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12
Justice and action in Plato’s Republic
Stephen Everson

I
I.1
It will not be doubted that there is a close connection between the notion of a virtuous
agent and that of virtuous action, but there is room for disagreement over which of
these notions, if either, should take explanatory priority. At least generally, it seems
that the same predicates which are used in the evaluation of people can also be used
in the evaluation of actions—but, on reflection, it will be apparent that people and
actions do not in fact satisfy the same predicates (at least if predicates are individuated
semantically), since what it is for a person to be, say, kind or just is not the same as what
it is for an action to be kind or just. Nevertheless, even if it turns out that the language
contains at least two homonymous predicates associated with at least most virtues,
it is clear that the senses of the pairs must be related (it is important to remember that
most homonyms are not mere homonyms), and it will be an important part of any
philosophical account of virtue to show what that relation is—or, in the material mode,
to clarify the relation between someone’s being a virtuous agent (of whatever kind)
and something’s being a virtuous action (of the relevant kind). According to some
accounts of the matter, it is also distinctive of what has come to be called ‘virtue ethics’
that priority here should be given to people over actions: that is, that the notion of
being a virtuous agent must be treated as prior to that of being a virtuous action. This,
however, must be wrong: it would certainly be possible to treat evaluations of virtue
as the central kind of ethical evaluation and yet deny that the notion of a virtuous agent
is fundamental.1
In this paper, I want to consider what must be the first detailed and systematic
account of virtue—or a virtue—which does treat the agent as theoretically funda-
mental, and that is Plato’s theory of justice in the Republic. Accepting that that theory is
indeed, as the modern jargon has it, ‘agent-centred’, I shall first consider what sort of
1
Indeed, I should like to argue—although I shall not do so here—that the fundamental notion is that of
a particular kind of reason for action and that our talk both of virtuous agents and of virtuous actions is
dependent on that.

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priority Plato assigns to the notion of the just agent, and then review the question of
how reasonably Plato can claim that what he offers is indeed a theory of justice. I shall
suggest that whilst he can withstand the challenge sometimes levelled against him that
he merely changes the subject when seeking to defend the practical rationality of being
just, nevertheless his theory is ultimately marred by his specification of what it is to
act justly.
I.2
That Plato does give priority to the notion of the just agent is clear from the end of
Book IV. Having persuaded Glaucon to agree that someone whose psychic parts are
properly ordered will not be the sort of person to commit the kinds of act ordinarily
considered to be unjust (such as embezzlement, temple-robbing, and theft), Socrates
then proceeds to say that justice is, in fact, not concerned with such actions at all:
[Justice] is not concerned with someone’s doing his own externally, but with what is inside him,
with what is truly himself and his own. One who is just does not allow any part of himself to do
the work of another part or allow the various classes within him to meddle with each other. He
regulates well what is really his own, and rules himself. He puts himself in order, is his own friend,
and harmonises the three parts of himself like three limiting notes in a musical scale—high, low,
and middle. He binds together those parts and any others there may be in between, and from
having been many things, he becomes entirely one, moderate and harmonious. Only then does
he act. And when he does anything, whether acquiring wealth, taking care of his body, engaging
in politics, or in private contracts—in all of these, he believes that the action is just and fine that
preserves this inner harmony and helps achieve it, and calls it so, and regards as wisdom (sophia)
the knowledge that oversees such actions. And he believes that the action that destroys this
harmony is unjust, and calls it so, and regards the belief that oversees it as ignorance.
(443c–444a)2

Once it is established that for an agent to be just is for his psuche to be properly ordered,
Socrates builds on this to provide an account of just actions. So, he continues, ‘if justice
and injustice are really clear enough to us, then acting justly, acting unjustly, and doing
injustice are also clear.’ Just as healthy things are those which produce health, and
unhealthy ones are those which produce disease, so just actions produce justice in
the soul and unjust ones produce injustice (444c–d). Having provided an account of
personal justice in terms of psychic ordering, Plato feels able to define just actions as
those which produce that state.3
According to Julia Annas, in moving to an agent-centred account of justice Plato is
responding to the difficulties faced by those who attempted to define virtuous actions
directly.4 In Plato’s earlier dialogues, Socrates’ interlocutors typically respond to the
demand to provide an account of some virtue by citing types of action which seem to

2
Translations of Plato are from Cooper (1992).
3
It may be worth emphasising that ‘personal’ here is used strictly to indicate that the type of justice in
question is an attribute of persons. It carries no suggestion of subjectivity.
4
The discussion of Annas here is in part derived from Everson (1998a), 18–22.

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them to be examples of the type of virtuous action in question. Notoriously, none of

these attempts to define virtue in the Socratic dialogues are successful, and it would
perhaps not be surprising if Plato (and perhaps Socrates before him) thought that
such failures arose from a more general misunderstanding of the nature of virtue.
Encouraged by this thought, one might readily take the argument of the Republic as a
whole to be at least in part an elaborate demonstration that one cannot satisfactorily
understand virtue—or here, justice—in terms of the kinds of action which the
virtuous agent is such as to perform. So, Annas claims,
. . . already in Book I, we saw Plato bringing out the deficiencies of people who think that
justice is a matter of knowing lists of duties. This approach was seen to be essentially shallow,
because it made justice a matter of the performance of acts that were imposed without springing
from the agent’s deepest concerns. It could provide no answer to genuine questions whose
pressure was felt: Why act like this at all? Is acting like this appropriate to the kind of person I
admire and would like to be?5

On Annas’ reading, Plato, in the Republic, is indeed concerned to refocus our attention
away from initial questions about the nature of right action to questions about what
it is to be a good person, so moving to an ‘agent-centred’ rather than an ‘act-centred’
account of virtue.
According to Annas, an agent-centred ethical theory ‘takes the primary questions to
be “What kind of person should I be?” “What is the good life?” “What kind of life is
admirable?”’:
We find out what is the right thing to do, by asking what kind of thing the good person would
do in these circumstances. The right thing to do is identified as the kind of thing done by the
good person. For the agent-centred approach, the primary notions are not duty and obligation,
but goodness and virtue.6

At first sight, this would seem to fit very well with the structure of the Republic. We
do indeed find dissatisfaction with the idea that one can properly characterise justice
simply by reference to types of action which might seem to be unjust, and in the
passage from Book IV, Socrates maintains both that justice is to do with the state of the
agent rather than with his actions, and that just actions can be understood as those
which produce the kind of psychic structure which he has decided is justice. Moreover,
if one is to determine what right action is by considering what the good or virtuous
person would do in the relevant circumstances, then one must be able to characterise
the virtuous person independently of his or her right actions. It is certainly tempting to
think that this is precisely what Plato does in the Republic: to be just is to have one’s
psuche properly ordered, and so, without begging the question, just acts can be seen
to be those which are such as to promote that condition.7 Thus, by beginning from an

5 6
Annas (1981), p. 158. Ibid., pp. 157–8.
7
It is not obvious from 443e itself whether just actions are those which promote only the agent’s psychic
harmony or psychic (and political) harmony more generally. To understand it in the first way, however, will
be to find in Plato an unnecessarily restrictive account of just action.

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account of justice which does not make reference to the kinds of action which the just
person is disposed to perform, Plato can then use that account to determine which acts
are required by justice.
Note, however, that whilst this does subordinate the notion of a just action to that of
a just agent, it does so in a way rather different from that described by Annas. For, whilst
Socrates talks of just actions as those which promote justice, Annas talks of just actions
as being those which the just person does. Thus, she says, ‘the right thing to do is
identified as the kind of thing done by the good person.’ This difference might seem
unimportant, since in fact actions which seek to promote justice, conceived as an
internal state of agents, are likely to be at least included amongst those which are
characteristic of the just agent. However, the central difficulty with Plato’s theory, as
Annas formulates it, is that such an agent will perform a great many other actions as
well. By switching to characterising just actions by reference to their source rather than
by reference to their effects, Annas introduces unnecessary difficulties into that theory.
Consider the circumstances in which someone needs to choose between watching
television and listening to a record, or drinking gin and drinking vodka. It would
certainly be a mistake to think that in following the choice of a just agent, one was
thereby able to identify the right action in these circumstances. The problem is that
there are many circumstances in which the question of what is the right thing to do
simply does not arise, and so the just agent’s justice will not affect his actions.
What is needed, then, is a way to restrict the range of actions, or of circumstances for
action, which can be taken to be relevant for deciding whether an action performed by
a just agent is a just action. Thus, whilst one certainly cannot maintain that an action
will be a just action if (and, maybe, only if) it is one performed by a just agent, one
might be able plausibly to argue that an action will be just if (and, maybe, only if) it is
performed by a just agent in some restricted range of circumstances—circumstances
which will not, for instance, include those where the agent has simply to choose
between tea and coffee or television and reading. The task, of course, is to restrict
the range of relevant circumstances to be specified, and the danger is precisely that it
will not be possible to specify those circumstances without using the notion of justice
to do so. Thus, the most obviously successful way to capture the range of circumstances
in which the action performed by a just agent will be a just action would be by saying
that they are those circumstances in which justice requires one to act one way rather
than another. Whenever there is a requirement of justice to act a certain way, any
action performed by a just agent will be a just action. The cost of this is obviously to
use a notion of justice which is not itself dependent on that of a just agent.
It might seem that it is precisely at this point that Plato’s own formulation will be
of help, since it would provide a way to restrict the relevant circumstances of action
without itself making use of an unanalysed notion of justice. Thus, we can say that an
action will be a just action when it is performed by a just agent—that is, an agent who
has an ordered psuche—in circumstances when it is open to him to promote psychic
harmony (or to avoid diminishing it). This would, on the whole, eliminate such actions

