Socratic Citizenship as Salve to the Antinomy of Rules and Values :: Plato Philosophy Philosophical Essays

Socratic Citizenship as Salve to the Antinomy of Rules and Values It is not inconceivable that Plato would view the enforcement of rigid laws as a appalling lie (Rep112) baronial as a guarantor of order in a just city, but misleading in its pretense of infallibility. The Crito, the apologia, and the Republic stimulate the tension in Platos work between a commitment to substantive justice and to formalist legal justice. In a system of substantive justice, rules be flexible and act as maxims of efficiency (Unger 90), proxies of justice and virtue. The system of formalist legal justice secures order and stability with rigid rules while risking miscarriages of particularity. This paper, then, is about Platos noble lie.Roberto Ungers Knowledge and Politics provides an invaluable lens for examining Platos discussion of law and justice in the Republic, the Apology and the Crito. In the Republic, Plato sketches the outlines of a just, ordered city-state. The Apology presents Socrates def ense against an unjust accusation before the court of law. The Crito sees Socrates accept his unjust sentencing to death and defend the rule of law. Ungers work helps distill from these Platonic whole kit a coherent platform of substantive justice and a critique of a formalist theory of adjudication. Moreover, while Ungers arguments arrive in the context of a critique of liberal political theory, Plato nevertheless offers a response to Ungers main critique of substantive justice, the antinomy of rules and values (91). The idea of Socratic citizenship, gleaned from the Apology and the Crito, seeks to dissipate this antinomy. Roberto Unger examines substantive justice in Knowledge and Politics in the context of legislation and adjudication. Unger defines substantive justice as a mode of ordering gentleman relations which determines goals and, independently of rules, decides particular cases by a judgment of what decision is most likely to contribute to the predetermined goals, a ju dgment of instrumental reason (89). In the Republic, Socrates evokes the principles of substantive justice in his verbal creation of the ideal Greek city-state. In book IV, Socrates locates the ends of the ideal city-state in the four virtues courage, temperance, wisdom and justice. Books I and II of the Republic deliver a scathing indictment against a formalist theory of adjudication. Formalist legal justice assumes that it is possible to deduce correct judgments from the laws by an spontaneous process (92) without reference to the purpose or end of the law.