Justice and the Yellow Pages Take 2 E.P. Brandon Platos Republic is a notoriously complex work.

. One can read it as a summation of middle-period Platonism, if one is inclined to developmental views of the Platonic corpus, or if not a summation, the indication of a direction in which to seek (Aune, 1997, has recently said, it is important to realize that what the Republic depicts is a quest rather than a finished result). It is certainly a repository of many characteristic doctrines traditionally associated with Platos name: the ontological priority of Forms, philosopher kings (and queens) ruling a tripartite society that mirrors the three parts of the human psyche, and ruling it with an iron hand, excluding most of the artists Platos contemporaries admired. But while the overall plot may be reasonably clear an account of the nature of justice or human goodness and the ramifications of that account for how human society should be organised the detailed structure of the book still raises difficult questions, one of which concerns the relations between its first book and the rest. The first book begins with a brief dialogue between Socrates (I shall use that name henceforth for the character in the dialogue, any resemblance to persons living or dead being irrelevant to my present concerns) and Cephalus, a wealthy old man in whose house the dialogue is set. When Cephalus withdraws to go about his religious business, Polemarchus takes up the debate a fairly brief interlude that is interrupted by Thrasymachus, whose advocacy of a cynical view of justice as a matter of power politics is the most notable topic of the first book. Many readers have been struck by the apparently different way Socrates conducts himself in these dialogues when compared with what happens from book 2 onwards, where we have for the most part a leisurely exposition of positive doctrine. The Socrates of book 1, on the other hand, is constantly engaged in destructive argumentation, often apparently at odds with the view that will ultimately be expounded. The difference has led some scholars to think that Plato simply patched together an earlier Socratic elenchtic dialogue as a kind of introduction to his new substantive piece. Whatever one thinks of that idea, there certainly is a question about how to understand what is going on in book 1. I am going to concentrate on one very minor episode which in fact takes up most of the dialogue between Socrates and Polemarchus. To acknowledge the first philosophical text I ever read, I shall use Lees Penguin translation. The full argument is this: Well then, said I [Socrates], as heir to this argument, tell me, what is this saying of Simonides that you think tells us the truth about doing right? That it is right to give every man his due, he [Polemarchus] replied; in that, I think, he puts the matter fairly enough. .. It looks, said I, as if Simonides was talking about what is right with a poets ambiguity. For it appears that he meant that it is right to give everyone what is appropriate to him, but he called this his due. Of course. Yes, but look here, I said, suppose someone asked him How then does medicine get its name, Simonides? What does it supply that is due and appropriate and to whom? How do you suppose he would reply? Obviously that it is the science that supplies the body with remedies and with

food and drink. And if he were asked the same question about cookery? That it supplies the flavour to our food. Then what about justice? What does it supply? If we are to be consistent, Socrates, it must be the ability to do good and evil to ones friends and enemies. So Simonides says that justice is to benefit ones friends and harm ones enemies? I think so. Who then is best able to benefit his friends and harm his enemies in matters of health? A doctor. And on a risky sea voyage? A navigator. And what about the just man? When and where will he be best able to help his friends and harm his enemies? In war: he will fight against his enemies and for his friends. Good. Yet people who are healthy have no use for a physician, have they, Polemarchus? True. Nor those that stay on land of a navigator? No. Do you then maintain that those who are not at war have no use for a just man? Certainly not. So justice is useful in peacetime? It is. So too is agriculture, for producing crops; and shoe-making for producing shoes. Yes. Well then, what is the use of justice in peacetime, and what do we get out of it? Its useful in business. And by that you mean some form of transaction between people? Yes. Well, if our transaction is a game of chess, is a just man a good and useful partner, or a chess players? A chess player. And if its a matter of bricks and mortar, is the just man a better and more useful partner than a bricklayer? No. Well, for what kind of transaction is the just man a better partner than the bricklayer? Where does he excel the musician as the musician excels him in music? Where money is involved, I suppose. Except perhaps, said I, when its a question of buying or selling; if, for example, we are buying or selling a horse, a trainer would be a better partner, would he not? Or if its a ship, a shipbuilder or sailor? I suppose so. Then in what financial transactions is the just man a better partner than others? When we want to bank our money, Socrates. In fact when we dont want to make use of it at all, but lay it by?

