“What is justice?” That is the first question posed every year to new Ashbrook scholars. Their first assigned reading (after having to read W. Churchill’s My Early Life over the summer) is the first book of Plato’s Politeia (as much as we love the word “republic” in Project 250, we consider it only appropriate to use Plato’s original title when discussing this work), as translated by Dr. Allan Bloom, in which the precise definition of justice is debated by Socrates and various men who take turns at proposing to him their idea of what justice might be. To us in the current year, the answer may seem obvious, maybe something like punishing criminals, but by the end of the first book, Socrates comes away admitting that he still does not know what the just is.
The three definitions proposed to him are (not quoted verbatim) “being honest and giving to others what is owed to them”, “doing good to friends and harm to enemies,” and “whatever is to the advantage of the stronger,” each of which we consider worse than the one that proceeds it, with the third definition being so to the point we sided with Socrates against Thrasymachus. With each proposal, his questions takes the conversation in a direction so far from the direction we believed it should have gone in, from making being just an occupation, somehow comparable to medicine or shoemaking, to asking about the virtues of animals. The entire discussion seems to go everywhere, eventually ending up nowhere.
Allow us to make one thing clear first: this is not an attempt to argue that Plato is wrong about everything, nor even about anything. We are nothing more than stupid undergrad students, and just because we today have a lot more information and historical experience available to us, makes us no wiser than those who have come before us. We have our opinions based on our understanding of the text, and though our attempts to read Politeia have never made it beyond the second page of Book II, as we find the reading experience to be as dull as that of reading N. Chernyshevkiy’s What is to be Done?, we still hold patience that there is something worthwhile in the book which can be applied to living in a free and self-governing republic; but whether or not Plato is entirely wrong, or whether there is nothing of value in the questions of Socrates that we read as irrelevant, or whether his works are worth reading or not, it is not our place to say. Answering those questions is reserved for those professors who have all ten Books in and out, and teach it every year. Moreover, we members of Project 250 are students in the Straussian school of philosophy—we are intellectual descendants of Leo Strauss, through our professors, whose professors were taught by his students, Allan Bloom among them. We are being taught how to understand great thinkers, not based on today’s understanding of ethics and politics, not even on the historical context of their time, but on their own terms, as they understood themselves. We still do not understand Plato, so we will not attempt to explain him here, nor is our objective here a detailed summary of Book I (a summary with our responses to the dialogue may be written later, but for now is not one of our priorities). Our only use for him here is to provide context and comparison for our opinion on justice. And what is that, exactly?
Our definition of justice, built on the one argued for by Cephalus and Polemarchus, is as follows:
Giving to others that which is owed to them.
The main fault Socrates finds the second and third definitions is that people misperceive reality—they are liable to making mistakes about who their real friends and enemies are; similarly, the “stronger” may misunderstand what is and is not in their interests. For example, those in power may sometimes make laws that they think will benefit them, but may actually end up working instead for the common people, at the expense of the powerful. We would like to add first that of course the stronger taking advantage for themselves is considered unjust, gravely so when at the expense of the weak, because those who can defend themselves should defend, not harm, those who cannot; second, friends are not perfectly good, nor enemies perfectly bad. Of course, we should ultimately remain loyal to our friends, and doing one good deed does not make our enemies heroes, but when they do wrong, especially when it harms us, our friends should be punished—maybe not for light and one-off, forgivable things, but definitely for major offenses like treachery—and our enemies should be commended where due.
Additionally it is hard to give much credence to Thrasymachus for his proposed definition. Not only is his proposal itself ridiculous, but he goes far as to refute Socrates pointing out the possibility of rulers making mistakes about what is to their advantage, by suggesting that a ruler who makes mistakes is no ruler. He ends up digging himself such a great hole just because he hates Socrates so much that he needs to be right, that he ends up eventually praising injustice.
The one fault Socrates finds with the definition of being honest and giving what is owed is that there are times when being lying to someone may be better than being honest (that much we agree with), and that giving someone something that belongs to them (such as weapons borrowed from a friend, in Socrates’s scenario) can be unjust, such as when they are of an unsound mind, so “giving to others that which is owed to them” cannot be the definition of justice. The first issue with this, which had all of of us crying out in frustration, is that neither Socrates, nor anyone debating him—not even Cephalus, who had proposed this definition, or his son Polemarchus, who took up the debate after the former went off to the sacrifices—had suggested waiting until the friend has returned to his senses.
