Justice in the State: Comparisons between Plato’s Republic and the West. Essay 5: Social Justice, the Power of the State, and Genetic Engineering
While Socrates’ initial statements about justice
in society were based on observations in nature—specifically, observations
about the capacities of men and women—his argument soon left nature behind and
turned to ideals. His discussion of the
cardinal virtues of prudence, courage, temperance, and justice provides a way
to connect ideals to practices of the state.
In addition to these ideals, Socrates’ vision of the state that wants to
pursue justice requires a state with the power to enforce its will on the
people. If we speak of this as ‘social
justice,’ we might mean both the ideal virtue of justice and not merely social
ethics but also and especially socialism—a powerful, centralised government
denying individual liberties in the higher interest of the state.
This sort of ‘social justice,’ then, involves
understanding the state as an enlightened, effective, guiding mechanism that
removes opposition and enforces its goals on the people for their collective
good. We see this everywhere in Western
countries today, where increasingly socialist governments present themselves as
virtuous, enforcing social justice on the population throughout all the
institutions of society.
For Socrates, social justice needed to involve
state control of its citizens. This
began with selective
breeding overseen by the rulers:
[459b] … how imperative, then, is our need of the highest skill in
our rulers…. [459d] … “It follows from our former admissions,” I said, “that
the best men must cohabit with the best women in as many cases as possible and
the worst with the worst in the fewest, [459e] and
that the offspring of the one must be reared and that of the other not, if the
flock is to be as perfect as possible. And the way in which all this is
brought to pass must be unknown to any but the rulers, if, again, the herd of
guardians is to be as free as possible from dissension.” … [460b] “And on the young
men, surely, who excel in war and other pursuits we must bestow honors and
prizes, and, in particular, the opportunity of more frequent intercourse with
the women, which will at the same time be a plausible pretext for having them
beget as many of the children as possible.” …[1]
Social justice also involved the state’s express
interest in births and child care. Socrates
earlier argued that men and women would not be bound by marriage in having sex,
and parents and children would not know one another. The state controlled reproduction in its own
interests. Even incest might be
permitted (461e). This control further
extended to deciding which children would live and which would be terminated:
[460c] The offspring of the good, I
suppose, they will take to the pen or créche, to certain nurses who live apart
in a quarter of the city, but the offspring of the inferior, and any of those
of the other sort who are born defective, they will properly dispose of in
secret, so that no one will know what has become of them.” … [460e] … [Breeding
must be limited to men and women in their prime:] “The women,” I said,
“beginning at the age of twenty, shall bear for the state to the age of
forty, and the man shall beget for the state from the time he passes his prime
in swiftness in running to the age of fifty-five.” … [461b] “if any of those
still within the age of procreation goes in to a woman of that age with whom
the ruler has not paired him. We shall say that he is imposing on the state a
base-born, uncertified, and unhallowed child.” …
We see some similarities with Western socialism
today. Iceland brags that it has no
children with Downs Syndrome—they have been terminated by a state that will not
have defective citizens that are perceived as a burden to the state. While the West’s new value of sexual freedom increasingly
assumes pre-marital, extramarital, and same-sex ‘marital’ unions as acceptable
and even normative, they are similar to Socrates’ state control of sexuality in
its disconnection of marriage from procreation.
The West’s insistence on individual rights is increasingly at odds with
its own infatuation with socialism, even communism for some. Either way, however, children are put to
death: in the name of women’s so-called rights over their children’s lives or
in the name of the state’s interest for ‘healthy’ citizens. Such arguments are extremely fragile and can
easily be extended to the rights of certain citizens over others. We have seen this in extreme within the past
century. In much less extreme ways, campaigns
for ‘social justice’ simply be social pressure to conform to whatever is the
current notion of political correctness.
Yet it easily becomes much more, as it was for Socrates, as the state’s
notion of the ideal of justice gets pressed upon individuals in the greater
interests of the state through socialism.
This is where we are. People have been arrested for silently
praying near state protected infanticide facilities in England. Street preachers have been arrested. People speaking against homosexual so-called ‘marriages’
or ‘transgenderism’ are silenced and charged with hate crimes. Some MPs have proposed a bill to force the
Church of England—itself hopelessly compromised in its attempt to reject the
Christian faith in favour of British culture—to indulge same-sex ‘marriages’ in
its buildings. Children are being
subjected to a non-Christian, state endorsed version of sexual ethics being
taught in schools. The power of the
state grows day by day, first along Western values of freedom—freeing the ‘marginalised’
in society—and then simply along the new values of social justice that deny individuals their freedom and that favours state control.
[1] Plato, Plato
in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6, trans.Paul Shorey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969).
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