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The Concept Of Justice In Plato's Republic : Justice Unveiled

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Samreen Ershad
The Republic: Justice Unveiled Justice-- a word that is used very frequently in society is usually tied to a modality amongst human natures. However, very few have truly gone to the depths and succeeded to find its real meaning or its significance to society. In Plato’s Republic, he ventures to do just that. In the Republic, the fundamental value of justice is drawn through testing the idea of justice against multiple situations that pose to glorify injustice and undermine the prominence of being just. Plato asserts the defense of justice in opposition to injustice through the conversations of Socrates with Glaucon, Polemarchus and Thrasymachus. Socrates shields the value of justice using elenchus, or a method of hyper…show more content…
According to Thrasymachus’ argument, rulers make laws that provide benefits to the powerful elites. The just man always ends up profiting substantially less whereas the unjust man, through his wicked cleverness and unfair deeds ends up achieving more material goods, power and merits in society (343 c-d). In reaction to these accounts advocating injustice, Socrates set out to disprove these claims and build an impermeable reason to support a just life that is both “intrinsically and instrumentally good” (Singh, 2017). By this, Socrates wanted to show justice as something that’s good in and of itself as well as for its effects. In his quest to uncover the desirability of justice regardless of any conventions, Socrates moves towards finding the absolute truth through magnifying justice in a made-up city, or kallipolis where everyone is assigned a specific craft and only those with wisdom and knowledge know how to harmonize and moderate the divisions within themselves (434 a-c). Socrates’ journey throughout the Republic brought him to a conclusive point where he presented a final image of the soul to show how an unjust man, who appeared to be just, was fundamentally not benefitting from his unjust way of life and held a soul, which was exceedingly far from being ideal. This image of the soul Socrates presented consisted of three unequal
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