The Thrasymachian Challenge

Part 2 in a series

In “The Moral Issue of Our Time,” I wrote that the central moral challenge of Western Civilization can be reduced to solving what I call the problem of “selfishness.” We typically designate selfishness as that grasping impulse to serve one’s immediate interests against those of others. Selfishness is most often viewed as the ugliest part of man’s soul. And, of course, the moral antipode to selfishness is selflessness, which has been viewed throughout the history of moral thought and practice as the paramount moral virtue. In sum, then, selfishness is man’s greatest vice and selflessness his greatest virtue.

Moral philosophers and theologians through all history have generally regarded the selfish man as a moral reprobate and as a symbol of the worst qualities in human nature, while the selfless man has been treated as a moral saint and as representing the best that human nature has to offer. These two assumptions are built into the moral DNA of Western culture and presumably most other world cultures as well. Virtually all moral teachers have attempted to overcome the selfishness problem with an ethic of selflessness and self-sacrifice.

My goal in this essay and those to follow is to begin an examination into how the most influential moral instructors of Western Civilization have addressed the problem of selfishness. The first moral philosophers to address this question directly were Plato and Aristotle. In what follows, I offer an interpretation of Plato and Aristotle that challenges traditional readings.

Plato and the Thrasymachian Challenge

Plato was the first—or, at least, the most important—ancient Greek philosopher to take up the moral challenge posed by the selfishness problem. Indeed, one might say that the moral challenge posed by the selfishness problem was first identified and taken up by Plato. Nowhere is this issue seen more clearly than in Plato’s most famous dialogue, the Republic.

The animating question of the Republic asks if it is better—i.e., more profitable—for a man to be just or unjust. Implicit in the question is whether it is better for a man to be selfish or not, which raises in turn the question of what it means to be selfish. Plato’s Republic is therefore the first great text in the history of philosophy to take up the question or problem of selfishness.

Socrates’s primary foil in the Republic is the sophist Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, who sets the stage for Socrates in Book I by defining justice as “the advantage of the stronger,” which is of course sometimes descriptively true. The fact of the matter is that those who hold power (i.e., those who are stronger in a certain way) typically define what justice is. Justice is defined by those hold power. Moreover, implicit in Thrasymachus’s definition is the assumption that all men will and should pursue their own interests to “benefit themselves” (343b). The Chalcedon sophist rejects Socrates’s contention that most men—or, at least, most good men—act selflessly for the advantage of others, i.e., for the benefit of those they serve. Thrasymachus rejects, for instance, Socrates’s suggestion that a doctor is concerned primarily with the wellbeing of his patients, or that a shepherd is concerned primarily with the welfare of his flock. Thrasymachus views Socrates’s position as naïve: the doctor and the shepherd are concerned primarily with their own interests and profit. The shepherd, for instance, protects and fattens his flock, so that he and others may eventually slaughter and eat the sheep.

Thrasymachus’s initial definition of justice is not prima facie objectionable in that he is simply recognizing the all-too-common reality of political life, but as he clarifies the meaning of his definition of justice he goes on to suggest that all men in the pursuit of their selfish interests can and should do whatever is necessary to benefit themselves—including lying, cheating, and stealing (or worse)—even at the expense of others. What begins as a definition of what is (i.e., power rules), quickly becomes a definition of what ought to be (i.e., the exploitation of others as good). On this view, the human condition is defined by either taking (i.e., serving one’s own interests) or being taken from (i.e., serving the interests of others).

Thrasymachus understands that his definition of justice is what most people consider to be the definition of injustice. Thus, deferring to common usage, the Chalcedonian sophist switches hats and now becomes a public defender of injustice as justice. He characterizes injustice, “when it comes into being on a sufficient scale,” as “mightier, freer, and more masterful than justice” (344c) traditionally understood. The pursuit of injustice is therefore good or beneficial for those who are successful in getting what they want. In other words, the unjust way of life is synonymous with that which is “profitable and advantageous for oneself” (343b-344c). Note that for Thrasymachus, that which is profitable or advantageous for oneself is not that which is objectively good for oneself but rather that which one subjectively wants or desires. Thrasymachus treats conventional morality as his philosophic enemy from which he nor anyone else (except the weak) has anything to gain.

