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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 recent 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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