founded, is completely good (427E). It emerges immediately that the conditionalif it has been correctly foundedis not intended as a serious qualification. The operative assumption is that the city has been correctly founded, so the argument now takes its perfect goodness as central premise, aims to specify its good-making properties, and to identify one such property with justice. In part, the reasoning proceeds as follows: the city is perfectly good, and must therefore have all the virtues. Among its virtues is that each group in the polity does its own work; moreover, this feature bears substantial affinity to the common conception of justice as respecting what belongs to othersacknowledging what is properly theirs, and refraining from taking what belongs to them. So we can think of our common notion of justiceaccording to which that justice is refraining from taking what belongs to others (by not stealing, by returning what one has borrowed, and by keeping agreements)as reflecting an imperfect grasping justice properly conceivedthat is, civic harmony. But what about the central premise itself: that the city is perfectly good? Consider three passages that offer suggestions about why it is perfectly good. First, Plato tells us that only the city constructed in the
Republic is genuinely a city (422E): others are too divided, typically between rich and poor, with their conflicting interests and values. The ideal polity is genuinely a city because it is naturally one, not many, and it is so in part because each member contributes according to natural suitability. Later (462A), we are told that the greatest evil for a city is what tears it apart and makes it many instead of one. And in the Book 8 discussion of different regimes, we are told that one of the central flaws of an oligarchy is that it is of necessity not one city but two, one of the poor and the other of the rich, living in the same place and always plotting against each other (551D). Thus, the city has been constructed to be highly unified, because its perfection consists in its unity. Moreover, the idea that unity is a fundamental good is not confined to the polity: it is a personal ideal, too, and the just person from a plurality becomes a unity (443D). But why should we think that unity constitutes goodness? Indeed putting aside the very strong thesis about the connection between unity and goodness, why should we think that unity is an especially good thing at allnever mind the condition that makes for goodness?
These questions have force in part because we are inclined to suppose that unity could be bad, because a political society could be highly unified around evil aims. Is there any greater good [for city], Socrates asks, than that which binds it together and makes it one? (462A/B) To which we might answer: Yes, a political city that ensures fair treatment for its members and that does not impose its will on outsiders is better than a highly unified political society, with ambitions of conquest. Unity seems at most necessary, but hardly sufficient for goodness, and potentially a source of bad.
Unity as a Complex Property. But perhaps these concerns about the connections between unity and goodness reflect a failure properly to understand the notion of unity. They arise most naturally if we think of unity as a matter of commonality of purpose. But that is too simple an understanding. I said at the outset that we might think of civic unity as having a number of different components: unity of evaluative understanding, attachment, emotion, feeling, circumstance, and objective. Thus, the ideal city exhibits unity of evaluative understanding, in that the philosopher-rulers share knowledge of what is best and because guardians and
non-guardians alike believe what the guardians know, namely that guardian rule is for the best; unity of attachment, because each person does his/her own work, and because doing ones own is good for the person who does it; unity of feeling, because the guardians share feelings of pleasure and pain; and unity of objective because each, in doing his/her own, contributes optimally to the good of the political society.19 If this characterization of unity is right, then unity turns out to be a rather complex propertyperhaps an ordered combination of the ten components noted at the outsetand not simply a matter of shared purpose among members. And perhaps this complexity helps to explain how unity could be so closely connected to goodness. Thus, notice in particular that a political society that is unified in the ten ways I have sketched has, by virtue of that unity, the properties that Plato identifies as the civic virtues of wisdom, moderation, and justice. Thus the polity is moderate in virtue of the shared belief by all members that the guardians should rule (see above, pp. 5-6, property 2), and wise in virtue of the guardians shared knowledge about what is best (above, p. 5, property 1). So the virtuesfor example, moderation,
19 In treating the condition of each doing the work for which he/she has
wisdom, and justiceare identical with (that is, are) the properties that are constitutive of the citys unity; they are not simply casual contributors to a unity defined independently from them. But if the virtues are constituents of unity, and if unity is what makes goodness, then the virtues themselves are components of the goodness of the city. Indeed, the goodness of the city is the ordered combination of these virtues.20 Thus civic unity consists in part in being ruled by guardians with knowledge about the good of the whole (428C); but this condition is precisely the virtue of civic wisdom (428E/429A). In part, civic unity consists in the shared belief that the guardians should rule: this condition is identical with the virtue of civic moderation, this agreement between the naturally worse and naturally better as to which of the two is to rule both in the city and in each one (432A). In part, it consist in each of the parts doing its own work, where that is understood as including the rule of the deliberatively capacitated: and that implies that a unified city has the property that Plato will identify with civic justice (434C).