To sharpen his point, Thrasymachus goes on to suggest that “perfect injustice is more profitable than justice when it is perfect” (348b), and that the always-grasping, always-taking “unjust” man is a winner and happier than the just man because he gets what he wants, whereas the “just” man—the man who plays by the rules of conventional morality—is a loser who is always taken advantage of by the unjust man. In colloquial terms, Thrasymachus’s positive rule of justice is, “take what you want,” and his negative rule of justice is, “don’t be a chump!” The unjust man better serves his interests and is therefore happier than the just man, who is typically run over by others and is wretched. This is what I call the Thrasymachian problem or challenge.

Thrasymachus’s views on justice and the human condition set the stage for the rest of the dialogue. In the opening scene of Book II, Plato’s two brothers—Glaucon and Adeimantus—take up and restate Thrasymachus’s rather ham-fisted defense of injustice as the pursuit of one’s selfish interests. The two brothers (the sons of Ariston) seek to sharpen and “polish” Thrasymachus’s position to force Socrates to offer a philosophically demonstrable defense of justice as preferable in all ways to injustice. The brothers want Socrates to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the life of the just man is more profitable than that of the unjust man because the just way of life leads to happiness rightly understood and the unjust way of life leads to sorrow.

Glaucon and Adeimantus then present Socrates with a series of seemingly airtight hypotheticals to push him hard in defense of the just life as the good and therefore profitable life. Glaucon begins his series of related hypotheticals by presenting Socrates with two men—a perfectly just man and a perfectly unjust man—each of whom will have “license to do whatever he wants” unseen by others. As with a laboratory experiment, Socrates and his interlocutors will observe where each man’s desires take them, particularly when they are unobserved by others. Thus, the discussion of justice and injustice becomes a study of human nature. Glaucon’s working assumption suggests that the just man will behave in the same way as the unjust man, particularly if he knows that he can escape detection, thereby suggesting that all men will lie, cheat, and steal if they think they can get away with it.

To prove his point, Glaucon constructs a thought experiment by employing the myth of the Ring of Gyges, in which a shepherd discovers an invisibility ring that gives him the freedom to rape the king’s wife and then kill the king without being detected. The shepherd then assumes the king’s wealth and power without ever being seen and punished. Glaucon’s hypothetical posits that if given the ring, the just man—indeed, all men—will behave no differently than the unjust man because “no one is willingly just but only when compelled to be so” (360c). Human nature is such that “all men suppose injustice is far more to their private profit than injustice” (360d). Natural justice and morality are, therefore, a mirage.

To make his point even sharper, Glaucon then makes the perfectly just man suffer all sorts of indignities, punishments, and pains precisely because of his just actions, while at the same time giving him a reputation for being unjust. Under these circumstances, why would a man choose to be just? His self-interest would clearly seem to point toward being unjust. To press the point, Glaucon then constructs a perfectly unjust man who always gets what he wants at the expense of others but nonetheless has a reputation for justice. No man Glaucon suggests would choose willingly to be just in this situation because it would not serve his self-interest.

Glaucon’s brother, Adeimantus, then insists that Socrates defend justice on the grounds that it is good in and of itself and that it also brings good things to the man who possesses it given that just the opposite seems to be true. In other words, Socrates is being pushed to demonstrate that the just life serves one’s own self-interest. Adeimantus then reformulates his question this way: “Of what profit is justice in itself to the man who possesses it, and what harm does injustice do (367d)?” And then again:

So, don’t only show us by the argument that justice is stronger than injustice, but show what each in itself does to the man who has it—whether it is noticed by gods and human being or not—that makes the one good and the other bad (367e).

