Ancient Greece’s Legacy for Liberty: The Pros and Cons of Justice

1. Justice is against the agent’s self-​interest, and consequently is foolish; hence a sensible person will avoid it.
2. Justice is in the agent’s self-​interest, though only for strategic reasons (mainly, as a way of winning others’ cooperation and avoiding their retaliation); hence a sensible person will embrace it. Frequent corollary: if it were possible to achieve one’s self-​interest by a different strategy (e.g., if others could be kept unaware of one’s injustice, and/​or rendered incapable of retaliating), the sensible person would no longer have reason to be just; hence the sensible person will be just only grudgingly, regarding justice as something like a necessary evil.
3. Justice is sometimes in the agent’s self-​interest and sometimes not; hence a sensible person will embrace justice on some occasions (e.g., when others are watching and are able to retaliate) and avoid it on others.

While these appear to be three different views, the Socratics tend to regard them as variations on a single underlying view. It’s easy enough to see why. If by justice we have in mind external behavior, then position C is a natural fallback for positions A and B; for anyone who holds A will reasonably have to admit that in some cases just behavior is in one’s self-​interest (e.g., when one is being observed by those able and willing to punish wrongdoing), and likewise anyone who holds B will reasonably have to admit that in some cases the social penalties for injustice can realistically be avoided (e.g., by committing injustice secretly, or against those too weak to respond in kind). So on this reading, positions A and B have an inherent tendency to evolve logically into C.

On the other hand, if by justice we have in mind a character trait – a principled disposition to behave justly across the board, in both actual and hypothetical cases – then since C recommends unjust behavior in some actual circumstances, and B recommends unjust behavior in some counterfactual circumstances, neither is recommending the virtue of justice. As Plato puts it, what they recommend is not justice itself, but rather the appearance of justice;¹ for if people are disposed to behave unjustly in some situations (be they actual or counterfactual), then even when they do behave in an outwardly just fashion, their doing so is not an expression of their possessing a just character. So on this reading, A is the secret meaning of both B and C.

Either way, then, the three positions seem to collapse into one.

No surviving Sophistic text explicitly recommends position A, the general rejection of justice; instead we find this view attributed to the Sophists only in hostile sources like Aristophanes and Plato, with what accuracy it’s hard to say.² Moreover, in Plato even the defenders of A are so only as regards justice as a character trait; with regard to external behavior, despite A-​like rhetoric, they soon prove to be proponents of C. Consider what Plato has Thrasymachus say in the Republic:

There is certainly a libertarian moral in Thrasymachus’s observation that conduct that would be considered criminal when done by private parties is regarded as sanctified when committed by rulers. But the point I am making here is that despite appearing to defend unjust conduct across the board (“the just is always a loser in comparison with the unjust”), Thrasymachus actually acknowledges that private wrongdoers are frequently “punished” and “incur great disgrace”; hence it is only for those in a position to commit injustice on a grand political scale that unjust behavior is being recommended.

Consider also the rather Nietzschean-​sounding eulogy of injustice that Plato gives to Callicles in his dialogue Gorgias:⁴

Here too, strictly speaking, injustice is being recommended not for everyone but only for those strong enough to take advantage of it (though Callicles seems to have in mind innate strength of character, while Thrasymachus is speaking of strength of sociopolitical position).

A version of position B, the endorsement of justice on strategic grounds, is found in a Sophistic treatise known today as the Anonymus Iamblichi (meaning “work by an unknown author reproduced in a work by Iamblichus,” and dating from the late 5^th or early 4^th c. BCE).

The Anonymus initially seems to be rejecting appeals to self-​interest: “we must not rush towards a consideration of our own advantage, nor should we consider … that the power which is based on a consideration of one’s advantage is virtue.” But it turns out that the Anonymus’s reasons for advising us not to focus on our self-​interest are themselves grounded indirectly on our self-​interest: since human beings “were given such a nature that they were not able to live alone,” they accordingly “formed an association with one another under pressure of necessity”; and since they furthermore “cannot associate and live with one another without observance of law,” they find it in their interest to regulate their own behavior by law. It is “because of these necessities” that “Law and Justice are kings among men.”⁶ (The idea of restraining our own self-​interest for self-​interested reasons is one we’ll revisit later in this series, with Protagoras.)

Accounting for the normative force of ethical principles in terms of their strategic contribution to securing for the agent a share in the benefits of cooperation is an approach that has been popular among libertarians and classical liberals, particularly those with a background in economics.⁷ Ludwig von Mises,⁸ Henry Hazlitt,⁹ and Leland Yeager¹⁰ have all defended similar views, and Robert Axelrod’s game-​theoretic account of strategic cooperation¹¹ is often cited favorably by libertarian scholars.¹²

But as noted above, position B seems to come with a less than cheerful corollary – one that Plato has his own brother, Glaucon, explain in the Republic:

(Note that the account Glaucon describes is inter alia a version of social contract theory.) Glaucon further asks us to imagine what reason we would have to behave justly if we possessed a magic ring of invisibility that would allow us to commit injustice secretly, thus severing the ordinary causal connection between conduct and reputation; on the account given, the answer would seem to be none – which, as noted above, implies that it is only the appearance and not the reality of justice that is being recommended.

The Anonymus Iamblichi, however, rejects the Glauconian corollary. After noting that our dependence on others makes law-​abiding conduct necessary, the Anonymus, like Glaucon, indulges in a science-​fiction thought-​experiment, asking us to imagine what benefits justice would bring if there were someone “invulnerable, not subject to disease, free from emotion … and hard as adamant in body and soul.” One might expect the Anonymus to conclude that in this counterfactual scenario, adherence to justice would lose its point; but instead the Anonymus argues that such a superhuman being still could not afford to live a life “based on consideration of one’s own advantage,” since unless he “placed himself on the side of the laws and what is just,” he “could not endure,” given that “all men would be in a state of hostility” to him, and “because of their own observance of law and their numbers, they would surpass such a man in skill or force and they would get the better of him.”¹⁴

The Anonymus thus refuses to countenance even counterfactual injustice. But Glaucon might reasonably object that the Anonymus has rigged the example by not making the hypothetical superman invulnerable enough.

Next time we’ll take a look at the third view, position C.