ABSTRACT
Let us begin by considering, in this chapter, the quarrel that Plato chronicles in the first book of the Republic between Socrates and the sophist Thrasymachus, about the central question of the whole dialogue: What is justice? Thrasymachus responds readily with the notorious contention that “justice is the interest of the stronger,” which he then elaborates to mean that in every society the norms and standards defining what is just and what is unjust are set by the ruling elite, the strongest group in society, acting in its own interest (Republic, 338c-339a). Socrates does not proffer his own answer until much later; when he does, he formulates it in several different, but related, ways. For our purposes, they might roughly be summarized as: “Justice is everyone having and doing what is appropriate to him” (Republic, 433a-434c).2 Socrates and Thrasymachus disagree fundamentally. Yet further reflection reveals that they disagree so fundamentally that they do not really disagree at all. Rather, they seem to be addressing and answering different questions, and their arguments never really meet. Socrates and Thrasymachus understand the question “What is justice?” in dif-
ferent ways. Each of them would insist that his understanding has to do with what “justice” itself really is, as distinct from mere verbal conventions or people’s ordinary, thoughtless assumptions. Yet one could accurately characterize the difference between them this way: Socrates answers the question as if it were about the meaning of the word “justice”; or at least, we can recognize his answer as a plausible definition. This is not true of Thrasymachus’ answer. He is not formulating a phrase more or less synonymous with the word “justice,” but making a kind of sociological observation about the things which people call “just” or “unjust.” The word “justice” does not mean “in the interest of the stronger,” and Thrasymachus is not suggesting that it might. Thrasymachus is trying to tell us something about the things or situations people say are “just.” Socrates, by contrast, is trying to tell us what people are saying about a thing when they call it “just,” what they are saying by calling it “just.”