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as drinking tea or listening to a record (they will not be identified as just even when
performed by a just agent), but will allow that actions of these types will count as just if
they are such as to affect the agent’s, or other people’s, psychic ordering. This is an
advantage, since it runs with the insight that, at least generally, we cannot in principle
declare that there are types of action (non-ethically identified) whose instances are
never such as to be just or unjust or are always such as to be just or unjust. What will
determine whether a particular act is just or unjust will be not whether it is a playing of
a record or even a the deceiving of a friend, but whether it is productive or disruptive
of psychic harmony.
Note, however, that this in fact provides no support for Annas’ way of reading the
argument, since the question of what is the right—here the just—thing to do can now
be answered without making any reference at all to the state of the agent that motivates
the action: if the agent’s psychic condition plays any role, it is only as something that
may be affected by the action, and not as something from which the action originates.
(Of course, it may be that for someone to act justly he does need to be a just agent, but
that is a separate question from whether an action is one which is right because just.)
There is, it seems, a conceptual dependency of what it is for an action to be just on
what it is to be a just agent—what it is for an action to be just is for it to promote
justice in people—but not of the kind which Annas describes.8
I.3
There is a further and related objection to the sort of agent-centred account which
Annas finds in the Republic. She formulates the issue in terms of our determiming
what is the right thing to do in some particular circumstance by considering what
the good—that is, the virtuous—person would do in such circumstances—and so,
presumably, determining what the just thing to do is by considering what the just
person would do. What this suggests at first is that when we need to act we should
have access to a good person, and then either follow his lead in acting, or ask him how
we should act. (Here, of course, there is the problem of how we are supposed to know
whether someone is a good person if we are not good people ourselves.) As a model
for moral deliberation, however, this is obviously far too limited, and what Annas must
rather have in mind is that when deliberating I should formulate my deliberation in
terms of considering, or imagining, how a good or just person would act—where what

8
At one point Annas seems to run these two rather different ideas together, when she treats Plato’s claim
that the just person will take just action to be action which preserves and creates psychic harmony as
expressing the thought, developed by Aristotle, that ‘the good man is the norm for just action’ who ‘can tell
you what is the right thing to do is, because he is just’ (1981, p. 160). She is correct to say that for Plato, the
just person identifies the just action by reference to the state of psychic harmony (because that is what he
seeks to promote) and ‘not by reference to lists of duties accepted by any external source’, but is wrong to
think that this sits happily with her own account of the relation between being just and acting justly.
Furthermore, her way of making the point excludes the highly pertinent possibility that the just agent may
recognise reasons for action which, whilst not deriving from lists of duties, are nevertheless externally
derived—that is, reasons to which the just agent must shape his motivations and which are not themselves
derived from his motivations.

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is involved in this is not finding out how any particular good person would act, but
rather in thinking through what an arbitrary good person would do. To do this,
however, requires attending to the reasons there are for acting, and deciding which
reason is the one on which one should act. So, to consider how the just person would
act in some circumstance, I need myself to recognise that there is in that circumstance a
reason of justice to act in a certain way and then, from that recognition, I can know that
the just person would act accordingly. It will be obvious, though, that this last step is
now unnecessary. In order to see how the just person would act, I need myself to
consider the strength of the reasons for acting, and having done that I can act properly
without thinking about how the good person would act. Of course, if I am not a good
person then I may well be wrong about the strength of the reasons that apply in a
particular situation—but appealing to how the good person would act will bring no
new considerations to bear. I will simply be wrong about that too.
Now, it might be thought that these objections to Annas are merely to an epistemic
claim which she does not need: it could be the case that what it is for an action to be
right in some circumstance is for it to be the action which the good person would do
in that circumstance, even if knowing that this is the case will be of no help in finding
out how one should act oneself. So, to take an Aristotelian parallel, it can be true, and
illuminating, that what is really pleasant is what seems pleasant to the virtuous person,
without its being the case that one can come to find out what is really pleasant in virtue
of knowing this. However, it will not help Annas merely to disavow the epistemic
claim. It may be right that agent-centred accounts of ethics do not need to be con-
cerned with providing a method for determining how one should act in any situation,
but they do need to enable a proper account of moral deliberation, and Annas’
supposedly Platonic theory does not do this. For one has to ask how the good person
himself will deliberate on how to act. On Annas’ account, the agent identifies the
right thing to do by considering how the good person will act—and if this is the model
for moral deliberation then the good person too will need to consider this. Thus, he
or she will not focus directly on the question ‘What is the right thing to do’, but rather
on the question ‘What would I (or someone like me) do in these circumstances?’
Posing this question, however, leaves no room for deliberation, if deliberation is taken
to be a process that can affect how one acts. The task for the good person has become
to find out how he himself is inclined to act rather than to consider how he should act
in the light of reasons, and so leaves that inclination to act as one which is irrational,
because prior to reason. This would be a surprising consequence for a theory which
places such emphasis on the need to acquire knowledge in order to act well.9 If one

9
In her later treatment of these matters in Annas (1993)—a discussion which focuses on authors later
than Plato—Annas seems to take note of this kind of concern: ‘When [the virtuous person] asks “What
should I do in this situation?” is she really asking “What would a brave person do in this situation?” It is odd
if moral deliberation is always to take the form of asking what some ideal version of you would do in this
situation.’ Her rejoinder to this, however, is not satisfactory: ‘In this form . . . I think that the problem is not
peculiar to virtue ethics; a deontologist will ask herself what a dutiful person would do, a consequentialist,
what an efficient maximiser would do. Thus the oddity is superficial.’ (Annas (1993), p. 110, n. 211.) This is

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rather takes Plato to characterise just actions by their promotion of personal or political
justice, this problem does not arise: the just agent’s deliberations will be focused outside
himself, or herself, on those reasons for action which are presented by his
circumstances.

II
II.1
Whilst Plato indeed provides a kind of ‘agent-centred’ account of justice, it is of a kind
rather different from that attributed to him by Annas. He subordinates the notion of a
just action to that of a just agent, but rather than viewing just actions as those which are
performed by just agents, he takes them to be ones that produce justice in the soul (and
also, presumably, in the state).10 An agent-centred account of justice of this kind does
not suffer from the internal problems that afflict the other, but it does face problems of
its own. Crucially, it is not obvious that in seeking to characterise justice in terms of the
structure of an agent’s psuche, Plato manages to characterise justice at all. Indeed, it is
perhaps ironic that after he has in the early dialogues so knowingly presented so many
misguided attempts to respond to the Socratic demand to define things of value, his
own attempt, in the Republic, to do this for justice should itself have seemed to many to
miss the point of that very enterprise.
It is not, of course, that his account is simply unmotivated. By taking justice to be the
proper ordering of the parts of the psuche, Plato is able to provide a straightforward
response to the challenge to show that it is in the agent’s own interests to be just—
something which is allowed to stand in conflict with ordinary beliefs. Identifying
justice with psychological health, Plato can appeal to the robust intuition that it is
indeed in one’s interests to be healthy in order to underpin the claim that it is in one’s
interests to be just. So, at the end of Book IV, when it has been shown to Socrates’
satisfaction that justice consists in the fine condition of the soul, and Socrates has said
that they must now enquire whether it is more profitable to be just than to be unjust,
Glaucon can protest that this is no longer necessary:

unsatisfactory, because efficient maximisers and dutiful people play a very different role in deontological
and consequentialist theories of ethics from that played by the virtuous agent in Annas’ version of virtue
ethics. The oddity here is taken by Annas to be that of moral deliberation taking ‘the form of asking what
some ideal version of you would do in this situation’. The problem, though, is rather that of being able to
provide a proper account of the deliberation of the virtuous person himself. Whilst the deontologist and
the consequentialist might in effect be deciding what the dutiful person and the efficient maximiser would
do, their deliberations need, and should, make no reference to these notions (deciding this would be the
upshot and not the content of the deliberation): on an agent-centred understanding of virtue, however,
it seems that the virtuous person cannot but deliberate about what he would do, and this is where the
problem lies.
10
This goes against my claims in Everson (1998a), p. 20, where I tried —unconvincingly, I now think—
to save Plato from commitment to this understanding of just action. The reasons why one might want to save
him from it will be apparent at the end of the present essay.