a natural aptitude as part of unity, I follow 423D. 20 Thus the claim that goodness is more important than justice and the other virtues. See 504D-505A.
When we ask, then, why the strong ties of civic community or unity of the city is what makes it good, what we want to know is why a political society that has those ten elements of unity, and therefore the various properties that Plato will argue to be virtues, is good. We are not simply asking why a political society with no internal divisions is good: the absence of internal divisions is necessary but insufficient for unity.21 Thus consider moderation: this is not simply agreement about who is to rule, but agreement that the naturally better are to rule. Or justice: this is not simply a matter of some common objective or other, but each group doing the work for which it is best suited.
Two False Starts: Stability and Capacity. Thus unity is a rather complex condition, and among its constituents are the various properties that Plato identifies as civic virtues. These observations help to refocus the original question: why is unity so good? Why is the possession of the properties that Plato identifies as virtues so important for the polity? In the first place, they
21 If unity were identified with the absence of internal divisions, then
the identification of goodness with unity would identify goodness with a natural property (absence of internal division). But that identification would conflict with Platos anti-reductivism, and in particular with the thesis that goodness is not being, but superior to it in rank and
suggest that two natural reasons for thinking that unity is a fundamental good will not suffice. It might first be thought that civic unity is good because such unity contributes to political stability. Thus, it might be said that if rulers and ruled agree about who is to rule and if the rulers agree among themselves about what is to be donethat if the city is in these ways one instead of manyit will be less likely to degenerate into civic conflict and so last longer. To be sure, political consensus does partly constitute civic unity, particularly the consensus within the ruling group. And such consensus does have the aforementioned advantage: it is a simple principle that the cause of change in any government is to be found in the ruling group itself, whenever discord breaks out in this very group. While it remains of one mind, even if it be quite small, it cannot be removed (545C-D). And when Plato says that the greatest evil for a city is what tears it apart and makes it many instead of one (462A/B), he is thinking in part of the sheer preservation of the city and the avoidance of civil conflict. Moreover, he tells us that very great harm is done to a city when members of different soul classes exchange their positions: indeed,
power (509B).
such exchanges bring the city to ruin (434B). Now civic justice consists in the non-exchange of positions by the different soul classes (434C). And justice, thus understood, is a constituent of civic unity (423D). So justice, as one of the components of unity, is an important good in part because it is needed to preserve the city, to avoid the ruin that follows on having the wrong groups assigned to tasksin particular, the ruin that comes from political rule not be confined to competent deliberators. But the contribution of unity to the sheer preservation of the city cannot be the whole story of the goodness of unity, for at least two reasons. First, suppose this were the whole picture: that unity were good solely because of its contribution to preservation. Then unity and all its constituentsfor example, justicewould be instrumental goods, of value only for their consequences (in particular, for the consequence of helping to preserve the community over time). But Plato aims to show that justice and the other constituents of unity are good both in themselves and for their consequences (see 357E-358A). So Plato cant be saying that civic justice, for example, is good solely because
the polity is more likely to last when different groups do the things for which they are naturally suited. Second, putting to the side the details of Platos own view, unless a city is good, how could the fact of its being stableits preservation over time, as a result of internal mechanisms that help to keep it from disintegratingbe of such fundamental value? If unity is in itself an important good, then the fact that unity also makes the community stable will be an additional good: It will be good in part because it helps to preserve something that is good, viz. a unified community. But if unity were not good otherwise than for its contribution to stability, then its contribution to stability would not suffice to make it good. After all, it might contribute to the stability of an evil political community. There is, of course, some trouble in navigating these waters because of Platos views about goodness and existence. Plato believes that civic corruptiondeparture from goodnessis destabilizing, so he does not think that an unjust, evil political community could be stable: It is difficult therefore to be asking about whether stability in an evil community is good. Still, the answer seems clear enough: Plato does not think that stability
