Republic

by Plato

He wrote philosophical literature, not philosophical textbooks.

There is a joke about a distressed would-be philanthropist who found that although he loved humanity, he loathed people.

The ambitious project of the book is to demonstrate that morality is beneficial to its possessor—that, in fact, an individual gains in happiness by being moral whether or not any external advantages accrue to him.

He therefore proposes to work with a political analogy: perhaps morality will be easier to see if we construct a community, describe its political system, and look for morality in this imaginary community.

Each person has a single talent and single way of contributing towards the welfare of the whole community; he is to perform that function, and that function alone (without interfering in the domains of others), throughout his life. This is not argued for: it is taken to be self-evident, and is made into an axiom.

Uncanny resemblance to the caste sysyem

He takes it as self-evident that we would be willing to obey someone who speaks with the authority of knowledge:

Greeks had a less developed view of the individual than we do,

Here we possibly refers to the western libertarian trend

Philosophers have to become rulers because they, with their knowledge of goodness, are the only ones who can produce goodness and happiness in everyone in a community (519e–520a).

A conscious lie may still be morally right or wrong, however. It is acceptable if it is wielded with knowledge and for moral purposes:

The sharing of wives, children, and property is, as we have noted already, designed to ensure the unity of the state, since possessiveness tends to cause dissension.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ‘Who will guard the guardians?’

Moreover, the approach Plato takes in Republic is important and valuable, in that for the first time in Western philosophical history he provides detailed arguments for an agent-centred theory of morality rather than an act-centred one.

All discord, harmony not understood;

One truth is clear: Whatever is, is right.

he thinks that morality can always be described as psychic harmony under the rule of reason

Plato, like Socrates before him, is a moral egoist—that is, an egoist who holds that it is good for me to do good for others.

making a ritual offering in the courtyard.*

Tulsi

It’s true that a good man wouldn’t find old age particularly easy to bear if he were poor, but it’s also true that a bad man would never be content with himself even if he were wealthy.’

What can we use morality for? What does it provide us with?

‘So when there’s a move to make in backgammon, is it a moral person, or an expert backgammon player, who is a good and useful associate?’

‘Well, what kind of association is it that people enter into for which a moral person is a better associate than a builder or a musician? I mean, analogously to how a musician is better than a moral person when it comes to an association over melodies.’

‘So morality is useful in relation to money at precisely the time when money is not in use?’ d ‘So it seems.’

‘And isn’t it the person who knows how to give protection from a disease who is also the expert at secretly inducing the disease?’

Anyone who is caught committing the merest fraction of these crimes is not only punished, but thoroughly stigmatized as well: small-scale criminals who commit these kinds of crimes are called temple-robbers,* kidnappers, burglars, thieves, and robbers. On the other hand, when someone appropriates the assets of the citizen body and then goes on to rob them of their very freedom and enslave them, then denigration gives way to congratulation, and it isn’t only his fellow citizens who call him happy, but anyone else who hears about his consummate wrongdoing does so as well.

The point is that immorality has a bad name because people are afraid of being at the receiving end of it, not of doing it.

if practised on a large enough scale—has more power, licence, and authority than morality.

‘Nor, I imagine, if someone recovers from illness while earning money, do you describe moneymaking skill as medical skill.’

Association and causation

The ultimate punishment for being unwilling to assume authority oneself is to be governed by a worse person, and it is fear of this happening, I think, which prompts good men to assume power occasionally.*

The chances are that were a community of good men to exist, the competition to avoid power* would be just as fierce as the competition for power is under current circumstances.

‘Why don’t you just tackle what I’m saying?’

‘A moral person doesn’t set himself up as superior to people who are like him, but only to people who are unlike him; an immoral person, on the other hand, sets himself up as superior to people who are like him as well as to people who are unlike him.’

Don’t you describe as good something which is welcomed for its own sake, rather

Consequential moral reasoning

The idea is that although it’s a fact of nature that doing wrong is good and having wrong done to one is bad, nevertheless the disadvantages of having it done to one outweigh the benefits of doing it.

People do wrong whenever they think they can, so they act morally only if they’re forced to, because they regard morality as something which isn’t good for one personally.

the acme of immorality is to give an impression of morality while actually being immoral.

genuine goodness rather than merely an aura of goodness.*

we must deprive him of any such aura, since if others think him moral, this reputation will gain him privileges and rewards, and it will become unclear whether it is morality or the rewards and privileges which might be motivating him to be what he is.

And this, Socrates, is why both gods and men provide a better life for an immoral person than for a moral person, according to this view.’ b

Deep cynicsm

Others* have the gods’ rewards for morality lasting even longer: they say that the legacy left behind by a person who is just and keeps his promises is that his children’s children are better people.†

What I hear is people telling me that, unless I also gain a reputation for morality, my actually being moral will do me no good, but will be a source of private troubles and public punishments.

On the other hand, an immoral person who has managed to get a reputation for morality is said to have a wonderful life.

‘But it’s not easy to cloak one’s badness for ever.’

It’s not enough just to demonstrate that morality is better than immorality. Why does one of them, in and of itself, make anyone who possesses it bad, while the other one, in and of itself, makes him good?

Question appears to be if morality is an emergency property which may not manifest at individual level or rather may not be empirically demonstrated at individual level

‘It’s not impossible, then, that morality might exist on a larger scale in the larger entity and be easier to discern. So, if you have no objection, why don’t we start by trying to see what morality is like in communities? And then we can examine individuals too, to see if the larger entity is reflected in the features of the smaller entity.’

‘And, of course, although the inhabitants of our former community could live off the produce of the land, the land will be too small now, don’t you think?’

Early notes on lifestyle diseases, overpopulation etc

‘Our job, then, if we’re up to it, would seem to be to select which people and what types of person have a natural gift for protecting our community.’

Sounds very much like an early apology for the caste structure

We’ll let nurses and mothers tell their children the acceptable ones, and we’ll have them devote themselves far more to using these stories to form their children’s minds than they do to using their hands to form their bodies.*

If the prospective guardians of our community are to loathe casual quarrels with one another, we must take good care that battles between gods and giants* and all the other various tales of gods and heroes coming to blows with their relatives and friends don’t occur in the stories they hear and the pictures they see.

The point is that a young person can’t tell when something is allegorical and when it isn’t, and any idea admitted by a person of that age tends to become almost ineradicable and permanent. All