The discussion starts on the level of individual morality – will
justice lead to individual happiness and injustice to unhappiness?
Socrates, however, argues that justice can be most clearly understood
on a state level. In the ideal state, there are three kinds of role to be
played. The guidance of the state must be through the exercise of
wisdom by the best citizens – the Guardians. The defence of the
state must be in the hands of the bravest and most spirited – the
Auxiliaries. The production of necessities will be carried out by the
rest – the Producers.
Justice resides in the harmony between the parts of society,
achieved by each fulfilling the role for which they are most fitted.
Thus Simonides’s concept of justice as giving each his due is returned
to, but with a clearer idea of what this entails.
This theory may be interpreted as very conservative – as support-
ing a hierarchical and authoritarian society in which class divisions
reflect natural divisions of talent amongst the population and in
which propaganda and censorship are employed (Popper, 1962: Vol.
1). There are implicit in Plato’s account some more radical strands.
For instance, he explicitly endorses equal educational opportunities
for women and the selection of Philosopher rulers on merit, not on
the basis of birth.
In contrast, Bentham’s views on the realisation of justice in the
state were based on different assumptions. His sole criterion for the
establishment of a just legal order was that the legislators should seek
‘the greatest good of the greatest number’. Furthermore he made the
radical and democratic assumption that it was not up to philosophers
to decide on the values the state should pursue. Instead the just state
would reflect its citizens’ own moral, economic and aesthetic choices.
It was in this context that he put forward the, sometimes mis-
represented, thesis that ‘Pushpin [read nowadays ‘computer games’?]
is as good as Poetry’. The best way to ensure that legislators reflected
the views of the inhabitants of the state, he argued, was to have them
elected by universal suffrage. Justice is therefore to be found in a
democratic society, which respects the moral equality of the
individuals composing it (Bentham, 1948).
Rawls’s (1971) Theory of Justiceis the most prominent work to
criticise Bentham’s view which, it can be argued, has dominated
discussion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Gorovitz, 1976:
273–276). Rawls puts forward a view of justice that deals with some
of the apparent inadequacies of utilitarianism. Thus it might be58 CONCEPTS