Inspired by Thrasymachus’s challenge to Socrates, the sons of Ariston are building what we might call the realmoralik position against which they hope Socrates will demonstrate that true justice and morality presumably mean self-sacrifice for an unidentified higher good and which is intrinsically choice worthy for its own sake.

With the Thrasymachian challenge put to him in its purest form, Socrates then lays out a highly complex argument over the course of the next seven books of the Republic. His goal is to understand and elucidate how and why acting justly is in the self-interest of the individual, but to do so he begins by investigating justice in the city because, as he says, a city is larger than an individual and therefore justice can be more clearly seen—at least initially—on the premise that something bigger (i.e., a city) is more clearly visible than something smaller (i.e., an individual). The obvious suggestion here is that there is a parallel between what is just in the city and what is just for the individual. It is important to keep tucked away in the back of our minds that Socrates’s goal is not to describe justice in the city as much as it is to describe what justice in the individual looks like. Thus, Plato’s ideal city is just a metaphor for the individual, which makes the Republic less a work of political philosophy and more a work of moral philosophy.

To that end, Plato’s Socrates (aided by Glaucon and Adeimantus) constructs a hypothetical city or what he calls a “city in speech”—the best city in speech. I can only summarize a few key elements of Plato’s “best” city, but the one thing that readers of the Republic have all commented on and either praised or condemned is Plato’s alleged communism. Plato’s supposedly best city is governed by a small, elite class of guardians whose lives are organized around the principle of communism. The guardians shall have no private property; they shall receive common and low wages; and they shall eat together in a common mess and live together communally in shared barracks.

The purpose of the Plato’s primitive communism is to redirect man’s selfish desires toward the virtue of self-sacrifice and the common good. But Plato’s communism goes beyond the simple community of goods. To eradicate man’s most powerful selfish desires (i.e., the desire for sexual exclusivity with the mother of one’s children and the recognition of one’s biological children as one’s own), Socrates calls for a community of women and children in which men and women live together communally and share sexual relations with each other. Likewise, children are to be reared not by their biological parents, but rather by the whole community. Indeed, parents are forbidden from even knowing who their children are and vice versa. To eradicate selfishness in its strongest or purest form means to eradicate the relationship between parent and child.

(I note in passing that that Plato’s alleged communism does not apply to the city as a whole but only to the guardian class, which might consist of only 5 to 10 percent of the total population of the city. For the rest of the city, Socrates seems to suggest that he supports something of a free-market society. See Republic, 425d, 427a)

It seems most likely that Plato’s best city in speech—or at least the organization of the guardians—drew inspiration from the Spartan regime designed by its legendary lawgiver, Lycurgus. According to Plutarch’s portrait of Lycurgus in the Parallel Lives, the Spartan lawgiver was primarily concerned with solving or overcoming what we have designated as the Thrasymachian problem several centuries before Plato wrote about it in the Republic. Lycurgus’s laws attempted to curb man’s selfish “desire of riches” and the quest for “luxury,” which led, he argued, to “avarice,” “arrogance and envy, luxury and crime” and “licentious disorders.” To reconstitute human nature and dampen his fellow Lacedaemonian’s selfish desires, the Spartan Lawgiver constructed a new government and society that forced all individuals to sacrifice their interests for the common good. To that end, Lycurgus believed that children (the most selfish value or object of interest for men and women) should not be viewed as the property of their parents but as the property of the whole community. (This is also the position of many twenty-first century socialists. See here and here.) The primary moral-political virtues promoted by Lycurgus included “obedience,” “discipline,” and “service to the state.”

Following Lycurgus’s blueprint, Plato was the first philosopher to argue that “It takes a village to raise a child.” The desire for privacy, exclusivity, ownership, and all forms of private selfishness are to be eradicated in the name of the common good. The individual is to be merged or made one with the whole. The wellbeing of the city is best promoted when all citizens feel the same pleasures and pains and seek the same ends. The community of common pleasures and pains binds the city together to the greatest possible extent. The worst thing for the city is, according to Socrates, for its citizens, or at least the guardians, to speak of “‘my own’” and “‘not my own’” (462c). Thus, all things private in the best city in speech—private property, private families, private pleasures, and private desires and passions—will be eliminated. The city will be one and whole.

