Plato: Temperance, Courage, Wisdom Yield Justice

PLATO'S VIEWS ON VIRTUE APPEAR to have evolved. Initially, he seems to have adopted Socrates's view that virtue was knowledge.  So it appears in the following dialogues: Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Euthydemus, and the Protagoras.  But the Socratic reductionist formula (virtue=knowledge) appears to have been abandoned by Plato and replaced with a four-fold formula which would yield the classic cardinal virtues of wisdom, fortitude, temperance and justice (sophia, andreia, sophrosyne, and dikaiosyne, respectively) 22. We find the virtues treated thus in Plato's Republic, specifically in sections 427d through 445e.

Plato's synthesis is gained by his reflection on the topography of the soul, a soul which is the city writ small.  So the city (polis) reflects the soul (psyche) as the soul reflects the city.  They are analogues in Platonic thought as expressed in the Republic.

Each city--and consequently each soul--must have three classes effectively to function as a community: craftsmen (those who produce services or goods).  In the soul, the analogue of city's craftsmen is the virtue of temperance.  There is a subordination or discipline of self for the purpose of producing the goods or delivering the services to the city.  A similar subordination or restraint of the passions, of the appetites is found in the virtue of temperance.  But temperance suffers from a certain timidity.  More is required than mere businessmen, craftsmen, tradesmen for a city effectively to function.  Similarly, a soul requires more than temperance.

Hence the need for the next class: the warriors.  The warriors in a city assume the disciplinary or enforcing occupations--the police, the military.  They order or supervise the city, have a rugged strong frame.  These are the analogue to the virtue of courage.  While warriors do no lack temperance (just like craftsmen have courage), their predominant virtue is courage.

The warriors, on the other hand, have no governing virtue.  They are merely auxiliaries.  Their irascibility must be tempered by some extrinsic measure, and hence the need for some class that is able to establish the form of order, the end of the citizenry.  What are the goals in war?  What are the arrangements for peace.  The warrior class is not fit for these sorts of questions.  There must, therefore, be a guardian class.  These guardians in the city are the analogue for the virtue of wisdom.  When the temperance of the craftsmen and the courage of the warrior are well-ordered by the guardians of the city, one arrives at a complete and full justice.

The soul has has thee parts: reason (logistikon), emotion (thymos), and desire (epithymia) with three corresponding virtues, being, respectively, wisdom, courage, and temperance.

Wisdom is found wherever reason knows and chooses the good; courage is found wherever the emotions overcome obstacles to the good; and temperance is found wherever desire for pleasure is so controlled as to lead to the good rather than away from it.

Houser, 10-11.

Where does justice fit in?  Justice is "ontologically homeless."  It is the "harmony produced when each of the three parts functions well," and in unison.

To accommodate his theory, Plato had to expand upon and in fact amend the Socratic reduction.

Plato emended Socrates' thesis that wisdom is a necessary and sufficient condition for virtue, by substituting the combination of wisdom, courage, and temperance for Socrates' single virtue of wisdom. Taken together, these three virtues are the necessary and sufficient condition for justice. Taken together, these three virtues are the necessary and sufficient condition for justice: 'That which preserves and fosters this inner harmony is called a just and find action' ((W·C·T) ⊃ J); and 'an action which destroys this harmony is unjust' (˜(W·C·T) ⊃ ˜J).

Houser, 11 (quoting, Republic 445c).

Justice is therefor a reduction of the three other virtues of temperance, courage, and wisdom.  Plato's contribution was to show that interconnectedness of virtue.  By expanding the Socratic formula of wisdom = virtue to the formula that justice is a harmonization arising from well-ordered virtues of courage, temperance, and wisdom, Plato developed the idea of virtue, of arete.

Plato

Corresponding to virtue was its opposite: vice. Though there is but one kind of virtue--that which yields justice--the imbalance that can occur as a result of disorder--whether in the soul or in the polis--is literally infinite.  There are "unlimited forms of vice," but only four are worthy of being mentioned, says Plato.  Republic 445c.

The justice of the aristocrat can yield to honor, and so the aristocrat--that man governed by excellence--may corrupt into a timocrat--that man governed by honor.  A timocrat "loves the honor that accompanies good action more than the goodness that such action produces." Houser, 11.  The wrong focus is bound to create disharmony, and though the virtues remain, they are disordered and lose their inner life, their inner harmony.

A similar corruption occur with the oligarch.  Here, courage is foregone or deprecated, while temperance runs amok.  Wealth is this man's preoccupation, and as a result, the virtues of courage, of wisdom, and hence justice suffer.

When temperance yields to an overabundant sense of freedom and equality, one has the democrat.  Here justice seems to be the desire, and yet a justice without courage, without temperance, without wisdom.  Impossibly, the democrat's justice is "but a pale imitation of true justice, for its claim to the name of virtue is that some genuine goods, notably equality and freedom, are still prized, though they are attained in more and more unjust ways."  Houser, 12.

The last devolution or corruption is the tyrant.  Here, the mind is enslaved to power without order, to arbitrary impulse, and so all vestiges, all pretense to the virtues--to courage, temperance, wisdom and their harmonious product of justice--are gone.  (Republic 543a-592b).

Plato's theory of the four virtues is one of harmony, proportion, balance.  Perfection is achieved in the aristocratic soul, where courage, temperance, wisdom harmoniously interplay and produce their desirable fruit: justice.  "This harmony is produced through functional unity, not as Socrates thought, through ontological unity."  Houser, 13.

