Glaucon's View Of Justice

In the excerpts of Plato’s, The Republic a crucial concept that became presented was the concept of justice. While carrying a conversation with Socrates, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus and Glaucon, each presented polarizing beliefs on justice. Though Socrates badgered, refuted, and worked to find fallacies within their ideas, the one that fits our current society is that of Glaucon. His position on justice can be summarized with a quote saying, “People love it, not because it is a good thing, but because they are too weak to do injustice with impunity.” (Glaucon, pg.37) In this paper, I will argue that Glaucon’s underlying value of justice is based on the idea of power and that today, his view of justice fits the makeup of our culture more than
In Glaucon’s argument, a conclusion can be drawn that we often act just, not out of wanting to, but because we must to be a member of society. Today specifically, everyone is more connected than ever before, with the internet, social media, and being able to contact each other within a matter of seconds. With this ability to connect, there also comes the fact that we rely on and need each other, if not for a specific reason, just so we do not go crazy, isolated, and lonely. Being more connected and interdependent, this comes back to Glaucon’s idea that we act just and work under what society defines as morals because we are compelled to, or else we risk being shut out from the rest our of our culture. In theory, people are too weak to act unjustly because the risk of a punishment, or in this case being shunned is simply too big of a gamble to make. Nowadays, if you were to give people the ability to act with impunity, the idea of justice and the just person himself would become nothing more than an afterthought. An easy example of this would come in the form of online anonymity. By stripping away any form of identity and therefore any consequence, the internet is widely known for becoming an unfathomably hostile place, but without that sense of security, a wide majority of those people would convert back into their socially accepted facades. The same goes for people who
While it stifles the ability of people to act freely and keeps people inside of what can be called a box in this situation, that box protects everyone from everyone else around them. In all aspects, I view justice as critical to finding a balance between the good and evil in the world and without it, the unjust would most certainly trample those who try to hold a sense of morality and act just. In an ideal world, justice would serve to establish the social morality, so that individuals would be hesitant to cross the outlined boundaries, and justice on smaller levels is utilized this way, but there remains many more circumstances where justice is not so much a socially accepted boundary, but a necessity to protect the strong from the weak, also stated as the unjust and just. A portion of justice carried out today is not an ideal form of fairness, rather it is utilized to separate and protect the rest of society from those we deem to be dangerous. Justice is a complex subject, but there simply are too many examples that can be argued in favor of a part of justice being exercised to help the stronger, while marginalizing the minority, and populations of minorities especially. The idea of justice can be distorted by those who wield it, and though the ideal form of justice is not Glaucon’s, his interpretation fits