The Moral Sense: Ancient and Modern

Thrasymachus offers a definition of justice in the first Book of Plato's Republic. He, quite simply, asserts that justice is the advantage of the stronger. In other words, we are just when we obey the laws that have been decreed by those who have the power to enact laws that are in their own self-interest. There is no inherent justice, a right way of doing things, or a universal virtue that deserves to be called justice and therefore praised. It is all - as we would say now - a power game. Or, at least, that is what Thrasymachus asserts in these early passages of Plato's dialogue. He then waits for applause. Instead of applause, though, Socrates demolishes Thrasymachus' assertion through a series of logical, even sophistic, maneuvers, such as asking whether rulers really know what is in their self-interest.[1] Nevertheless, while Socrates subdues Thrasymachus here, he leaves unsatisfied the two young interlocutors who will address him through the rest of the dialogue. They want more than the simple sophistic overturning of Thrasymachus' definition. They want to know what justice is and why it is that we should want to be just. In particular, there is the feisty Glaucon who posits the telling story of the ring of Gyges. This ring has a certain magical quality that can make its wearer invisible when turned in a certain way. In the story that Glaucon tells the ring enables a shepherd to kill the king, seduce the queen and become ruler himself. Glaucon senses that the actions done under the cloak of invisibility are not just, and he pleads with Socrates to show him why, even if he had the ring of Gyges, he would not kin the king and seduce the queen, why he would not take that which is not his, why he would not be unjust. Why, if any of us had the ring of Gyges, would we not pursue secretly our own self-interest, get power, legislate laws that serve our interests, and live happily ever after taking advantage of our subjects' obedience to the laws constructed to serve ourselves? Socrates spends the rest of the Republic responding to this plea so that by the final book, after a long evening of discourse, Glaucon supposedly understands why he would choose justice rather than rule, why he would follow Socrates rather than Thrasymachus, and why he would toss the ring of Gyges far away were he to come upon it by chance.[2] The challenge facing Socrates in the Republic is similar in many ways to the question that James Q. Wilson poses in The Moral Sense. Like Glaucon, Wilson recognizes that we all in fact do not take advantage of others, even though there is often the opportunity to do so. Wilson inverts the contemporary question concerning crime which asks why there is so much of it and what we can do to prevent it; he asks, instead, why there is so little crime and why, when we often have the equivalent of the ring of Gyges, when no one in power is watching us, do we refrain from injustice, act heroically, show sympathy and care for others. Dismissing the Hobbesian answer that it is simply fear of being caught and punished by a public authority, Wilson turns to nature and in particular our nature as we have evolved into social animals. The blurb on the book jacket for Wilson's book remarks on his "boldly reviving an ancient tradition of critical moral reflection going back to the Greeks." In the concluding chapter of the book especially, Wilson draws heavily on Aristotle who teaches that by nature we are political animals and thus ties our natures to our sociality. I believe it will help us to understand Wilson's argument and what he has and has not accomplished if we look at how he is similar to and dissimilar from the "Greeks" whose moral theorizing he purportedly revives. There are quotation marks around the word "Greeks" here because, of course, there are differences among the Greeks and between Aristotle and Plato in particular. While marketing strategies and book jackets may find benefits in conflating the two philosophers, Wilson does not. …