Yes. So when we arent making any use of our money, we find justice useful? It looks rather like it. And so when you want to store a pruning-knife, justice is useful both to community and to individual; but if you want to use it then you turn to the vine dresser. And if you want to keep your shield or your lyre safe you look to the just man, but if you want to use it to the solider or musician? That seems to follow. And so in all spheres justice is useless when you are using things, and useful when you are not? Maybe. Justice, then, cant be a very serious thing, I said, if that is all the use it is. (Plato, The Republic (trans. H.D.P. Lee), Penguin, 1955, pp. 56-59 [332334].) Very briefly, assuming justice is like a craft (techn) such as sailing or cooking, the just man is of remarkably little use, apart perhaps from keeping your money safe, though even that is then argued to be a possibly dangerous assumption. The key idea here is that, just as one might nowadays seek a baker or a doctor in the Yellow pages, one might also expect to find just men or women listed there. The Socratic argument is then that they would have remarkably little business. Our argument is then entangled with the famous craft analogy, another issue on which debate rages. One could see the analogy as simply being something good to think with let us see where it will take us to compare whatever is going on when a good person acts or decides justly with what is going on when an expert successfully performs his craft, makes a tasty dinner or gets a ship safely into harbour. A craft involves a body of knowledge or know-how and produces a specific deliverable, to use consultancy-speak, sometimes a tangible object, a pair of shoes or a delectable meal, other times simply safe arrival in port. Our argument focuses on justices deliverable. Whatever else they may think, commentators are agreed that neither Plato nor Socrates wants us to endorse the provisional conclusion Socrates arrives at, that justice is not a serious issue. We are to think that justice is a serious issue, and that it matters in all contexts. What the rough-and-tumble may suggest is that an ordinary, conventional view of the nature of justice or right conduct collapses when pushed in a certain direction. But if we grant that much, it is not clear whether the lesson to be learned is that the direction, the analogy with crafts, is fundamentally flawed, or whether Polemarchus, as spokesman for unreflective conventionality, has simply failed to find the appropriate answer. Let us look at what some commentators have had to say about our argument, and the larger questions it raises. For Annas (1981), Socrates objections in book 1 are commonly taken to be feeble if not sophistical; but in fact they are quite effective. For they show up the inadequacy of the notion that one can say what justice is by specifying kinds of action at all (23), rather than by specifying what a just person is. The point here is, I believe, one that Plato often makes: being F (holy, courageous, beautiful, etc.) cannot be identified with doing or being G because there are occasions when doing or being G would not be F. Irwin refers to it as the non-reducibility thesis; it shows, he thinks, we cannot equate F with a set of observable terms. This does not, however, seem to have much to do with our particular argument, and it is a point that applies equally