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But, Socrates, this enquiry looks ridiculous to me now that justice and injustice have been shown
to be as we have described. Even if one has every kind of food and drink, lots of money, and
every sort of power to rule, life is thought to be not worth living when the body’s nature is
ruined. So even if someone can do whatever he wishes, except what will free him from vice and
injustice and make him acquire justice and virtue, how can it be worth living when his soul—the
very thing by which he lives—is ruined and in turmoil?
(445b)

Socrates does, of course, go on to provide a justification for what now seems to

Glaucon so obvious, but Glaucon’s reaction is surely meant to show that the
main work has been done: given what Plato takes to be the proper understanding
of the nature of justice, it is clearly in the agent’s interests to be just rather than
unjust.
This, of course, just looks too easy. Can the state which Glaucon now so readily
accepts to be in the agent’s interests really be the same state whose value seemed so
dubious at the start of Book II? Following on from Thrasymachus’ rejection of the
value of justice, Glaucon there asked for a justification of being just, where this was
conceived of as being disposed to take other people’s interests into account when
acting, and it is not obvious why a defence of being psychologically healthy should
satisfy that demand. If Plato’s argument is to be vindicated, it needs to be shown that
he is right to think that the state of having the parts of one’s psuche properly ordered
is indeed that which disposes one to be motivationally sensitive to other people’s
interests. Unless the reader of the Republic is given reason to accept that this is the same
state, then the argument of the Republic will founder on what David Sachs has called a
‘fallacy of irrelevance’: even if Plato were to have established that it is in the agent’s
interests to have an ordered psuche, this will not do any work against a moral sceptic
such as Thrasymachus, since what he doubts is the value of acting against one’s own
interests—something which, as far as he is concerned, has nothing to do with the
internal ordering of the psuche.11
II.2
Although the claim that what it is for a person to be just is to have the parts of his psuche
properly ordered is not an articulation of even a refined version of an intuitive notion
of justice, it is not without its roots in such pre-theoretical views. This is because
Plato derives it from consideration of what it is for a state to be just, and in the case of
the state it does make good intuitive sense to think of a just state as one that has a
proper internal ordering. Plato’s commentators sometimes speak here of his drawing
an analogy between the individual and the state, but he assumes a closer relation
between the two than an analogical one. In the Republic, as apparently later in the
Parmenides, Plato maintains what one might call the ‘Principle of Univocality’—that is,
in modern jargon, that whenever a word is used, it will have the same semantic value.

11
Sachs (1971).

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Thus, it is agreed at 435a that when ‘things are called by the same name,’ they are alike
‘with respect to that to which that name applies’.12
Indeed, according to Vlastos, this is a fundamental Platonic principle, which is ‘taken
over uncritically from Socrates, whose search for definitions is guided by the explicit
assumption that all of the things correctly called “F” have an identical character,
F, and that each of them is so called only because each has this self-identical
character’.13 To confirm the provenance of this as a Socratic principle, Vlastos cites
Euthyphro 5d and 6d-e, and Meno 72aff., but, in fact, none of these passages contains
an application of that principle; rather, they are applications of the different principle
that, for any F, if two things are F, they will be so in virtue of having the same
form.14 Vlastos, however, seems to think that these are different statements of the
same principle, one in the formal, the other in the material mode—or at least he
takes his claim that ‘the difference between the formal and the material mode is
systematically ignored in Plato’, to warrant using a Socratic claim made in the
material mode as evidence for his acceptance of the semantic principle. However,
the two kinds of claim are importantly different, and even if Vlastos were right in
thinking that Plato ignores the difference between them, he is not right in maintain-
ing that it makes no difference to Plato’s argument whether he supports it by means
of a metaphysical or a semantic principle. For if Plato were to restrict himself to the
metaphysical principle that everything which is just is so in virtue of participating
in the same form, then this would not be sufficient to guarantee that states and
individuals are just in the same way.15 It is only by maintaining that everything that
satisfies the predicate ‘ . . . is just’, and individuating it morphologically, that Plato
can reach this conclusion.16
Given the Principle of Univocality, and given that the predicate ‘ . . . is just’ is taken
to be satisfied by both states and individuals, it follows that the property of being just
must be something which both individuals and states can have:17 in order to under-
stand what it is either for a state or a person to be just, then, it does not matter—other
12
Compare Parmenides 147d: ‘Don’t you apply to something each name you use?’—‘I do’—’Now, could
you use the same name either more than once or once?’—’I could’—’So if you use it once, do you call by
name that thing whose name it is, but not that thing, if you use it many times? Or whether you utter the
same name once or many times, do you quite necessarily always also speak of the same thing?’—’To be sure’.
13
Vlastos (1981), at p. 128 and n. 48.
14
Thus, Euthyphro 6d: ‘Bear in mind that I did not bid you tell me one or two of the pious actions but that
form itself that makes all pious actions pious, for you agreed that all impious actions are impious and all pious
actions pious through one form’, and Meno 72c: ‘The same is true in the case of the virtues. Even if they are
many and various, all of them have one and the same form which makes them virtues, and it is right to look
to this when one is asked to make clear what virtue is.’
15
So, it can be true that everything which is a bank is so in virtue of having the same property, but false
that everything which satisfies the predicate ‘ . . . is a bank’ does so in virtue of having the same property, at
least if the predicate is individuated morphologically.
16
To individuate it semantically—so that for two predicates to be the same, they would have to have the
same morphology and the same semantic value, would be to beg the question whether states and people do
satisfy the same predicate ‘ . . . is just’.
17
That is, it follows if it can truly be said of at least one individual and one state that he or it is just: given
the account of justice which Plato proceeds to give, this is hardly a trivial condition.

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than pragmatically—which of these one investigates. Discovering what it is for a state

to be just will be sufficient to know what it is for an individual to be just, and vice versa.
So, Socrates begins by considering the nature of political justice, on the pragmatic
grounds that larger versions of something are easier to take in than smaller versions—as
one finds it easier to read larger letters than smaller (368d). Nevertheless, that any
satisfactory account of justice should be one which both individuals and states should
be able to satisfy places firm constraints on any candidate for such an account. Once it
has been argued that for a state to be just is for each of its constituent classes to ‘do its
own work’, Socrates does not immediately conclude that this must also somehow be
what it is for an individual to be just. Rather, he claims that they must now determine
whether the same form can be found in the individual as well—but ‘if that is not what
we find, we must look for something else to be justice’ (434d).
Socrates’ caution here does not extend to doubting whether the predicate ‘ . . . is
just’ might not be univocal: since things will be similar if they satisfy the same term, ‘a
just man will not differ at all from a just state with respect to the form of justice; rather
he will be like the city’ (435a-b). So, rather than looking to the individual to determine
whether justice for the individual is indeed the same as that for a state, Socrates’
method is rather to use the individual to provide a check on the account offered of
what it is for a state to be just. Unless the individual can somehow satisfy that account,
then this will show that that account is itself inadequate:
Let us apply what has come to light in the state to an individual, and if it is accepted there, all will
be well. But if something different is found in the individual, then we must go back and test that
on the state. And if we do this, and compare them side by side, we might well make justice light
up as if we were rubbing fire-sticks together.18
(434e–435a)

Unfortunately for Plato’s argument, the Principle of Univocality is false: clearly, it is

not the case—at least if we individuate predicates morphologically—that everything
which satisfies some predicate does so in virtue of having the same property—and if
we individuate predicates more finely, making reference to their semantic properties as
well, then it will beg the question, for instance, to say that states and people do both

18
This counts against Jonathan Lear’s contention that the Principle of Univocality ‘remains open to
further explication and defence’, and so ‘vulnerable to future emendation and revision’, because it is ‘intro-
duced in the course of a dialectical inquiry’ (1992, p. 70). Although later, in the Sophist, Plato does implicitly
reject the principle (for which see the following note), there is no sign at all that he takes it to be open to
revision in the Republic, where it is rather taken to underpin the inquiry. Of course, had Plato been unable to
find a form in which both states and people could participate, then this might have led him to doubt his
semantic principle (or to revise his way of individuating words), but since he does think he finds such a form,
the principle resists subjection to critical scrutiny. Lear’s further claim that its application to the case of
‘psychopolitical’ predicates is grounded in the Platonic belief that ‘a wide range of political characterisations
of the polis are to be understood as externalisations of the same qualities from within the psyches of
historically significant citizens’ surely has matters the wrong way round. The principle is treated by Plato as a
general semantic principle, and not one which requires inductive grounding by considering each case in turn
of when a predicate, or set of predicates, is satisfied by entities of different kinds.

