Plato Socrates Social Justice

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates and his peers attempt to define justice. Unlike the definitions that his peers give, Socrates is searching to define justice as a structure, not a set of behaviors. Socrates uses a tripartite city-soul analogy to define justice and show that it is found when there is harmony between the three parts of the city—guardians, auxiliaries, producers—mirrored to the three parts of the soul—reason, spirit, appetite. Although Socrates provides a well-structured account of justice in an attempt to demonstrate that there cannot be social justice—in the city—if people don’t first bring internal justice—in the soul—in themselves, he has a notable contradiction in his premises. In Socrates’ ideal city it is a necessary condition of an auxiliary acting in a just way that he must cause any producers who get out of hand, or

If this unison of ideals results from the manipulative education that Socrates says, it makes one consider: If you bring up children surrounded by utopian ideals will they live out an idealistic lifestyle or are humans inherently prone to acting unjust? If someone were to prove that humans don’t act inherently unjust it would aid the argument that in Socrates city the auxiliaries would have no situation where they would have to maintain control by potential harmful means, and thus no situation where they would be unjust. However, this wouldn’t be true because the aforementioned counterargument only speaks to one aspect of the auxiliary’s role. Even if the auxiliaries do not do harm to the producers they must do harm to invaders to keep the city from collapsing, which is still a contradiction to Plato’s definition of