to uncontentious skills: knowing how to bake bread is not a matter of always baking it for 25 minutes; the time depends on the temperature and size of the loaf. Annas stresses that Polemarchus accepts from Socrates the idea of justice as a skill that involves knowledge of means to a given end, of precepts that produce its specific deliverable. She suggests we may think Polemarchus collapses too quickly, but her defence of him does not take us very far. She suggests two possible responses. He might have invoked Kantian thoughts that moral rules are not hypothetical, not means to any further end, but she admits that we are probably nearer Plato than Kant in finding such a response of little persuasiveness. Her other suggested response is to accept the means-end thought but insist that the end is not trivial or restricted but rather a very general happiness or a satisfactory life which we try to achieve in exercising more specific skills (27) and so which includes them rather than being pushed out by them. But she adds that it is not surprising Polemarchus does not think of this, since for him, as for the ordinary moral agent, justice is in fact pretty trivial, certainly not something that structures their lives as a whole (27) - though I suggest that overall happiness, eudaimonia, might well occur to such a person as a worthwhile blanket notion. Annas does not here specify what the inclusion relation might be. She speaks as if happiness were a further end for which the exercise of the various specific crafts serves as means, so the just person reveals knowledge of how to put together the occupations of ordinary life so that they lead overall to happiness. I suppose this is a possible response for Polemarchus - it is the notion of a master craft, a skill that utilises other skills and is thus a sort of second-order skill, that Plato examined in the Euthydemus and elsewhere.1 One consequence is that it reveals that Socrates argument is seriously inconclusive.2 As an appeal to analogy it labours under a lack of decisiveness anyway - showing that justice is not like this other skill in one way does little to impugn the general idea that justice is a skill (Socrates would not have been willing to say that navigation was not a skill in that it fails to produce a tangible object in the way shoe-making does) - but Annas here offers us a possible answer (indeed arguably not very different from Platos own answer) that respects the type of analogy being invoked. Beversluis (2000) shares Annas dim view of Polemarchus intellect and moral character. He is at pains to deny that the arguments with Socrates involve the refutation of any craft analogy that Polemarchus espouses on the grounds that Polemarchus has the analogy foisted on him (a term he takes from Annas) and has no opinion, one way or the other, on its applicability. But Beversluis also offers an independent reason for thinking that justice is not a skill. He distinguishes what one does, which may involve a skill, from the help or harm that one thereby achieves, and observes, rightly, that [t]he fact that one achieves some end does not entail that one is skilled at achieving it (211). But while it is not entailed, it may yet be true. It is not obvious to me that one could not acquire a skill of being helpful (no doubt, in some sorts of context, not in all logically possible ones); indeed, observing the behaviour of bar attendants in different countries suggests that some of them can, and some of them wont. What seems to me the obvious retort for Polemarchus is almost offered by Pappas (1995). One wants to object to Socrates that justice, unlike horse-trading, does not exist as a means to some other end, but as a characteristic of all human activities. . We should be comparing two horse experts, one just and one not; then it becomes obvious whom one would rather do business with (35). Justice does not

have its own narrowly delineated deliverable, but is rather a way of producing any deliverable; it is an adverbial modification of other skills or activities. I said almost since I do not think we have to accept Pappas first claim that this type of account means that justice could not be a means to some other end. Working to rule might be an adverbial modification of someones various skills, and it might well entail that their performance takes noticeably longer than usual, which result might itself be intended to contribute to some further end, as typically that kind of behaviour does. These options were, I think, kept open by Nettleship (1901) when he said somewhat piously of Polemarchus: He ought to have said, justice or morality is not a thing enabling a man to do this or that thing demanding specific knowledge, but a principle of universal application enabling a man to do well everything that he does; it is not one among many arts of doing good, it is the one art of doing the one good. (1920) Having seen some responses to Socrates argument, I turn now to Irwin (1977).3 Irwin sees our argument as rehearsing what was established at greater length in other dialogues (178): that justice is not a craft co-ordinate with shoe-making and the rest, a claim which allows that it might yet be a super-ordinate branch of knowledge (76, and note 46, p. 299). How should we understand such a superordinate craft? Irwins few remarks suggest one answer: a super-ordinate craft tells us how to use the products of other crafts (76), and is thus pretty much the same as Annas general skill of ordering our activities so that they lead to happiness or a satisfying life. But his formulation permits another possible interpretation that exploits some of a philosophers interest in a meta-level or second-order task: a super-ordinate craft keeps the others in line, it lays down their spheres of operation and adjudicates between them. This second understanding of a super-ordinate craft preserves the possibility of separately listing the possessors of this demarcatory skill. Reflection would suggest that a society would not need many with this particular skill, though when called upon their service may be of considerable utility and significance for the rest. Umpires or referees are usually fewer than players, but useful nonetheless. My preferred alternative adverbial construal gives us a different outcome. As a logical possibility one could list just bakers and unjust ones, but that would seem to be a public relations disaster. Justice, like many similar properties (considerateness, efficiency, etc.), would not be a thing that some people should do as their own; it would be a way of doing whatever your first-order aptitudes give you, and a way that others would generally wish to see. So we no longer expect to see just men or women given a separate listing (though a Which?-style directory might make suitable comments on the way different skilled persons discharge their duties), and we have something, a skill or otherwise, that it is desirable be shared as widely as possible. So, to sum up so far, the argument is inconclusive. It does not rule out the possibility that justice is a general skill of Annas sort; it does not rule out the possibility of justice being some other sort of meta-skill, fixing the boundaries among first-order skills; and it does not rule out the simple adverbial point, that any activity can be done justly or unjustly and that this way of doing things might yet be a skill that is learnable.