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satisfy the same predicate ‘ . . . is just’.19 Without relying on that principle, moreover,
Plato’s argument appears decidedly shaky. For although it would still be open to Plato
to claim that the predicate ‘ . . . is just’ is univocal (something which would be
confirmed by a successful unified account of justice which could apply to people and
states alike), the claim is, prima facie, highly dubious.
The problem here is that it seems that there are two different ways in which one can
talk even of a state’s being just: it can be just because its goods and offices are properly
distributed amongst its citizens, but it can also be just because it acts properly towards,
for instance, other states.20 Thus a state can, we might say, be either internally just or
externally just—and it is not immediately obvious that the predicate ‘ . . . is just’ here
is being used in only one sense. Now, of the two ways in which a state can be just, it is
external justice which provides the most obvious parallel to justice in individuals.21
What concerns Thrasymachus and Glaucon is acting in such a way that one does not
maximise one’s goods at the expense of others, and this does not obviously have
anything to do with whether states are properly constituted. If the only way in which a
state could be just were internally, and if it could be shown that the predicate ‘ . . . is
just’ carries only one sense, then the fact that a state can be just in virtue of its internal
structure might indeed cast light on what it is for a person to be just. As it is, however,
the analogy which Socrates draws between justice in the state and justice in the
individual seems precisely to highlight the danger of Sach’s fallacy of irrelevance rather
than to do anything to avert it.
19
Indeed he ultimately, if implicitly, abandons the principle. In the Sophist, at the start of the investigation
into what it is to be a sophist, the Visitor raises the possibility that he and Theaetetus ‘have only the name in
common, and maybe we have each used it for a different thing. In every case, though, we always need to be
in agreement about the thing itself by means of a verbal explanation, rather than doing without any such
explanation and merely agreeing about the name’ (218c). Here it is recognised that the same name may pick
out different things, and so absolves the dialectician from the requirement to come up with a common
account for everything to which a name is correctly applied.
20
Vlastos is sensitive to the problem here, but does not succeed in articulating it very happily: ‘In its
primary signification “just” is a relational predicate; to speak of a person as having this property is to think of
the way in which he habitually relates himself to persons or groups in his conduct’, whilst ‘among the
derivative uses of “just” there is one in which it functions as a one-place group-predicate, predicable of groups
as such, on condition that their members, or sub-groups composed of their members, are just in the primary
sense, i.e. behave justly to one another’ (1981, p. 130). This has one technical difficulty and one substantive
one. Vlastos contrasts the one-place predicate with the relational-predicate: when, however, I describe some-
one as just I employ a one-place predicate exactly as I do when I describe a state as just, even if what secures
the judgement I express is how he behaves towards other people. Substantively, the relevant way in which a
state is just is when there is a proper distribution of its offices (so that, for instance, the right people are in
government), and this does not require, although it may enable, its citizens to act justly towards one another.
21
This point is made clearly by C. C. W. Taylor, in his (1998), at pp. 64–5. His verdict is more trenchant:
the notion of something’s being just because it is organised according to just principles cannot be applied to
the individual, ‘because just principles assign rights and obligations to the individuals composing a com-
munity, whereas the elements in an individual’s psychological organisation are not themselves individuals,
and are therefore not subjects of rights and obligations’ (p. 65). However, Plato’s more minimal notion of
something’s functional parts doing what they should is not so minimal that it is not arguably an account of
political justice, and it does have application to the individual, at least given the kind of psychological theory
which Plato offers. It is not over-sympathetic, I think, to treat Plato’s account of justice as proper internal
organisation, applied both the states and to individuals, as something which is counter-intuitive but able to
be secured rather than something which is simply unsalvageable.

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Furthermore, Plato himself provides the materials for recognising that the predicate ‘
. . . is just’ is not univocal, since the account he gives of what it is for an action to be just
is, as we have seen, different from that given for just people and states. Given this, it is
clear that it cannot be the case that everything which satisfies the predicate does so in
virtue of having the same property. Nevertheless, whilst this should certainly have led
Plato to question, and indeed abandon, the Principle of Univocality, it is perhaps not as
lethal to his argument as it might at first seem. Plato could allow that the predicate
is not univocal—that there is a semantically related predicate ‘ . . . is just’ which is
satisfied by actions and not by people—but maintain that, despite the failure of the
Principle of Univocality, there is still reason to look for a unified account which will
apply to both states and people. He could reasonably say that where things do satisfy
the same predicate, morphologically identified, this provides a prima facie reason for
thinking that they do so in virtue of having the same property. There is good reason
for maintaining that this is overturned in the case of the morphologically identical
predicates ‘ . . . is just’ satisfied by people and by actions, but there would still be an
advantage in showing that people and states satisfy the predicate in virtue of having the
same property—so that, for instance, a semantic theory for English which needed to
supply only two axioms for a predicate ‘ . . . is just’ would be preferable to one which
required more than two such axioms. Substituting this weaker semantic claim for the
one he actually makes, and allowing him his claims about the structure of the psuche, we
shall find that he has in fact the materials to make his account of justice a candidate for
being precisely that.
II.3
Plato thus needs to show that there is indeed one property—being just—about which
people have been talking all along but which in fact consists in proper internal order-
ing (whether of a state or a person), rather than two different states, of which one
consists in having a particular kind of internal structure and the other consists in being
disposed to act towards other people in a way which takes their interests into account.
What, then, are the constraints on Plato’s internal account of justice which, if satisfied,
would justify treating it as indeed that rather than as an account of something else—of,
we might say, internal justice? According to Sachs, the constraints are very tight:
[Plato] must prove that the conduct of his just man also conforms to the ordinary or vulgar
canons of justice. Second, he has to prove that his conception of the just man applies to—is
exemplified by—every man who is just according to the vulgar conception.22

They are also constraints which, Sachs thinks, Plato’s account fails to meet:
There are passages in the Republic which show that Plato thought there was no problem about
the first requirement; there are, however, no passages which indicate that he was aware of the

22
Ibid., p. 46.

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second. In any event, the fact is that he met neither requirement; nor is it plausible to suppose
that he could have met either of them.23

Both of these requirements need to be met, Sachs argues, if there is not to be the
possibility of counter-examples to Socrates’ claim that the person who has vulgar
justice is happier than anyone who does not. If Plato’s account met the first but not
the second, it would allow the possibility that of those who are not platonically just,
someone who has vulgar justice should be less happy than someone who does not.
Similarly, if it met the second requirement but not the first it would, he claims, allow
the possibility of people who were happy because platonically just, whilst ‘capable of
vulgar injustices and crimes’. Sachs accepts, or believes, that Plato assumes that the first
condition will be met—that the platonically just person will in fact not act in violation
of ordinary standards of justice, but objects that Plato nowhere even tries to argue for
what is, on Sachs’ view, an implausible claim. The position in respect to the second
requirement is still worse—Plato is not even aware of its force. Since Plato does not
demonstrate any non-accidental connection between vulgar justice and psychic
harmony, whatever he says about the value of the latter will be of no use in providing
a defence of the rationality of the former. On Sach’s construal of the argument of
the Republic, although the challenge to Socrates is posed by one well-formulated
question—Is the person who has (vulgar) justice happier than the person who has
(vulgar) injustice?—he actually answers a prima facie different question—Is the person
who has psychic harmony happier than the person who does not?—and does not
attempt to show that these are in fact questions about the same property. Without
doing this, an affirmative answer to the second does nothing to answer the first, leaving
it, in fact, unanswered by the Republic.
Now, one way in which the Republic differs from the Socratic dialogues is that its
central question is not one concerning definition. The principal challenge to which
Socrates is responding is that of showing that justice is valuable (indeed that it is one of
the highest type of goods, valuable both for itself and for its consequences), and not that
of defining justice. Nevertheless, determining what it is to be just is required to meet
that challenge, and we should not forget that the definitional question has already been
posed without being satisfactorily answered in Book I.24 Indeed, at the end of Book I
Socrates roundly declares that since that question has gone unanswered—since, that is,
he does not know what justice is—he cannot know ‘whether it is a kind of virtue or
not, or whether a person who has it is happy or unhappy’ (354c).
The general aporia at the end of Book I is not without its consequences for Sachs’
way of putting his complaints, which require that there should already be a properly
regulated notion—‘vulgar justice’—which can be employed in posing the question as
to whether vulgar justice and platonic justice are the same thing. Sach’s employment of

23
Ibid., p. 46.
24
I am assuming here that Book I is an integral part of the Republic—something for which I have argued
in Everson (1998b), at pp. 127–31.

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the two terms here—‘vulgar justice’ and ‘platonic justice’—has the potential to clarify
matters, but also the potential to mislead, making one think that Plato himself is
thinking in terms of two properties rather than one. This, of course, is not right: for
Plato, at least, there are not two properties—vulgar justice and platonic justice—but
one property, justice, which turns out to be the state of having an ordered soul. It is
certainly appropriate to question whether Plato is justified in maintaining that this
psychological condition is indeed the virtue which people had been talking about by
using the term ‘justice’ (or rather ‘dikaiosune’), but the moral of Book I is surely that
one cannot properly require that the platonically just person should conform to the
‘ordinary or vulgar canons of justice’, since on Plato’s view there is no determinate set
of such canons.25
Consider in this context the Euthyphro. At the beginning of his encounter with
Socrates, Euthyphro claims a particular expertise in respect of piety, and so to know
that in prosecuting his father he is acting piously. He readily admits that in proceeding
as he does he is going against the moral beliefs of his relatives who are in fact angry
with him, protesting that it is impious to bring a case of this sort against one’s own
father. Euthyphro dismisses these protests as arising from ignorance, but his own claim
to expertise is, of course, revealed to be insecure. Thus, by the end of the dialogue both
beliefs—that he is acting piously and that he is acting impiously—remain undefeated.
It would be a mistake to think that Euthyphro’s inability to produce a definition of
piety shows that he is wrong to prosecute his father: rather, since he cannot say what
it is for an action to be pious, he cannot know whether or not this particular action is
pious. (Here I do not need to deal with the question of whether Socrates thinks that
one cannot know whether any action is pious without knowing the definition of piety,
as this is a particular case about which there were already conflicting beliefs.) In the
case of piety, then, there is neither a vulgar concept of piety nor a notion of vulgar
piety; rather there is an ordinary failure, shared by both Euthyphro and Socrates, to be
able to specify what it is for an action to be pious, and this reveals that the ordinarily
accepted canons of pious action are not fully determinate.
Similarly, in Republic I, none of the attempts to define justice are successful, and
nothing is offered which would allow someone to know what action is required by
justice in any situation. This is surely the condition of the ordinary—or, if preferred,
‘vulgar’—grasp on the notion of justice: one is able to hold the belief that something is
just or unjust (usually because more or less unreflectively it seems just or unjust to one),
but in a way which is liable to error. Certainly there is a difference between the pre-
theoretical understanding of justice as something which is to be characterised by how

25
This is noticed by Vlastos (1981, pp. 121–2), but he perhaps does not give it due weight in his own
response to Sachs’ challenge (ibid., pp. 135–6). Annas too perhaps recognises the relevance of Book I in
this context (1981, p. 158, cited above), but misidentifies its import, seeing in it a dissatisfaction with an
understanding of justice which does not give priority to ‘the agent’s deepest concerns’. Also, she is willing,
slightly later, to continue talking of ‘a conscientious performer of the acts required by justice’ (ibid., p. 163),
which suggests that she does think that the ordinary canons of justice are determinate.