Plato is best known if not (in)famous for his ideal city, and most scholars and readers of Plato have long assumed that he is in fact arguing for a city of collective selflessness. Careful readers of the Republic will recall that the original function served by Socrates’s discussion of the city in speech is to serve metaphorically as a kind of magnifying glass for examining the motives and actions of the individual. In fact, Socrates says that the whole point of his discussion of the best city is to determine if the perfectly just man can come into being and whether he can be happy, which means that the perfectly just man is and should be motivated by the selfish desire to be happy.

Few readers of the Republic get as far as or take seriously Book IX, which is where Socrates finally makes the direct case for the just way of life as the necessary condition for leading a good and happy life, which means a rationally, selfish life. Socrates concedes that all men have base desires and passions (including a capacity for dark and even beastly desires that lay deep in the subconscious), which means that all men have the capacity and the potential to act unjustly and against their proper interests. In other words, there is a form of tyranny lurking in the human soul, which is guided by the mad master that is eros.

Plato’s moral teaching is designed in such a way that a man will have a “healthy and moderate relationship to himself (571d).” This means that the just man will tame his omnivorous eros and order his soul in such a way that the ruling element is his rational faculty rather than the desiring part of the soul, which is variously described as “mad,” “deranged,” “drunken,” “erotic,” and “melancholic,” “anarchic,” “lawless,” and “tyrannical.” Eros is a kind of multi-headed, demonic voice lurking in the soul from which no man is immune. (Plato reminds his readers that even the just man dreams unjust thoughts!) In fact, Thrasymachus’s ideal man—the unjust man—has the soul of a tyrant, and he demonstrates unintentionally that the tyrant’s life is miserable. The individual with the soul of a tyrant is the unhappiest of men. Such a man “never has a taste of freedom or true friendship” (576a) because he is a slave to his passions, and no one wants to associate with such a man. His life is lonely, miserable, and wretched.

By contrast, the truly just man, according to Socrates, is the happiest of men because he is self-governing, self-reliant, and therefore “king of himself” (580c). The soul of such a man is ordered properly. The reasoning part of his soul and its correlative virtues, namely, wisdom and moderation, rule his desires and passions according to a ranked hierarchy of those goods that individuals desire or value. The just man is just because his soul is ordered properly and because he pursues the highest values that lead to permanent forms of happiness. The just man is therefore properly selfish because he knows that it is in his selfish interest to order his soul properly and to live a just and life, which invariably leads to a life of happiness. The properly just, good, and happy man will “found a city within himself” (592b) to pursue his rational self-interest, and he can be happy on his own and presumably without the city.

Aristotle and the Thrasymachian Challenge

Plato’s best student, Aristotle, continued where his teacher left off in Book IX of the Republic. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics can likewise be read as his response to the Thrasymachian problem—particularly the Thrasymachian problem as it was sharpened by Glaucon and Adeimantus (i.e., the twofold proposition that, first, all men will lie, cheat, and steal if they think they think they can get away with it, and, second, that the unjust man lives a better life than the just man). More specifically, the Nicomachean Ethics can be viewed as a guidebook teaching men how to become kings of themselves as Plato suggested in Book IX of the Republic.

Simply put, Aristotle’s position is that the life of the moral man is superior in all ways to that of the immoral man. The immoral or base man’s moral character is defined by a total lack self-restraint, which invariably means his life is unstable, turbulent, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short! Aristotle’s Thrasymachian man is guided by his base desires and convulsive passions. He is a licentious man whose life is directed helter-skelter toward the pursuit of vulgar pleasures and ill-gotten gains. His soul is divided, “torn by faction” (1166b), crooked, and ugly. He grasps for more and more of what is not his to grasp. Thrasymachian man lives his life by the dog-eat-dog law of the jungle: take or be taken from.