To illustrate our perspective, let us modernize the example Socrates put forward. Assume you have gone to your neighbor and they agreed to let you borrow their handgun for a week, for whatever reason. Maybe you just broke up with your abusive partner, and she’s a psycho who is undeterred by a restraining order. Whatever the reason, when you’re done with the gun and are planning on returning it, your neighbor comes over, frantically asking for her gun back. You ask why, and she reveals that she has gone mad and wants to kill herself. Of course you, being a good neighbor, will say “Hell no!” and refuse to hand over the firearm until she calms down. Waiting a while to return something is always an option; you don’t never give the gun back.
But even in this scenario, there is still a slight possibility in which not returning the gun is the just action—maybe the neighbor never calms down and has to be admitted, or maybe she wants to kill someone else. That is because, we think now, that something belonging to someone does not mean it is owed to them, which Socrates seems necessarily to be implying, from our understanding. This is not a justification of stealing someone’s property, or of the government confiscating it without due process; on the contrary, in both situations the property that was taken necessarily becomes what is owed. Besides that, something can be owed to someone even when it did not originally belong to them.
To help you understand us as we understand ourselves, when we say that something is owed to something, we consider that to mean that someone deserves or is entitled to that thing. Sometimes that looks like giving back something that was stolen, many times it looks like paying someone for something they made or bought for it to be sold. To better illustrate our idea of justice, let me list several examples of situations in everyday life that we would describe as justice:
Men who go off and fight in war are owed respect by the civilians they volunteered to defend, and healthcare (or the money to afford it) by the government that sent them.
A lady whose car was stolen and crashed is owed restitution by the person who stole it.
A murderer is owed a severe penalty by the community of his or her victim.
A worker who contracts mesothelioma by working with asbestos without proper PPE is owed compensation from his employer.
The diligent worker is owed a higher wage than the idle worker.
The low-ranking drug dealer is owed a more lenient penalty than the kingpin.
What is owed to someone, essentially, is based on what they have done or what has been done to them. A person who has done good deeds is rewarded accordingly, a person who has been injured is compensated adequately, and a person who commits bad deeds is punished according to the injuries they have caused others.
Perhaps my favorite instance of this sense of justice being portrayed in media is in Elmore Leonard's Valdez is Coming. In this novel, the titular Bob Valdez is a town constable, though no one seems to think much of him, but he's sent to the shootout of a cattleman by the name of Frank Tanner and his men against a negro whom Tanner believes shot the husband of his mistress. When the fighting dies down, Valdez goes down to talk to the man (Orlando Rincón), who comes out of hiding, and gains his trust, but when he heads over to Rincón's wagon to get his army discharge papers, R. L. Davis, who wants so desperately throughout the book to get hired by Tanner, shoots at the negro. Thinking Valdez had tricked him, Rincón goes to shoot him, but Valdez is quicker, and in self-defense ends up killing the man, who is revealed at the end to be the wrong man. Of course, Davis blames Valdez, saying, "'Constable, you went and killed the wrong coon.'" (The facts that it was in self-defense, and it was Tanner who sent everyone after the "wrong coon", are apparently irrelevent.) But Rincón left behind an Indian wife, pregnant with his child. Knowing the woman has nowhere to go and no one to rely on, Valdez comes up with an idea:
"All right, we can't give him back to you, but we should give you something. You take something from a person, then you have to pay for it. We have to pay. We have to pay you for taking your husband. You see that?"
Before I had read that book I had acquiesced that we may never know the meaning of true justice, but when I read that paragraph I knew instinctively that this right here was justice. The actions of Frank Tanner and R. L. Davis had led to an innocent man's wrongful death (I would like to note here that, given their overt lack of remorse, I had initially suspected that Tanner may have wilfully gone after the wrong man for whatever reason; however to give him the benefit of the doubt, his mistress, Gay Erin, whose husband had been killed, reveals later to Valdez that she had killed her husband and never told Tanner), which would affect his widow and child's livelihood. Therefore, Valdez reasons, he and the other men owe her something. And just as the car thief can't repair the stolen car he totalled, or the employer cannot heal his worker who has mesothelioma, Tanner, Davis, and Valdez cannot resurrect Rincón, so the closest they can ever come to making things right with his widow is to give her some money in order to take the necessary measures to get on with her life. Unfortunately, however, Tanner and Davis have other ideas, and their refusal to cooperate with Valdez, in the form of humiliating and endangering him, lead to Tanner's men over the course of the book paying for their boss's refusal—in which they are complicit—with their lives. Perhaps it could be argued that that, too, is justice.
This concept, justice, extends to so many aspects of our lives, public and private. It is the foundation of our legal system, and is a virtue that ought to dictate our lives and our conduct. We will write in later essays about how we think justice is to be exercised in public and private life, but for now, know that is is the definition we shall work with any time we mention the idea in further discussions of political thought.