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one acts towards other people and Plato’s theoretical account of it as psychic harmony,
but one should not construe this as a difference between two equally determinate
conceptions of justice. Without doing this, however, one cannot make it a condition
of identifying the properties which are the referents of the relevant predicates that
everything which is taken by speakers to satisfy the one is also taken by them to satisfy
the other.
II.4
At the heart of Plato’s theory of justice is the identification of the property of being
just with that of having an ordered psuche. What, then, are the constraints on such an
identification? Abstracting from Sachs’ argument against Plato, we can find the general
requirement that to establish an identification of the form ‘F=G’, where ‘ . . . is F’ and
‘. . . is G’ are predicates, it must be the case that ∀x(Fx ↔ Gx). This must be right. Just
as it will be true that two objects are identical only if they have all their properties in
common—for ‘a=b’ to be true, where ‘a’ and ‘b’ are names, it must be the case that
∀Φ(Φa↔Φb)—so two properties will be the same property only if they are properties
of all and only the same objects. The problem with Sachs’ argument is not that this
constraint is inappropriate, but rather that it is purely formal. If ‘F=G’ is true, then it
follows that ∀x(Fx↔Gx), and this is not something which needs to be independently
established. (Nor would establishing it be a route to securing the identity claim,
since even predicates which are necessarily co-extensive may fail to refer to the same
property.) So, if Plato is correct that being just is identical with being psychically
well-ordered, then it must be true that all and only those who are just are psychically
well-ordered.
Sachs’ constraint will begin to bite only if it is coupled with a particular kind of
account of how the extension of a predicate is determined.26 If we take it that to
understand a predicate is to know a set of conditions such that if, and only if, an object
meets those conditions it will satisfy the predicate, then, given two predicates ‘ . . . is F’
and ‘ . . . is G’, where the conditions applied by speakers for the satisfaction of the first
are different from those for the satisfaction of the second, we shall indeed be suspicious
of the claim that F=G, since there will be a significant possibility that the extension
of the one will differ from the extension of the other. In these circumstances there
is the possibility of competition between the ways of determining the extensions of
the two predicates, and so of the violation of the formal constraint on the identity
of the relevant properties.
Sachs’ criticism of Plato was published in 1963, when the generally accepted
model for the semantics of predicates was indeed something of this kind. Successful
definitions of properties were taken to be analytic, and to be derived from the
26
I hope the following detour around the subject of property identities and the semantics of predicates
will not seem out of place. Sachs’ criticism of Plato is not one which seeks to identify an internal inconsis-
tency in Plato’s theory, but rather one which charges him with failing to provide an adequate justification for
the identification of justice with psychic harmony—and one cannot address that criticism without trying to
formulate some account of what does constitute an adequate justification in this context.

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analysis of people’s beliefs about the property.27 We are now—thanks to the work of
Kripke, Putnam, and Wiggins on the semantics of natural-kind predicates—properly
habituated to the idea that not all properties can be defined in this way—that it can be
appropriate to produce a definition of a property not by analysing people’s existing
beliefs about it, but by making use of contingent scientific discoveries. In can be the
case, for instance, that what it is to be gold is to have a certain atomic structure, even
though one would not have been able to determine this by analysing or refining the
beliefs of people about gold. To define ‘ . . . is gold’ required not conceptual analysis
but knowledge of metaphysically contingent facts about atomic structures.28 To allow
that property-definitions can be a posteriori in this way, however, is to give up at least
the universal applicability of the semantic model which might make Sachs’ criticisms
of Plato seem at first sight so compelling.
One response to this might be to maintain that Sachs’ argument does not in fact
need to rely on such a general account of the semantics of predicates. He could
perfectly well accept that that model should be given up in the case of such natural-
kind predicates as ‘ . . . is gold’ and ‘ . . . is a beech tree’ but deny that this in any way
threatens its applicability in the case of, for instance, ethical predicates such as ‘ . . . is
loyal’ or ‘ . . . is just’, since scientific discoveries are not going to cast light on the nature
of the properties of being loyal and being just. We should, I think, have a certain
sympathy with this response, even if it is not one which will ultimately save his attack
on Plato’s argument. Certainly, we should be suspicious of the thought that a theory
which is successful in explaining the semantics of natural-kind predicates can be
extended wholesale to license a posteriori definitions of all kinds of other predicates
as well. It is one thing to be told that what it is for something to be gold is to have a
certain atomic structure, or that what it is for something to change temperature is for it
to change in respect of its mean kinetic energy, but another to be told that the property
of believing that wearing baseball caps backwards is vulgar is the same as the property
of undergoing some kind of neural activity, or that the property of being good is
the same as that of promoting some kind of psychological condition—and it is not
uncommon amongst philosophers with a certain kind of naturalising ambition to
make such claims, making cursory reference to Putnam’s or Kripke’s account of
natural-kind terms to license them. What is required here is a principled method for
deciding which predicates are such that one can properly provide a posteriori accounts
of what is required of an object to satisfy them, and further, perhaps, some account of
what constraints such a proposed definition needs to satisfy if it is to be successful.
Thus, whilst we can accept in principle that there can be definitions of properties
which are true even though a competent speaker will not find them immediately

27
Or, perhaps, by the analysis of people’s concept of the property, where a concept is taken to be a
psychological rather than an abstract item. For this model of the meaning of predicates, see Putnam (1975),
p. 218–9.
28
Although this knowledge will not by itself settle the semantic questions: see Section III.2 below.

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compelling, we do need some reason for accepting that what is being defined is what
the speaker was already talking about before accepting the new definition.
Consideration of Plato’s account of justice is useful in this context because it helps us,
I think, to clarify what is in question. If one does not think that the sort of account
of natural-kind predicates offered by Putnam provides a theory for the semantics of
predicates quite generally, one will perhaps be tempted by the thought that a posteriori
definitions will be available only as the result of empirical scientific advance. This
thought accords well with the fact that its most obvious successes have been those cases
where increased empirical knowledge at the microlevel has allowed a better classification
of things—better, non-arbitrarily, because it provides the scientist with a classification
which has greater explanatory and predictive success.29 Now, Plato’s account of justice
does not fit this pattern, at least not straightforwardly. He does think, no doubt, that the
psychology on which his account of justice is secured is a better psychology than that
which preceded it—because, for instance, it is able to provide better explanations of
agency—but, as we shall see, he does not try to identify justice with any purely psycho-
logical property. In fact, it is often not a straightforward matter to decide whether a
proposed definition is the result of pure conceptual analysis or is achieved as a result of a
mixture of such analysis and attention to contingent facts. Happily, this does not matter,
since what is important is the relation between what one might call the ‘application-
conditions’ of the predicate to be defined and what is given as its definition.
We are accustomed to the idea that a sentence can have both truth-conditions and
assertion-conditions. The truth-condition of a sentence is simply what has to be the
case for the sentence to be true. An assertion-condition for a sentence will be some-
thing which, when known, is taken by competent speakers to warrant uttering the
sentence assertively (or, more simply, of assenting to the truth of the sentence).30 At
the sub-sentential level, we can likewise distinguish the satisfaction-conditions for a
predicate from its application-conditions. The satisfaction-conditions will be what has
to be true of an object if it is to satisfy the predicate, while the application-conditions
are what a competent speaker will take to warrant asserting that an object satisfies the
predicate. In the case of some predicates, the satisfaction-conditions will be the same as,
or at least included in, the application-conditions—when, for instance, the satisfaction-
condition is itself something which is directly available to speakers. Thus the
satisfaction-condition for the predicate ‘ . . . is red’ can be straightforwardly stated as an
axiom in a homophonic truth-theory for English: ∀x(x satisfies ‘ . . . is red’ iff x is red).
Whether or not an object is red, however, is something which, in standard conditions, is
perceptually available to the speaker, and so is included in the application conditions
for the predicate.31 For other predicates, in contrast, at least for certain periods of their

29
By itself, this does not show that the scientist has found better ways of classifying, for instance, the very
chemical elements which had already been distinguished, if less precisely.
30
I shall here ignore the complication that such warrant may have different degrees of rational strength.
31
Only included in and not identical with, since there can be grounds for judging something to be red
other than looking at it in standard conditions.

