Each man commits injustice and fears receiving acts of injustice toward themselves. The great masses of weak men commit wanton acts of injustice toward one another. When it cannot be avoided, people look to make compacts with others but not to commit injustice nor to suffer it. It is the base, or slave, morality of Nietzsche laid out in the Genealogy of Morals.
They are always and everywhere seeking to commit acts of injustice for their own seeming profit, and to minimize their own suffering of injustice. According to this argument, people commit justice unwillingly.
Glaucon defends Thrasymachus’s thesis that injustice is preferable to justice, but only in order to receive a proper praise of justice by Socrates.įirst, Glaucon gives an account of the origin of justice. When asked, Socrates supposes that justice is the second kind of good which occurs for its own sake, as well as another sake. Glaucon claims that there are three kinds of goods 1) that which is good for its own sake, 2) that which is good for its own sake and for another, 3) and that which is good for another sake. Together, they both launch an inauthentic attack on justice, in order to hear Socrates make a substantial praise of justice. Thrasymachus takes his sophisticated art seriously, but not the question of justice.Īt any rate, the inquiry into the nature of justice has now passed beyond the three claims of Book I, with each definition falling short, and the discussion has now passed to the more refined Athenian brothers. While Thrasymachus, the foreign tyrant, has been tamed in Book I, his exchange with Socrates has appeared to be little more than a joke that had taken the virtue of justice lightly. Socrates begins the next section thinking he has freed himself from argument, but he acknowledges that the acts of Book I seems to have only been a “prelude” (357a).
The Battle of Megara was a crucial victory for the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta. Both brothers are praised by Socrates for their noble actions as soldiers at Megara and also for their aristocratic lineage, descending from Ariston (meaning “excellence”). Glaucon and Adeimantus, both brothers and Athenians (brothers of Plato), make up the bulk of the remainder of the Republic.
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