goes with unity, goodness, and justice because stability is the basic good, and therefore a maximally stable political community is perfectly good. He thinks that right makes might, not that might makes right: you should say that nor only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the good, but their being is also do to it, although the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power (509B). Similar problems undercut the force of a second answer to our question about why unity is good: that unity is a fundamental good because a unified city is better able to achieve its aims than a divided city. Here unity is a source of civic power or political capacity, rather than sheer stability. To be sure, Plato does think that internal division diminishes the capacity of a community to achieve its aims, whatever those aims may be. Justice, recall, is one aspect of unity, and Socrates rejects Thrasymachuss claim that injustice is a source of strength or civic capacity; he argues that injustice within a community limits the capacity of a city, an army, a band of robbers or thieves, or any other tribe with a common unjust purpose to achieve that purpose (351C). Injustice generates civil wars, and that makes the group or city incapable of achieving anything as a
unit (352A). Later, too, he argues that lack of unity is a considerable flaw of oligarchy (551D). Oligarchies are not really one city, but two, one of the poor and the other of the rich, living in the same place and always plotting against each other (551D). And this mutual suspicion and hostility substantially reduces the military strength of oligarchic regimes: they are probably unable to fight a war, because they would be compelled either to arm the people and use them, and be more afraid of them than of the enemy, or, if they did not do so, they would indeed be oligarchs, being so few, in the actual fighting (551D/E). But for two reasons precisely paralleling those I just considered in the case of stability, it cannot be true that unity is good because it is empowering and disunity is bad because it is incapacitating. If that were the whole story, then unityand by extension the conditions that constitute itwould be merely instrumentally good, and would be good even if it contributed to bad purposes.
Why Unity is Good. What then does explain the goodness of civic unity? I think there are at least three explanations, corresponding to three of the properties
that are constituents of the complex ideal of civic unitythe properties that Plato labels justice, moderation, and wisdom. First, one of the properties that constitutes civic unitythat makes the political society a communityis that each group does the kind of work for which it is best suited, and does not meddle in the proper work of others. Plato identifies this property with civic justice, because there is some connection between the intuitive idea of justice as refraining from taking what belongs to others, and the philosophical idea of justice as an arrangement in which each component does its own proper work. But lets not worry now about the plausibility of the thesis that justice consists in civic harmony. Consider instead the claim, equally Platonic, that doing the work for which one is naturally best suited is good for the person who does that work. It follows from the conjunction of this claim and the claim that unity consists in part in each group doing the work for which it is best suited, that a political society has unity in part because it contributes to the good of its members (or at least of each of the groups it comprises): it treats each as a member in the substantive sense that it advances the good of each. But if civic unity consists
in part in the fact that the whole contributes to the good of the members of the polity, then we have a notimplausible reason for thinking that civic unity is an important good. In particular, unity is good because the lives of the members are better in the unified polity than in the non-unified polity. To see the force of the point, we should distinguish three elements of Platos view about the connection between justice, unity, and goodness. First, that one good-making feature of a political society is that it contributes to the good of its members; second, that what is good for a person is a life in which the person realizes his/her capacities; third, that peoples capacities suit them for very different positions in the social and political division of laboreither because there are strong soul classes, or because there are weak soul classes but being suitable is understood as being best suited. We may find the first, or the first and the second, plausible, even if we are strongly inclined to reject the thirdparticularly the point about a naturally-founded political division of labor. But it is the third that drives an especially sharp wedge between the value of community and the values of liberty and equality: it is the third that leads to the conclusion
that we only have civic unity when we have political inequality. So if we do reject the third element, then we canthus farjoin with Plato in embracing civic unity as an important value, while at the same time disagreeing with him about equality and liberty. We would say that a political society is good when all its members engage in activities that realize their capacities: because such self-realization is good for the members, the political society that fosters it is good. A second aspect of civic unity is a shared belief among the different soul classes about who is to rule and who is to be ruled: Plato identifies this condition in which all sing the same tune as the property of civic moderation (432A/B). To see its importance, we need to distinguish this property of agreement in belief about the form of political order from the condition that those who are suited to ruling rule, and those who are suited to being ruled are ruled. We are concerned now with the agreement in belief, and not with the objective suitability of rulers and ruled to their respective positions. Here, again, we might usefully distinguish three elements of the agreement in belief whose contribution to civic unity and goodness is under consideration. First,
