A new Thrasymachus

What is justice?  For the current President of the United States of America, the answer to that question is directly and exclusively linked to another – who holds power over others?  In his White House dialogue with Volodymir Zelinskyy on 28 February, Donald Trump told him ‘you don’t have the cards right now’.  It follows that only those countries who do ‘hold the cards’, the USA and Russia, have the right to decide Ukraine’s future.  Similarly, the Palestinians (and the Greenlanders and Canadians for that matter) lack ‘cards’ and therefore have no rights in determining their own future.

‘Might is right’ is a doctrine that many in power quietly subscribe to, but seldom has it been so nakedly paraded as today.  It does, though, have a long history as a justification for domination and self-interest.  The ancient Greeks recognised the argument, and the need to counter it.  A very different dialogue from the White House version took place around 410 BCE, according to Plato in his Republic.

The Republic starts with a dialogue between Socrates and various interlocutors about our initial question, what is justice?  One of the early speakers is a man called Thrasymachus.  Plato’s dialogue is fictional, but Thrasymachus was a real person, from the Greek colony of Chalcedon (now a suburb of Istanbul), and was one of the ‘sophists’.  Sophists (‘wise men’) offered their services, usually for money, to people keen to learn about philosophy and the arts of persuasion (important in states that were democracies).  Plato was suspicious of them, as charlatans indifferent to the pursuit of truth, and, sure enough, Thrasymachus is portrayed unfavourably:

While we had been talking Thrasymachus had often tried to interrupt … but when we paused and I asked my question, he was no longer able to keep quiet but gathered himself together and sprang on us like a wild beast, as if he wanted to tear us in pieces.

After this Trumpish show of aggression, and an accusation that Socrates is deliberately avoiding answering the question himself, Thrasymachus collects himself and puts forward his personal theory of justice:

I say that ‘right’ is the same thing in all states, namely the interest of the established government; and government is the strongest element in each state, and so if we argue correctly we see that ‘right’ is always the same, the interest of the stronger party.

Socrates immediately begins to poke holes in this argument.  He gets Thrasymachus to agree that the established power is not infallible, and can make mistakes, decisions that are not in its own interest.  Yet subjects are obliged in all cases to obey the government, even if in doing so may will be working against the latter’s interest.

Another speaker interrupts to say that what Thrasymachus really meant was that subjects must obey what the government thinks is in its interest, whether it is or not in reality.  Thrasymachus rejects this, saying that in fact the strong are always infallible.  Socrates next gets him to admit that governing, like any expert profession, like medicine or maritime captaincy, seeks not its own interest but the interest of those it serves.  Thrasymachus regards this attempted parallel with the professions as simple-minded, and reasserts his view that rulers act only in their own interests, and that it is just for them to do so, since they are stronger than their subjects.  In truth, the ‘just’ man always loses out:

… when there are taxes to be paid the unjust man will pay less on the same income, and when there’s anything to be got he’ll get the lot, the just man nothing.

Tyrants and plunderers are often condemned,

But when a man succeeds in robbing the whole body of citizens and reducing them to slavery, they forget these ugly names and call him happy and fortunate, as do others who hear of his unmitigated wrongdoing.

(These views sound remarkably similar to opinions of and about our own plutocrats and tech bros.)

Socrates retorts by arguing that governing has its particular and peculiar aim, the care of the governed; being paid or rewarded for governing is purely incidental.  Also, a group of entirely self-interested powers are likely to be ineffective, since by definition they are incapable of acting in conjunction with others: they will inevitably fall out with one another and come to blows.  They’re also likely to be miserable, deprived of the chance to lead a good life.

Thrasymachus is now silent, but Glaucon, another member of the group, next proposes a variant of his argument, that the morality and legality are not goods in themselves, but the constructions of those in society who fear that they may suffer rather than be in a position to inflict their will on others; rules also suit the unscrupulous, since they act as a mask by means of which they can make themselves seem good while doing wrong.  But stripped of this framework of rules, each man, just or otherwise, would act invariably in his own best interest.  Glaucon’s brother, Adeimantus, adds that men only act as if they were good to gain advantage; they would much prefer to do wrong if that brought them advantages.  Both brothers challenge Socrates to demonstrate that just or right behaviour is better in itself than the opposite.

This brings the first book of the Republic to an end.  The rest of the work deals with Socrates’s highly detailed response.  Some modern readers of Book 1 find that Thrasymachus retreated too early from his ‘strong’ proposition, that he yielded prematurely, and that some of Socrates’s arguments are flimsy or faulty.  It’s certainly likely that Donald Trump, if he possessed the attention span to follow Socrates’s thinking, would simply reiterate his (Thrasymachus’s) position and angrily reject any attack on it.  This is the line taken by the Athenians in an earlier discussion of the ‘might is right’ doctrine, reported by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War.  The Melians, defeated after an attempted rebellion, attempt to persuade their victors that they should not be executed for their actions, but the Athenians simply dismiss such arguments, and assert that justice is nothing more than the interest of the stronger force: ‘the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.’

One of Socrates’s arguments, however, might make Mr Trump pause.  If all humans are fallible and prone to make harmful mistakes, the same is true of the all-powerful (let us say that Mr Trump, for the time being, is all-powerful).  Therefore, on occasion, that leader will make serious mistakes that inevitably will not be in his interest.  So ‘might’, whether or not it is ‘right’, could well end in disaster for its holder.