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use, the satisfaction-conditions will not be included in the application-conditions. So,

if it is true that what it is for something to be gold is for it to have the atomic number
79 (or to have the atomic structure for which that is the standard term), then the
satisfaction-condition for the predicate ‘ . . . is gold’ can be given by ‘∀x(x satisfies
the predicate ‘ . . . is gold’ iff x has the atomic number 79)’.32 Nevertheless, at least for
most of the time it has been in use, speakers have not been able to make reference
to the possession of this atomic structure in warranting their assertions that something
is gold, nor indeed recognised that atomic structure as relevant to the question of
whether something is gold.
Now, in seeking to provide a definition of a predicate, the theorist is, in effect,
seeking to articulate and clarify the satisfaction-conditions of that predicate.33 In some
cases, this will require no more than reflection on the commitments of, and perhaps
problems among, what are the current application-conditions for that predicate. When
this is the method employed—a method which can be properly described as con-
ceptual analysis—the definition will be derived directly from the existing practice of
speakers. In other cases, however, as in the case of the predicate ‘ . . . is gold’, the
definition is not derived from the application-conditions for the predicate employed
by speakers which govern its use. It is because of this that one can say that the resulting
definition is a posteriori, even when the property with which one seeks to identify the
property to be defined is not one which required empirical investigation to discover.34
Plato’s account of justice is certainly a posteriori in this sense, and this is why it does not
matter whether his route to the claim that there is a condition which consists in having
a particular kind of psychic ordering is itself an exercise in empirical or in a priori
psychology or some mixture of the two. What is important is that in declaring that
what it is for a person to be just is to have the parts of his psuche correctly ordered, he is
not making use of the criteria which would ordinarily have been applied in deciding
whether or not someone was a just person.35
II.5
The account of justice as psychic harmony in the Republic, then, is one which, even if
true, is knowable only a posteriori. As the example of natural-kinds demonstrates, of

32
Note that the specification of satisfaction-conditions operates at the level of reference and not of sense.
At this level, the theorist can be indifferent between the specification just given and the strictly homophonic
‘∀x(x satisfies the predicate ‘ . . . is gold’ iff x is gold). There is no commitment here to the claim that the
predicates ‘ . . . is gold’ and ‘ . . . has the atomic number 79’ have the same sense.
33
He will, of course, already be able to specify them by using the predicate that he is seeking to define, as
with the specification of the satisfaction-conditions for ‘ . . . is red’ above. In the case of a predicate which is
indefinable, one will only be able to specify the satisfaction-condition either homophonically or by using a
semantically simple predicate which preserves the sense of the predicate under consideration.
34
I am talking indifferently about defining predicates and defining properties: one can do both of these
things, and in doing the one the theorist provides the materials for doing the other.
35
Vlastos makes the point: ‘If a contemporary had been told that there was an enviable state of soul,
characterised by proper functioning of every one of its parts, only by accident could he have guessed that this
is supposed to be the moral attribute of justice’ (1981, p. 117).

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course, there is nothing wrong in principle with such identifications. Nevertheless,

any a posteriori property definition is potentially vulnerable to the objection that the
theorist has simply failed to capture the property he is seeking to define, since it will
always be possible intelligibly to doubt that by using the defining predicate one is
managing to describe the same features of the world which one was describing
using the predicate to be defined. So, whilst one can truly ascribe to things the property
of being composed of H2O, one needs to provide some reason for the claim that
in doing this one is ascribing the very same property one was ascribing by using the
predicate ‘ . . . is water’. Scientific discovery can inform us that things have the property
of being H2O, but by itself it cannot tell us that to have this property is to be water.
In many cases, as in this one, it will be possible to provide sufficient reason, but the
theorist will still have an argumentative burden which is not shared by someone
putting forward a definition of a property when the truth of that definition can be
known a priori.
This is a problem even when to accept the proposed definition will not affect which
things one judges to satisfy the predicate.36 It is particularly pressing, however, when a
consequence of accepting the definition will be to revise the application-conditions
for the predicate so that one’s judgements about its extension will change. Thus, when
it was accepted that to be gold is to have the atomic number 79, it had also to be
accepted that something could satisfy the existing application conditions for the
predicate ‘ . . . is gold’ and yet not actually be gold, and also not satisfy those conditions
and nevertheless be gold. When the existing application conditions for a predicate are
such as to determine coherent and determinate judgements about what falls within the
extension of the predicate, then, prima facie, it will make the best theoretical sense
to deny the proposed identification and allow that in using the vocabulary of the
suggested definiens one is describing a different, even if somehow otherwise related,
feature of the world.
This is the root of Sach’s objection to Plato’s theory of justice and what motivates
his insistence that Plato needs to demonstrate that all and only the people who would
have been judged to be just are psychologically well-ordered. The danger for Plato is
that even if, in talking of psychic harmony, he succeeds in describing a genuine psycho-
logical condition, he will still not have adequate reason for thinking that it was about
this condition that people had been talking by using the predicate ‘ . . . is just’. Not
only was there nothing in the application-conditions for that predicate which required
any direct sensitivity to that psychological condition, but there will indeed be a
divergence between those whom one would have judged to satisfy the predicate and
those one would judge to have psychic harmony.
At this point, however, it is important not to neglect the implication of Book I for
the ordinary understanding of justice, which is that the pre-theoretical grasp on what

36
That is, properly applying the application-conditions for the predicates ‘F’ and ‘G’ in the identity claim
‘F = G’ will lead one to apply both predicates to the same objects.

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counts as a just action is itself seen to be inadequate. If there is a divergence between

those who would pre-theoretically have been counted as just and those who are
psychically well-ordered, then, for Plato, this will only highlight what is already
apparent from Book I: that the existing norms governing the use of the predicate ‘ . . .
is just’ are not sufficient to allow the speaker properly to discriminate either just
agents or just actions. It is because of this that Sachs’ demand that Plato should show
that all and only those ordinarily considered just have psychic harmony is too strong.
Plato’s account of justice as psychic harmony cannot satisfy Sachs’ demand, because no
definition of justice in which the application-conditions for the defining predicate fix
a determinate extension could satisfy that requirement.
II.6
It would, of course, be open to Plato to claim that since what it is to be just is to have an
ordered psuche, both of Sach’s requirements are straightforwardly and necessarily met—
everyone who is such as to be truly considered (vulgarly) just must have an ordered
psuche, and everyone who has an ordered psuche must be such as to be truly considered
vulgarly just (since to be considered vulgarly just is to be considered just). Now, Sachs’
complaint is that Plato does not provide an argument either for the claim that everyone
who has an ordered psuche will be vulgarly just (although he thinks that Plato does
believe this), or that everyone who is vulgarly just will have an ordered psuche. Again,
the assumption underlying this must be that the ordinary application conditions for
the predicate ‘ . . . is just’ determine its satisfaction conditions, so that if a sufficiently
competent speaker (that is, in this context, someone who has mastered the application-
conditions of the predicate) finds himself to be warranted in applying the predicate
to someone, then the predicate will be true of that person. If, however, Plato can make
good the idea that in talking about justice, people were talking about a property about
which, even collectively, they only had partial beliefs—and, crucially, had insufficient
knowledge to be able to specify its essence—then he could properly deny that assump-
tion. Of course, it would not then be open to him to pick out just any property and
claim that this is what it is to be just, but it would license a definition of justice which
even apparently competent speakers would not find conceptually compelling, and
which, if true, could deny at least some (and even many) people’s existing beliefs about
who is in fact just.37
Here it matters with what sort of property Plato identifies being just. If, for instance,
he were offering what would be a genuinely vulgar account of justice, according to
37
Annas (1981, p. 161) claims that ‘it is to some extent a matter of taste whether we say that he has
changed the subject, or say that he has retained the subject but drastically changed the method of treating it.’
This must be too blithe, for the reason she herself had just given: ‘Plato wants to defend justice, not some
invention of his own . . . He does, that is, want to answer Thrasymachus’ (ibid., p. 160). She maintains that
this aim stands in tension with the fact that Plato has turned his attention away from just actions to just
agents, and it is this which brings about such a drastic change in method that it is not obvious whether he can
any longer be talking about justice. However, if Plato is to answer Thrasymachus and Glaucon then he does
need to show that whatever his methods he is defining the very state whose value they questioned, and this
had better not be simply a matter of taste, whatever that is in the present context.

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which to be just is, for instance, to have a particular kind of genetic make-up, then,
because of the wild disparity between the characters of the norms governing the use
of the ethical and the genetic vocabularies, we should require a great, if not a total,
coincidence between the attributions of justice warranted by the first and those
warranted by the second. As it is, however, Plato’s internalist account of justice is
crucially different from that sort of naturalistic enterprise. Indeed, he does not even
seek to identify justice with a purely psychological property. Psychic harmony is not
merely a structural feature of the soul to be defined by the relation between its three
parts—rather, it is achieved when each part of the soul is capable of ‘doing its own
work’, and for that to be possible the rational part of the soul must not be not only
in practical control but itself be properly developed. So, at 441e Socrates says that it is
appropriate for the rational part to rule in the soul because ‘it is really wise and
exercises foresight on behalf of the whole soul’, and then at 442c that someone is wise
‘because of that small part of himself that rules in him and makes those declarations and
has within it the knowledge of what is advantageous for each part and for the whole
soul, which is a community of all three parts’.
For the rational part of the soul to do its proper work, then, it must rule the soul, and
its title to do this rests not simply on its rationality but on its realised capacity for
knowledge, and, in particular, knowledge of the Form of the Good. It is this, of course,
which is ‘the most important thing to learn about’, since it is ‘by their relation to it that
just things and the like become useful and beneficial’ (505a). Indeed, it is doubtful
that ‘just and fine things will have acquired much of a guardian in someone who
does not even know in what way they are good,’ and ‘no-one will have adequate
knowledge of these until he knows this’ (506a). Thus, for the parts of the soul to be
properly ordered—that is, for each part to be developed so that it can do its proper
work—requires that the rational part of the soul has knowledge, and, in particular,
knowledge of the Form of the Good. Moreover, it turns out, one cannot have
proper knowledge of other Forms—for instance, those of justice or beauty—until that
knowledge is achieved. Plato is not, then, trying to secure some ethical notion (being
just) on some non-ethical notion (being psychologically healthy), since it turns out that
the latter precisely requires the evaluative knowledge which cannot be properly
achieved until the nature of the Form of the Good is grasped.
When Glaucon in Book IV accepts that the person who is psychologically well
ordered will not be such as to act in ways ordinarily considered unjust, he no doubt
does so too readily. Nevertheless, Plato can quite properly claim that there is a non-
accidental relation between being psychologically well-ordered and being disposed
to take other people’s interests properly into account when one acts. In grasping the
Form of the Good, and then coming to understand the nature of those other forms
which are related to it, the agent’s motivations will be changed. The developed
logistikon knows what is beneficial for the whole soul, because it knows what is good
simpliciter. One cannot know what is good for oneself without knowing the Form of
the Good, but, once one has knowledge of that, one’s understanding of what is good is,