Aune has recently argued that Platos point in book 1 is to set out and distinguish from close alternatives the idea that justice is not a techn but an aret, a virtue, on account of which a job is done well. As he says, this claim is easily confused with the idea that justice is simply another skill or techn. Let us see if we can in fact distinguish them. A baker has the job of making bread; her techn includes the various skills of kneading dough and baking it. What is her aret? Aune says it is that by which a job is done well and achieves its goal. What he opposes is, I think, the idea that this is the simple know-how itself I may know how to F but perform so nonchalantly that nothing gets achieved. If that is right, it is then her way of practicising her technai, conscientiously, and with care and attention to contextually varying features (the absorptive capacity of different flours ), let us suppose. It is then a second-order matter, of how she employs the know-how she has. But since Aune is happy to allow a variety of second-order technai (a doctor aims to heal, but through that he aims to make money, and through that to provide for his family and play a responsible role in his community, and through that to achieve eudaimonia) why baulk at admitting an aret as a further kind of second-order techn? One could equally well invoke my adverbial talk and say that the bakers virtue is how she performs her allotted tasks. Perhaps this reveals the looseness of the notion of second order being invoked here. But even if we should not align the adverbial and the second-order, I do not see why Aune thinks that knowing how to modify ones performance in a certain way could not itself be another skill in addition to the basic know-how itself. We do try to train people in being helpful to customers, for instance. Whatever we should say about the adverbial account, both my other main alternatives are ways of being second-order. Since all second-order implies is that ones focus is on something else, there can be many ways of being second-order with respect to any given first-order X. Arranging them all to lead to eudaimonia is one exercise upon first-order skills or occupations; setting their boundaries is quite another. Both, I think, are important for Plato. We are not meant to agree that justice is of little value. We are then to supply ourselves, or at least be ready to endorse when they are suggested to us, alternative ways of construing justice. Let us see, then, whether anything later in the Republic chimes in with any of the possibilities I have broached. Irwin, as we noted, thought that Book 1 was intended to show the inadequacy of views that invoke the craft analogy and that the later Books set out a new view that does not rely on it. Of course, there is no easy answer to the question of how Plato deals with the matter in the later books of the Republic. The idea of so harmonising things that eudaimonia results for the self and for the society is, of course, an explicit doctrine in the later books. But I want to suggest that we can also read them as permitting the second-order adjudication notion to play an important part, so that we may not need to see either development of the analogy abandoned. Irwins own account of the later books relies heavily on seeing them using ideas from other works my reference to a summation applies here quite well. But while that approach yields a subtle and interesting view, perhaps we can simply adopt what the book actually offers us. What we find in the later books, as Santas (2001) has recently insisted,4 is a thoroughgoing implementation of a functional analysis of the good, invoking an extreme form of the division of labour. In designing his utopias, Plato starts with a situation in which a man specializes appropriately on a single job for which he is naturally fitted (370, p. 103). The luxurious second-best state uses

