Plato’s Theory of Knowledge

Defining Justice

Plato’s longest and most detailed dialogue was The Republic. One of Plato’s central topics in the book is the question of what Justice is. For him, justice is both an ethical issue and a political issue. Justice concerns how individuals should interact with each other and how society should be structured and ruled. In exploring the question about defining justice, Plato uses his usual literary device of Socrates discussing the question with alleged authorities. They give Socrates examples and definitions of justice; each one in turn Socrates shows to be inadequate.

The complex arguments of the back-and-forth between Socrates and his interlocutors are interesting, but let’s step back for a moment to appreciate the complexity of the question of what justice is. How do you approach defining a virtue like justice? You cannot see justice. You cannot handle it. You cannot measure it or weigh it. It has no color or texture or any material quality we can discern with our senses. We can see actions that we call “just,” but do we ever see justice itself?

Frustrating our attempts to define justice is that we have never seen an example of perfect Justice that we can use as a standard to judge particular circumstances. Our concept of perfect Justice does not come from any experience we have had. However, we feel that we can see…