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of course, already distanced from one’s own case: to know what is good for oneself one
must be able to recognise also what is good for other people and think of it as such. In
Book VII, the philosophers who have ‘made the ascent and seen the good’ (519c) will
not refuse to descend again and ‘share the labours of the state’, since the order to do so
will be a just one, given to just people (520e). The philosopher will know that he will
be happier left to his own study, but he will also recognise the good he can do by
helping to instantiate the form of justice in the state and be moved by that recognition.
The compulsion here is not mere compulsion: if he is compelled, it is by a requirement
of justice. What is distinctive of the just agent, the person with psychic harmony, is that
he has the cognitive ability to recognise such requirements as providing reason to act,
and the motivational structure to act on them.38
This will now answer the objection raised earlier against Plato’s use of political
justice as a model for personal justice. Accepting that there is a type of justice that is
shared by people and states, the objection focused rather on the fact that there seem to
be two different ways in which a state can be just: in virtue of its actions towards people
and other states, and in virtue of its internal structure. The concern was that these
different types of political justice look to be independent of each other, and that if
either provided a natural model for personal justice it was the first and not the second.
Now that it is clear that the kind of internal structure which Plato takes to constitute
political justice is not a merely formal one, and that a state will not be just unless it is led
by people who have full evaluative knowledge, that objection can be met. For a state
will only be able to act properly towards other states if those who take the political
decisions are able to recognise how the state should act towards others: and if this is to
be achieved, then it needs to be governed by those who have grasped the Form of
the Good. Just political action, no less than just personal action, requires both moral
knowledge and an executive structure which will ensure that this knowledge regulates
action.

III
III.1
Plato’s ambition is to provide both an account of justice, and to show that it is in the
agent’s interests to be just. If, by the end of the Republic, the reader’s grasp of the nature
and value of justice is only tentative, this is because one thing which is missing from its

38
The most sophisticated treatments of the question of whether Plato does succeed in answering
Thrasymachus—and, if so, how—are those given by T. H. Irwin, first in his (1977), and then in his (1995).
Irwin too gives proper emphasis to the fact that ‘the rational part . . . is concerned to find out what is really
better and worse on the whole’ (1995, p. 293), but his route to why the philosopher should be concerned
with the interests of other people is longer than that suggested here, taking in the idea that promoting the
psychic harmony of others is a form of ‘self-propagation’—something which he finds in the Symposium (see
his 1995, ch. 18). There is not space to deal with these issues here, except tentatively to remark that there is an
advantage in keeping the route from psychic harmony to action which takes other people’s interests as direct
as one can.

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argument is precisely the specification of the Form of the Good—and, according to

the Republic’s own doctrine, without this one cannot have knowledge of the other
Forms. Until one has grasped the Form of the Good, one will only be at the third stage
of the Line and not the fourth: one will have dianoia but not noesis. Nevertheless, in
advance of knowing the Form of the Good, even if the account of justice has the status
only of an hypothesis, it is reasonably clear that Plato expects the acquisition of that
knowledge to confirm the hypothesis and so the value of being just.39 Certainly, once
it has been argued and accepted that what it is to be just is to have psychic harmony,
it seems obvious to Glaucon at least that this something one will rationally want to
achieve.
In so far as the Republic contains a defence of justice, that defence is what might be
called internal rather than external: that is, it will be fully compelling only to those
who have themselves the evaluative knowledge necessary for being just.40 This is a
straightforward consequence of the fact that one will not know which things are good
until one has grasped the Form of the Good. Socrates and Glaucon accept that grasping
this will vindicate justice, and so justify the willingness to take other people’s interests
into account when acting, because they accept that one needs a notion of the Good
which is not relativised to the agent in order to secure knowledge of those goods
which are so relativised. Now, if one is to provide an internal justification of the value
of something, and that justification is to have any force with those who do not already
understand the value of what is to be justified, then it is important to provide some
account of why one should accept the expertise of those who will find the justification
compelling. In Books V–VII we are duly presented with an account of the cognitive
development of the philosopher, which, if correct, will show that the philosopher, and
hence the just person, has a genuine understanding of the nature of things which is
lacked by those who have not undergone that development. When the philosopher
judges that something is good, we have reason to accept that judgement, since he has
the cognitive resources to be able to know what is good and what is not.41 Even if Plato
cannot specify what the philosopher knows in order to be able to do this, he sets out
what form that knowledge should have.

39
Note that in the Timaeus, the demiurge is said to bring order out of disorder because he believed ‘that
order was in every way better than disorder’ (30a).
40
So, to provide an ‘external’ justification of the value of something will require that one demonstrate
its value in a way that will be intelligible to those who do not yet think of it as valuable, as one might
cite the fact that a university education will, at least in some universities, provide people with intellectual
skills which will help them gain remunerative employment. To give this justification for going to uni-
versity is to place it within values that someone may already have before acquiring the skills which that
education should provide. One hopes, of course, that once those skills have been achieved, the student
will regard this externalist justification as missing the point—that he or she will be able to grasp the
internalist justification that such an education enables people to gain particular kinds of distinctively
intellectual satisfaction.
41
Given that it can be right for the guardians to lie, the fact that he says something is good may not give
one reason to believe this is true; but even then, one will have reason to act as if it were.

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It must be admitted, however, that the details of Plato’s account of the philosopher’s
development pose particular and further problems for his ability to secure the claim
that what the philosopher succeeds in defining is what non-philosophers already had
beliefs about. Plato is, of course, much taken with the contrast between the kind of
illuminated understanding that the philosopher has of the world, and the dim grasp
possessed by those who have not reflected on its real nature. That Thrasymachus in
Book I and Glaucon in Book II can question the value of justice itself shows, he thinks,
that their grasp of justice is tenuous at best. Unlike the philosopher, they see only the
images and shadows of justice, and do not know the real thing. The philosopher, in
contrast, knows what it is to be just and why it is valuable to be so. Glaucon and
Thrasymachus regard justice as essentially a matter of subordinating one’s own interests
to those of other people, whilst the philosopher (if Plato’s hypothesis is right) knows
that even if the just person will indeed, and characteristically, be concerned with other
people’s interests, justice is essentially a state of the his psuche, specifiable without
reference to his dealings with other people. I have argued that given what is required
for someone to achieve psychic harmony, Plato can reasonably claim that his theory of
justice has the resources to explain why someone who is psychically well-ordered
should be disposed to act in the kind of ways which, pre-theoretically, provide the
basis for our judgements about whether people are just, and what justice requires in
particular circumstances. This should not, however, disguise the fact that Plato’s
account of cognitive development may not so easily accommodate the pre-theoretical
grasp of such concepts.
In the second of the his speeches in the Phaedrus, Socrates says that a ‘soul which
never saw the truth cannot take a human shape, since a human being must understand
speech in terms of general forms, proceeding to bring many perceptions together into
reasoned unity’ (249b–c). Even if one is hesitant to treat this speech as providing
straightforward evidence of any particular Platonic belief, it does highlight a problem
for the sort of developmental epistemology that we find in the middle books of the
Republic. In order to have the thought that, say, something is just, one needs to have the
concept of justice. It is easy enough to explain how the philosopher can have a thought
with this content, since he has a fully articulated conception of what it is to be just. It is,
however, considerably more difficult to explain how someone like Thrasymachus or
Cephalus can have such a thought. As the Phaedrus suggests, Plato could offer an
explanation of this whilst he espoused the doctrine of recollection, since, according
to this, even Thrasymachus and Cephalus would have had contact with the Form of
Justice before they were born, and so one could explain even their thoughts as having
been shaped by it.
In the Republic, however, Plato makes no attempt to make use of the doctrine of
recollection, and there is no sign at all of any commitment to it. No doubt this is a
good thing in itself, but it does leave an explanatory gap which the argument
of the Republic does not obviously fill. The cognitive development which leads
to knowledge of the Form of the Good and the Form of Justice begins with our

