Socrates' Law of the Jungle

I noticed that I haven't updated this blog for more than a year! Consequently, my reading/re-reading of Plato's dialogues seems to be going really slow, since I tend to write about them.

Gorgias is another dialogue with some forgotten gems (forgotten at least by me). Socrates discusses the role of justice with a couple of "sophists", teachers of the art of persuation. We know from high school that Socrates does not appreciate the sophist style of philosophy.

The sophists state that they empower a person to serve his own interests. This leads to discussion about the morality behind these interests. Callicles, a politician, puts down an argument of natural rights: "nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior."

Socrates does not buy the argument. Instead, his doctrine is "it is better to suffer from injustice than to be unjust", and his demonstration of this is actually quite clever. Earlier in the discussion he has established that the medical science and the system of justice work for human betterment (if done right). Polus, a sophist, says indirectly that his art can help you get away with a murder. Socrates finds that committing immoral deeds and avoiding a punishment is like not going to see a doctor when one is sick: "May not their [the perpetrators'] way of proceeding, my friend, be compared to the conduct of a person who is afflicted with the worst of diseases and yet contrives not to pay the penalty to the physician for his sins against his constitution, and will not be cured, because, like a child, he is afraid of the pain of being burned or cut".