Plato’s Republic: Cephalus, Polemarchus, and Socrates on What is Justice?

I interpreted Socrates’s counter argument with Polemarchus as a case for that we aren’t always on good terms with good people, some good people occasionally make evil or unjust decisions, and finally our enemies aren’t always murderous criminals or the worst people on the planet. Therefore giving people what they deserve doesn’t always work as a form of justice because your subjective opinion of someone may not show their true nature. Socrates asserts to be trying to get people to think more open-mindedly and consider other sides of arguments instead of always relying on tradition and subjective common sense as their primary sources of knowledge.

I think this passage from The Republic proves what a smart guy that Socrates was during his time. The two ideas that are presented by Cephalus and Polemarchus are the original versions of Kantian and Utilitarian ethics, which are simply respecting others as ends rather than means and trying to make the best possible situation for the most amount of people (Titus). Cephalus tries to make respecting others as ends as his version of justice, but Socrates came up with a perfect counterexample by saying that respecting someone that could turn out to be an enemy may have more drastic consequences for the rest of the population including you. Using the respecting others as an explanation for justice and ethics can sometimes have consequences.

Reading this part of The Republic was the first time I had read a philosophy piece of this level but I had previously heard about how Socrates was killed in Athens for corrupting the youth and for practicing philosophy itself. After this however, I started thinking about how he was just really annoying to the people of Athens because they weren’t good at thinking and didn’t want to develop that in particular skill. Socrates was challenging the peoples’ peaceful, passive lives as objects in the world. The people were used to never taking the time to think and reflect about their choices in how they might affect others in good or bad ways. Or how the ways of Greece may have not been going that well, but they were so used to it they didn’t want to change. Some of the passages in the book remind me of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and other more contemporary leaders in social movements that were also assassinated because they challenged the unjust norms of the time. Even if the norm wasn’t working as well as the masses thought it was, Socrates and the others were challenging what they saw as problems. It wasn’t really corrupting the people in the world, they were changing the world with reason and they were educating the youth and others on how to change flawed parts of civilization. Socrates was an advocate for progress and for people thinking for themselves, something all people should do and stand up for when times start to look grim.

Plato’s Republic shows that Socrates was a master debater; he proved that justice isn’t the easiest idea to define with Polemarchus and Cephalus, and I think he was arguing with the citizens of Athens to open their minds like other social movements. The closed-minded individuals like Cephalus and Polemarchus had their ideas “chained” into their brains, but luckily Socrates was there to unchain them even if they parted ways more confused than before. The dialectic that Socrates used in conversing with the citizens was done not only for his own benefit and gain, but also for their own good to educate them on important matters like how to treat others and justice.