members agree about the right way to organize their political life; second, they agree that the right way must contribute to the good of all members; third, they agree that those who are especially suited to ruling should rule. And, once more, we may find the first two elements of this aspect of civic unity compelling, while we reject the third. When people agree that the political society is to work for the good of each member, they acknowledge in the political culture the importance of the lives of membersthat the polity, as a common venture requiring the cooperative efforts of all, is not to disregard the good of any of the people who constitute it. Such public acknowledgment of the importance of the contribution to the good of each member is itself arguably an important good: beyond the goodness that consists in the societys actually advancing the good of the members, there is the good of its being publicly acknowledged that it ought to so work. We ought not to reject this claim as such because Platos articulation of it embraces an account of the human good that we find objectionable. To be sure, an important residual issue remains: We might think that agreement on an ideal of justice of the kind that is required for the virtue of moderation is
incompatible with the value of libertyin particular, that political consensus will be disrupted by free expression. Even if we drop the inegalitarian aspects of Platos conception of political community, then, we need still to determine whether hes right about excluding the poets. And nothing that I have said engages this issue. Suffice to say now that nothing intrinsic to the idea of political agreement requires such exclusion. The third property that forms civic unity is that the ruling guardians have genuine knowledge of what is best for the city as a whole (428D)the property of civic wisdom. We are to say, that is, that the city is wise just in case those who rule have genuine knowledge (not merely true belief) about what is best for the city as a whole. Once more, the thought is that wisdom makes the political society better. Lets again separate out the different elements joined together in this view of civic wisdom: first, the city is governed on the basis of a conception of the civic good (a view that takes in the good of the members) that those who rule (whether few or many) not only endorse but are capable of backing with reasons; second, reason converges to a single, true account of the good; and third, the Strong Soul Classes thesis: that only some members (indeed a small number
428E) are capable of the sustained exercise of practical reason needed to grasp the truth about what is good. Notice that we can drop the second and third conditionswhich produce a sharp conflict between community, equality, and libertyand still have a plausible candidate for a unity-making property that is good-making. Thus, consider the difference between two political societies: the first operates for the common good and has a shared understanding of the common good (that is, it has the thin versions of the first two features that constitute civic unity) but the members cannot give a reasoned justification for the conception; in the second, they can give such a justification. So the second also has a thin version of the property of civic wisdom. In the second, then, the shared understanding is more likely to last through changes of circumstance, and that means that the political society itself is more likely to lastto exhibit, in a stable way, the first two properties.22 In short, civic unity is a very great good because it is a complex whole comprising properties that make for civic goodness. Stating the thin versions of those
22 See Republic 484B-D, which explains why philosophers should rule, in
part by reference to the importance of guarding what is valuable, once it is established.
constituent properties: one requires that the city operate for the common good, where this is understood as comprising the good of all the members; another, that the members agree that the polity is to work for the common good; and a third, that they are able to support their conception of the common good and the associated agreement with reasons. Plato offers a more particular, thicker interpretation of each of these conditions: that interpretation draws on his conception of soul parts, soul classes, and the correspondence between classes and function. And this interpretation leads, in turn, to a substantive view of community with no place for values of equality and liberty. I suggest that we can give an abstract reinterpretation of the conditions that captures their attractions and diminishes the conflict between civic unity and other basic political values.

Cohen Gerald

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What Is To Be Common?

1. The Problem of Civic Unity

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1 Aristotle, Politics, 1260b28. 2 Aristotle, Politics 1263b30-1.

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3 Aristotle, Politics 1261a18.

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4 For example, the argument for eliminating separate families in the

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5 Plato thinks that it is quite generally true that a persons life is

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better life may require control imposed from without.

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6 See Miles Burnyeat, Culture and Society in Platos Republic, Tanner

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7 Burnyeat, Lecture 2, pp. 1-2.

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8 For a discussion of contemporary debate about democracy, and

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2. Moral and Political Thought in the Republic

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9 On this, see Aristotle, Politics 1291a-b, and the discussion in T. H.

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11 Emile, trans. Allan Bloom, p. 40.

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12 It might be argued that I making too much of the extension of the

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make constant reference to it.

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