Such a man for Aristotle has abdicated his rational faculty and its ability to evaluate, rank, and choose goods according to his long-term self-interest. Thrasymachian man is defined by his inability or unwillingness to choose well according to what Aristotle calls “correct reason,” and thus he does not do what is best for his own life. As a result, such men “choose harmful pleasures,” they avoid what is “best for themselves,” they “hate themselves,” they “flee” from “themselves,” and they “feel in no way friendly toward themselves” (1166b-19). The so-called “selfish” man does not act in his self-interest. Indeed, quite the opposite. In the end, such a man cannot be trusted and is therefore unlovable, friendless, and ultimately miserable. The life of the base and corrupt man is rotten to the core, and he knows it.

Aristotle’s burden in the Nicomachean Ethics is to demonstrate how man ought to live (i.e., how he ought to think, choose, and act) as he searches to find and achieve his most complete and self-sufficient good, which is happiness or eudaimonia. For the Peripatetic philosopher, happiness is man’s highest state of being and is achieved by ordering one’s soul according to one’s highest capacities and achieving one’s long-term goods. In contradistinction to the claims of Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus, Aristotle argues that the life of the virtuous, good, and noble man provides the model for achieving one’s long-term self-interest and therefore one’s happiness. Aristotle is concerned with achieving what is highest in and best for man over the course of a lifetime.

The happy man is the virtuous man, and the virtuous man is the man who is “obedient to the commands of reason (1102b-25)” or what Aristotle calls “correct reason” (1103b-33), which means his reason controls and guides his desires, emotions, and actions. For Aristotle, the life of reason is synonymous with the life of morality and happiness. Virtue and the good life begin by mastering one’s base desires and irrational passions followed by choosing and acting well in the service of living the best life possible. Life is defined by choice, and a good life for Aristotle is defined by choosing well, which means choosing and acting on the best possible option available in each situation. The most profitable life for a man, according to Aristotle, begins by fashioning one’s “longings in accord with reason” and then to “act accordingly” (1095a-10). Moral choice and action for Aristotle are meant to serve each man’s life in the pursuit of happiness.

Aristotle was the first moral philosopher in history to clearly and explicitly define the purpose of moral thought and action as serving and enhancing man’s highest goals and aspirations. He does not define moral virtue as sacrifice for the sake of others. Aristotle claimed that man’s first and most important relationship is with himself, and, more particularly, with his own moral character, which he has the power to construct and improve. This means that the properly self-interested man will care first and foremost about the state of his soul, which means always doing “what is just, or moderate, or whatever else accords with the virtues” (1168b-25). Aristotle’s properly self-interested man does not follow his base desires, his unruly passions, and the “nonrational part” of his soul to “allot” to himself “the greater share of money, honors, and bodily pleasures” (1168b-15). To do so, would be to act against one’s happiness and self-interest. Instead, the morally self-interested man “allots to himself the noblest things and the greatest goods,” and he “gratifies the most authoritative part of himself, and in all things he obeys this part” (1168a-300). The self-interested and therefore happy man seeks and possesses those things that are objectively “good by nature” (1069b-20).

Aristotle’s eudaimonistic moral teaching is unique in the Western tradition. His ethical philosophy was observational, naturalistic, and secular. It was grounded in watching and identifying the best men in Athens who were noted for their wisdom, goodness, and nobility. Its goal was to improve man’s life in the here and now.

The Nicomachean Ethics was a moral guidebook, the purpose of which was to instruct and guide men in the pursuit of a moral and happy life. Tragically, it was forgotten, buried, and effectively lost for over 2,000 years. In its stead, the Nicomachean Ethics was replaced by a moral teaching that taught men that to act in one’s moral self-interest was wicked and that to act selflessly for the sake of others is man’s highest moral obligation.