Plato on the Nature and Origin of Justice
Plato's Ethics, Allegory, and the Reasons Behind Human Beliefs
Sep 29, 2009
Plato believed that the nature and origin of justice indicated that humans who were able to and capable of doing wrong would often do so. He also believed that men who were not strong enough to keep themselves from harm would mostly avoid doing harm to others, because they weren't willing to accept the consequences of their potential actions.
Plato's Views on Justice and Human Belief
Human nature, according to Plato, often made people try to "get away with" actions. Plato's theory held that those people who weren't capable of self-defense walked away from trouble because they feared the consequences. They didn't usually start problems, because they understood that reciprocal harm could be more than they could accept. The rewards they would get from harming someone else were not enough to make the risk worthwhile.
This deduction stemmed from logic, pure and simple, like the logic that other philosophers such as Bertrand Russell showed in his dealings with and exploration of mathematics. The argument that Plato made also painted a picture of human beings as being cruel overall, but this was not the actual intention.
The literal intention behind Plato's view on the nature and origin of justice and how human nature ties into that appears to actually be that men who were more capable when it came to fending for themselves were not as deeply concerned about how other perceived the actions they took.
A Perception of Ethics and Belief: The Allegory of The Cave
The problems with human nature did not stem from a lack of ethics, according to Plato, but from the fact that each person's perception of ethics was different. Some of this was showcased in Plato's work The Allegory of The Cave, where Plato told of a group of people who spent their entire life in a cave, facing one direction, watching only shadows on the wall. When one was released and went outside and saw the sunlight, he did not know what to do or how to act, because the entire world seemed foreign to him.
The ethics that people who were released from the cave had were not the same as the ethics of people who had always spent their life in the sunlight. The perceptions that they had of the world were completely different because of the way that they had lived in the past.
Like the people who lived in the time of Plato, the people in today's modern world have perception differences and ethical differences based on many factors, including their beliefs and what they "know." With that being the case, it would appear to be unfair to say that someone from a different place has ethics that are better or worse – their ethics are simply different.
Plato would not have judged them, and Russell appeared to agree with Plato's argument on these points. Culture and region, as well as religion, social status, and other factors can all affect what someone perceives to be ethical and what he believes about his world
Resources on Plato, Justice, and Belief:
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