Plato's The Republic: A Critical Analysis

Introduction

The purpose of this assignment is to critically analyse the question what is justice? This work will include looking at justice as a conduct and character which will help me to understand the overall just society and just individual. I will be focusing on Plato’s view on just state and the character of individual he believes is just. I then will continue analyzing the question on justice by looking at justice as a conduct, which will examine the question what is the right thing to do? In order to understand the question, I will be concentrating on two different approaches by Consequentialism and Deontologist.

There is no straightforward or simple answer to the question: What is justice? Justice has been an ongoing traditional

When looking at justice as a character the person we should consider is Plato. He is one of the world’s best known and most read philosopher (Brickhouse and Smith, 2014). Plato is most famous for his piece ‘The Republic’, in which he comes across justice and its relation to happiness and argues in defense of the just life. The Republic explores the question ‘what is justice’ and therefore constructs a just state. They do this in order to explain and understand justice and demonstrate justice by looking at individual character and soul (Coumoundouros, 2014).

Plato believed and treated justice as a virtue of both individual and a society which meant that every issue which we believe is ethical comes from the idea of justice. In our modern society we look at justice as part of morality and don’t look at someone as unjust if they lie but other descriptions about the individual develop straight away. Individual justice refers to moral issues which are related to goods and property for example we say that it is an unjust if the person steal from someone or does not return what they owe

In Plato’s state each individual have a set of obligations in the community and therefore if everyone achieves them this will result in balanced and happy whole. If person fulfills those specific duties in return they will get credit and failure to do so will result in appropriate punishment. For Plato this was justice and excess of any kind, were unjust (Wright, 2014). Therefore justice for the individual is exactly the same as it is for the state, as Plato did not see as one morality being for individual and another to state (Literary Articles, 2014).

The idea of justice formed from Plato’s belief that everything in nature is part of Hierarchy. In his vision Anarchy was most unnatural and unjust part of state and therefore he did not include it in his just state. He believed that a just state exactly like our nature is hierarchical which meant that individuals should be separated into categories according to their value, ambition and determination (Wright, 2014). Plato did not believe in democracy as he thought that not all the members of society are capable of making wise decisions (Okpala,