Plato's doctrine can be summed up as follows: following Socrates, Plato held that whoever truly has one virtue has all the virtues, and whoever lacks on virtue lacks all true virtue. But he departed from his teacher in recognizing four virtues, not just one. Because thee virtues exist on their own, they can be gained and lost one by one. Until all virtues are present together in the soul of the truly just person, however, they are only images of true virtues and therefore really are vices.

Houser, 13.

Preliminary to a Definition of Virtue: Prudence and Justice

MAN HAS A FUNDAMENTAL NEED FOR a deliberate disposition of the dynamic parts of his psyche that would make him existentially ready to do good. That disposition, then, must be tied to the objective moral order (or else it could be a vice),* must be reliable, and must also be qualitative. Yet there is one more element that must be attached so to speak to this qualitative existential disposition to make it a moral virtue, as distinguished from some other behavioral disposition. A businessman may be disposed to pay his bills on a timely basis, not because he has an qualitative existential disposition to be just, but merely because he is convinced that "honesty is the best policy" and will, in the long, run more fruit. In other words, how do we mark a moral virtue--which makes us a good man--from a virtue that is conventional or bourgeois--a disposition that makes us a good citizen, and not necessarily a good man.

A better grasps of what a moral virtue is can be gained by reflection upon the traditional, classical list of cardinal virtues. There is remarkable unanimity in the tradition regarding the list, from Plato and Aristotle through modern writers on virtue ethics. Prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance are the cardinal virtues.

Prudentia by Giotto (Scrovegni Chapel, Padua)

Prudence (in Greek, phronēsis or φρόνησις; in Latin translated as prudentia) is particularly unique because it has one foot in the intellectual realm and another foot in the moral realm. It bestrides the intellectual and moral realms like a colossus. Thus prudence is companion to other intellectual virtues (understanding, science, wisdom, and art) which have only a qualitative readiness, as well as companion to the moral virtues (fortitude, justice, temperance) which have both qualitative and existential readiness. Prudence may be translated as practical wisdom, "wisdom in acting, wisdom in practice, wisdom in what we have referred to as human use."** Prudence exhibits itself most splendidly not in common, run-of-the-mill situations which may be handled by the standards of manualists. Prudence exhibits its worth in those areas where the person is confronted with unique and contingent circumstances which do not yield ready-textbook answers. Prudence is that moral disposition that allows one to take in all the factual circumstances, all the other virtues, and, through proper disposition or inclination derive the morally-mandated act in the premises.

Justitia by Giotto (Scrovegni Chapel, Padua)

Justice is the moral virtue that applies in relations with another. The "other," it may be observed, may be, but need not be, another human being. The "other" might be the community at large (i.e., the common good), or the "other" might be the Other, that is, God. In our modern focus on individualism, we have lost a sense of justice as it may related to the common good, the commonwealth, and even more significant, our duties in justice to God. "The world has heard enough of the so-called 'rights of man,'" said Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, "Let it hear something of the rights of God." Even in the Catholic Mass, in the "Sursum Corda," the justice owed to God would seem to have been squelched in the current translation of this wonderful prayer which introduces us into the Mass of the Faithful:

* Priest: Dominus vobiscum.
* People: Et cum spiritu tuo.
* Priest: Sursum corda.
* People: Habemus ad Dominum.
* Priest: Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro.
* People: Dignum et iustum est.

Translated:

* Priest: The Lord be with you.
* People: And also with you.
* Priest: Lift up your hearts.
* People: We lift them up to the Lord.
* Priest: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
* People: It is right to give him thanks and praise.

The "dignum et iustum est," which might be translated "it is fitting and just," has been suppressed in the English translation for whatever reason (which cannot have been a good one) and conflated into the vague term "right," which weakens, if not altogether removes, the notion that we owe to God in justice the lifting of our hearts to Him, that is our worship.

Justice might be further distinguished depending upon whether we are dealing with justice between individuals, justice between an individual and the whole of society, and justice between the whole of society and the individual. General justice (also called legal justice) involves the relationship of the individual to the whole. Distributive justice involves the relationship between the whole to the individual. Commutative justice involves the relationship between one individual and another individual. Rectificatory or corrective justice steps in to correct injustices. Thus, Simon summarizes:

So in the context of community as such, commutative justice is, in sense, taken for granted [in that it relates to individual to individual relationships, in which the State is uninvolved]. And that leaves us with just three kinds of what we may call social justice: general justice, ruling the relations of the parts of the community to the community itself; distributive justice, governing the relations between teh community and its members; and rectificatory or corrective justice, which is what the community must enforce when the rule of just exchange (which, incidentally, is strict equality) is not lived up to by individual citizens.

Simon, 100.

In our next blog posting, we shall look and the virtues of temperance and fortitude.
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*For Simon, vice is "a stable disposition not of habitus but of the habit type, because the necessity involved in it is subjective rather than objective." Simon, 92. Although Aristotle uses the term "hexis" to describe vices, and this is inconsistent with the necessity of hexis or habitus being tied the the objective order, Simon attributes it to a certain carelessness in Aristotle. It seems that vice relates to a seeming (objective) good, whereas virtue would relate to an authentic (objective) good. In reality, there is no objective necessity underlying a vice. They arise as a "result from a poor handling, a poor resolution of the conflict that normally exists between our senses and our reason." Simon, 93.
**See our blog posting on particular use versus human use. A Good Man is Hard to Find: Nature and Use.