the same principle to set up a standing army for defence (374) and thus to usher in the philosopher-kings.5 Now Plato offers little by way of argument for these principles and their prohibitions against doing other peoples jobs (the worst of evils, 434), relying on the intuitive appeal of a modest division of labour. But what Plato actually wants is by no means so modest, and it forfeits any initial plausibility that his examples of farmers not being blacksmiths might give. In cricket, some people specialize in batting, others in bowling; but it is by no means clear that it would be a better game if the batsmen never had to field or the bowlers never had to bat. Yet that would seem the obvious Platonic solution. Plato does not in fact evince much doubt about the boundaries of the occupations he mentions, but one can see part of the Rulers wisdom residing in their ability to judge when people are overstepping their naturally given bounds. Given the basic principle of one man, one job, not only could we expect each person to have an entry in the Yellow pages but we find justice to be a matter of appropriate demarcation (Our quarry [justice in the State] is right under our noses all the time. . I believe justice is the principle we laid down at the beginning and have consistently followed in founding our state, or else some variant of it. in our state one man was to do one job, the job he was naturally most suited for. . Perhaps justice is, in a certain sense, just this minding ones own business (432-433, p. 181).) This allows each person to act justly by minding his own business, but gives to the Rulers a special role of setting out what those various businesses may be and determining boundary disputes. Their justice, their grasp of the supposed facts here, gives them a distinctive deliverable. Flourishing, achieving eudaimonia, is explained in terms of the tripartite soul/society and its ways of working together. The official story is that the philosopher rulers will also have access to the know-how to provide the right answers here too, the rest of the society taking their word for it. As many have seen, what seems missing from such a story is the adverbial understanding of the doing of the occupations themselves. I may mind my own business, cooking but not venturing to grow the food or make the utensils, or of course trying to advise the polity in its decision-making for the collective, but conduct it unscrupulously or nonchalantly. On one count I could be acting justly, but obviously not in what would be conventionally regarded as a just way, and not in a way that Plato would want to consider just. This take on justice leaves too wide a gap between the Republics justice and the everyday kind. But it seems to be part, at least, of what is on offer in Platos utopia.

References Aune, Bruce, 1997. The Unity of Platos Republic. Ancient Philosophy, 17, 1-18 Annas, Julia, 1981. An Introduction to Platos Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beversluis, John, 2000. Cross-Examining Socrates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Donovan, Brian R., 2003. The Do-it-yourselfer in Platos Republic. American Journal of Philology 124.1, 1-18. Irwin, Terrence, 1977. Platos Moral Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irwin, Terence, 1995. Plato's Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nettleship, Richard Lewis, 1901. Lectures on the Republic of Plato. London: Macmillan & Co. Pappas, Nickolas, 1995. Plato and the Republic. London: Routledge. Plato (trans. H.D.P. Lee), 1955. The Republic. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Santas, Gerasimos, 2001. Goodness and Justice. Oxford: Blackwell.

1 Sprague has focussed on the idea of such second-order knowledge throughout the Platonic corpus, terming it the "theoretical background" for the figure of the philosopher-king who emerges finally to rule the hypothetical polis in Republic (Donovan, 2003). 2 Annas, however, thinks the argument fair enough (27) in its dialectical context, assuming, as we have seen, that Polemarchus is a very ordinary kind of person. 3 Views not significantly altered in his later, 1995. 4 On page 77, he says It is truly remarkable that the application of the functional theory after the first book has been rarely explicitly recognized, even though Plato has taken the trouble to define the concept of ergon and uses the term for it constantly in his construction and defense of justice. Santas functional theory is not the same as the craft analogy, but there are links. Things, including the human soul, have functions; their good involves their carrying out those functions well, which involves their exercising their characteristic virtues. A doctors function is to cure the sick, a cooks to make palatable food. Thus the craft-knowledge these people have is, or is at least part of, their virtue; generalising for all people, their virtue is that knowledge by which they are enabled to perform their function. 5 Ironically, the only group who are expected to be expert at two different jobs: soldiering when they are young and ruling by philosophy when they are old.