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 noble populate (Rep112)noble as a guarantor of order in a just city, but misleading in its pretense of infallibility. The Crito, the Apology, and the Republic enchant the tension in Platos work between a payload to essential justice and to formalist legal justice. In a arranging of significant justice, rules are 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 enchantment risking miscarriages of particularity. This paper, then, is some Platos noble lie.Roberto Ungers Knowledge and Politics provides an invaluable crystalline 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 presen ts Socrates defense against an unjust accusation onwards 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 works a coherent political program of substantive justice and a limited review of a formalist theory of adjudication. Moreover, while Ungers arguments arrive in the context of a critique of progressive tense 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 resolve this antinomy. Roberto Unger examines substantive justice in Knowledge and Politics in the context of lawmaking and adjudication. Unger defines substantive justice as a mode of ordering man relations which determines goals and, independently of rules, decides particular cases by a judgment of what last is most likely to contribute to th e predetermined goals, a judgment of instrumental rationality (89). In the Republic, Socrates evokes the principles of substantive justice in his verbal cornerstone of the ideal Greek city-state. In book IV, Socrates locates the ends of the ideal city-state in the foursome virtues courage, temperance, wisdom and justice. Books I and II of the Republic deliver a vituperative indictment against a formalist theory of adjudication. Formalist legal justice assumes that it is possible to understand correct judgments from the laws by an automatic process (92) without reference to the purpose or end of the law.