Socrates Plato Vs Glaucon

Ryan Anderson
Phil 110
5/12/17
Question 1

In the Republic, Plato and Glaucon have a difference of opinion when it comes to the idea of justice. Glaucon believes that justice is something we keep up for the sake of others, unlike Plato who believes that justice is a benefit that improves one’s own life as well as everyone around them. Justice is simply a social contract theory that would have no basis if not for the existence of rules or the moral conscience of humans. If the concept of justice didn’t exist, people would be out stealing, murdering, and raping all they want because “all men suppose injustice is far more to their private profit than justice” (Republic 360c). Glaucon believes that humans internally are corrupt and the only thing
Locke’s ideal social contract theory exists before government where everyone is equal and lives in a balance between the State of Nature and the Law of Nature. He says “all men are naturally in the state of nature” (Second Treatise P15) but “subject only to limits set by the law of nature” (Second Treatise P4). In the Second Treatise, the State of Nature depicts everyone as equal beings only accountable by the Laws of Nature, which seeks the preservation of the human species. However, this expects humans to enforce these laws on each other in fair circumstances. Locke argues that while in the State of Nature two men will judge each other evenly, yet if one is in control of a government he will be corrupted by power and judge everyone else unfairly which is why Locke believes “the only pact that ends the state of nature is one in which men agree together mutually to enter into one community and make one body politic” (Second Treatise
Mills disagrees with the depiction of “all men are equal” in the State of Nature since when this idea was written down all men actually only meant rich white men and every other person was considered a subspecies or a barbarian. When the social contract theory was made, it had two groups in mind, “whites” and “Non-whites” and this social contract theory “establishe[d] a racial polity, a racial state, a racial juridical system, where the status of whites and nonwhites is clearly demarcated, whether by law or custom” (Racial Contract Pg.14). This lack of respect to the “non-whites” eventually led to “the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them” (Racial Contract Pg.11) because it was considered law that “whites” were better than “non-whites. Without the “equal socioeconomic opportunities”, “non-whites” always had to work under the “whites” with little to no chance of them surviving on their own without help from the “whites” giving the impression of a dog looking to its master for permission in any moment of its life. In the social contract “race is made to seem marginal when in fact race has been central” (Racial Contract Pg. 56) in how laws are made and enforced which influences how people react to a crime and basing it on what color the