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perceptions of the physical world and not with pre-natal intellectual cognition. What is
required is some account of how, despite being cognisant only of the physical images
of justice, one can nevertheless have thoughts of which the concept of justice is a
component. Now, Plato might move here to emphasise the difference between the
philosopher and the non-philosopher, and deny that the latter does have thoughts
about the real thing—but then we should need to press him to show how, despite this,
the philosopher can share thoughts with those who have not grasped the relevant
forms. If they cannot, then the proposed theory of justice in the Republic will turn out
after all not to be a theory of justice at all, since when the philosopher says that what it is
to be just is to have psychic harmony, he cannot be using the predicate ‘ . . . is just’ in
the same way as we do—to express the same range of thoughts which we express when
uttering sentences containing the predicate. If what we are perceptually exposed to are
things which have not justice but some analogue of justice, then the concept that we
will acquire from this exposure will be of that analogue, and not of justice itself.
If, alternatively, Plato allows that physical things—such as people and states—can be
genuinely just, then we shall still require an explanation of how we can have acquired
the concept of justice, where this turns out to be the concept of the condition of being
properly ordered. Again, a comparison with our use of natural-kind terms is helpful
here. If we accept that what it is to be gold, say, is to have a certain atomic structure, and
that even before we knew about the atomic structure of things, people were talking
about gold by using the predicate ‘ . . . is gold’, then we are faced by the question of
how it could be that people managed this—making statements whose truth depended
upon the condition of this substance—in the absence of this knowledge. In the case
of a substance such as gold, the question can be answered by pointing to the fact
that speakers were in fact interacting with gold, and also, as we have seen, that they took
their own classification of metals to be in principle answerable to that classification of
the elements which would best allow the behaviour of things to be explained and
predicted. Furthermore, the atomic structure of gold explains the features of gold
which were used for its classification. We can allow that people had thought about
gold, even without having fully adequate identificatory knowledge of gold, because we
can appeal to the presence of gold in their environment to explain why they had the
thoughts that they did.
Aristotle, for instance, can avail himself of an explanation of how people come to
acquire the concepts of the various virtues which is parallel to this. For him, the
virtuous person develops a sensitivity to those circumstances in which an action of the
relevant kind is required. One acquires this sensitivity by being repeatedly exposed to
those circumstances and being required to act accordingly: gradually one comes to be
able to recognise such circumstances for oneself and eventually to see the value in
acting that way. For Plato, however, such an explanation of how one acquires the
concept of justice is not possible. What just actions have in common is that they
promote psychic harmony, and this is not something for which one can develop a
recognitional perceptual capacity. If one will not be able to develop the concept of

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a just action in advance of acquiring the concept of a just agent, however, it is difficult
to see how it furnishes the materials for securing the idea that in judging people to be
just or unjust, speakers had thoughts whose truth depended upon whether the people
in question had psychic harmony. Given the extreme constraints on what it is to be a
just agent according to Plato’s theory, it will hardly be available to him to claim that
these thoughts were about justice because they were mediated by the speakers’ inter-
action with just agents. There will simply not have been sufficiently many just agents to
fulfil this role. Whilst one could certainly recognise that some actions are motivated by
other reasons than simple self-interest, even these actions will not be explicable either
by reference to the psychic harmony of the agent or their promotion of such harmony
in himself or others. It is as if we should attribute thoughts about gold to people in
virtue of the fact that, despite interacting only ever with fool’s gold, they applied the
same inadequate identificatory criteria that they would have done had they been
exposed to gold instead. In this context, neither the distinction between belief and
knowledge in Book V, nor the analogies of Books VI and VII, are obviously adequate
to make clear how one can have the concept of justice, and hence thoughts about
justice, in advance of knowing its Form.
III.2
As they stand, the considerations of the previous section are intended as a challenge
to Plato’s account rather than a refutation of it: to assess its force will require a
proper examination of the epistemology of Books V–VII with an eye not to its
epistemological implications but to its consequences for the attribution of thoughts.
In any case, it is fair enough for our present purposes to ignore that challenge, since
it is reasonably clear that Plato will take it to be a constraint on his account of the
philosopher’s cognitive development that it will secure the ability of the philosopher
to provide definitions of the terms which are already in use. If that is right, then the
concerns just raised can be reasonably treated as causing potential difficulties for his
epistemology rather than the account of justice itself. There is, however, a problem for
that account which is more central, and arises from Plato’s treatment of the relation
between just agents and just actions.
In providing an a posteriori definition of a predicate, one will in effect be effecting a
change in the application-conditions of that predicate. So, in the case of natural-kind
predicates, it can be appropriate to abandon existing application-conditions in the light
of new knowledge, if that knowledge will allow one to do better what one was already
trying to do—such as to distinguish gold from other substances. Once one has dis-
tinguished an element by reference to its atomic structure, there is no point continuing
to distinguish stuffs by reference to their colour or density or whether they dissolve
in aqua regia (although these tests may still be helpful prima facie distinguishing charac-
teristics). Similarly, if Plato’s account of justice is to be justified as such, then again we
need reason for thinking that distinguishing those who have an ordered psuche from
those who do not will supplant existing ways of trying to distinguish the just from the

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unjust. We must have reason to accept that the philosopher, using his definition of
justice, is able to do better what people were already doing badly: namely, distinguish-
ing just from unjust agents.
Leaving to one side, for one moment, Plato’s account of just action, then this
demand looks readily satisfied: since the person with psychic harmony will be distinc-
tive in having knowledge of the just, so that he will recognise requirements of justice
and be disposed to act on them, any other way of identifying justice will be inadequate
to the task insofar as it fails to discriminate those who have psychic harmony from
those who do not—and, moreover, the behaviour to which other methods would be
sensitive, such as the tendency to perform just actions, will be explained by reference to
psychic harmony.
Once one brings Plato’s account of just action back into the theory, however, then
its credentials as a theory of justice become again more dubious. Although Plato has
Glaucon agree in Book IV that the person with an ordered soul will not engage in the
kinds of action ordinarily considered unjust, such as embezzlement, theft, and adultery
(something which looks very much like a test to show that psychic harmony is the
right state to explain the behaviour to which people were sensitive in their existing talk
of justice), this seems too blithe if the reasons to which the just agent distinctively
responds are those which are concerned with the promotion of a certain kind of order
in people and states. It is not obvious why acts such as adultery should always, or even
typically, have the effect of diminishing the psychic harmony either of the agent or of
other people. The proper response here would have been to say that, given his and
Socrates’ epistemic state, it is not clear how the just person will act, but that one can
know that, however he does act, it will be, when possible, to promote justice; that is,
psychic and political harmony.
Plato’s defence here must be to say that psychic harmony will explain the central
feature of people’s existing beliefs about justice—which is that the just agent is
motivationally sensitive to the interests of other people. It is this feature of justice
which made it seem straightforwardly irrational to Thrasymachus and made Glaucon
suspicious of its value. Socrates’ strategy is to show that once one sees what is required
for someone to be genuinely sensitive to other people’s interests, one will see also that
attaining that state is indeed in the agent’s own interests, since only then will he be
able to know what is genuinely in his own interests. Plato would still, however, be well
advised to abandon the idea that just action is action which promotes psychic and
political harmony, since even if one allows both that there is such a psychological state
as Plato describes, and that attaining it is the most valuable good one can achieve, there
are other goods one can have and so other interests to which one should be sensitive
in acting justly. It is here that Plato’s move to an agent-centred account of justice
misfires. He should have resisted the urge to define just actions in the way that he does,
and rested content to allow that the knowledge possessed by the just person will be
knowledge of how one should act justly towards other people—that is, when it is
reasonable to take into account their interests of all kinds—without trying to provide a

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 , .

reductive account of just action. However, we have to wait until Aristotle for a theory
of virtue which does that.42

References
Annas, J. (). An Introduction to Plato’s Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— (). The Morality of Happiness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cooper, J. (ed.) (). Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Everson, S. (a). ‘Virtue and Morality’, in S. Everson (ed.), Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. –.
—— (b). ‘The Incoherence of Thrasymachus’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy,
: –.
Irwin, T. H. (). Plato’s Moral Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
—— (). Plato’s Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lear, J. (). ‘Inside and Outside the Republic’, Phronesis, : –.
Putnam, H. (). ‘The Meaning of Meaning’, in his Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. –.
Sachs, D. (). ‘A Fallacy in Plato’s Republic’, in G. Vlastos (ed.), Plato: A Collection of Critical
Essays, Vol. : Ethics, Politics and Philosophy of Art and Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday
Anchor, pp. –.
Taylor, C. C. W. (). ‘Platonic Ethics’, in S. Everson (ed.), Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. –.
Vlastos, G. (). ‘Justice and Happiness in the Republic’, in his Platonic Studies, second edition.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. –.

42
It is, of course, customary to conclude with acknowledgements of help and advice on the writing of the
paper. Here I wish to acknowledge a debt that is more general and more profound. I hope my choice of
subject will not seem too perversely conservative for a collection to honour Jonathan Barnes. No-one has
done more than Jonathan to widen the subject matter of the historian of philosophy and to broaden the
historical gaze of contemporary philosophy beyond those texts whose close study has traditionally been the
core of Greats. That one now finds philosophers whose interests are not primarily historical referring to
once obscure Hellenistic texts owes much not just to Jonathan’s scholarly adventurousness in exploring what
had seemed the byways of ancient thought, but to his distinctive ability to reveal the philosophical interest of
what in other interpretative hands can easily seem to be of merely historical or antiquarian curiosity. The
Republic remains, I think, one of the few philosophical works of antiquity which is largely ignored in
Jonathan’s published writings. Nevertheless, it is a text that I associate with him. I chose not to study it as an
undergraduate, and did not look at it closely until I had to teach it. I found it initially disconcerting and
difficult to grasp – and it was conversations with Jonathan that helped me to begin to make sense of it and to
see its interest. The same can probably be said of every ancient text on which I have views.

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