POL200Y1 Lecture : lecture note
Document Summary
The truly just person must be someone who says no to himself. Most just is one who will sacrifice the most. Giving up what we want to accommodate what others want. There are two ways of making justice make sense. The first is what glaucon wants to hear. Justice is so great and good that it is worth the sacrifice of all other goods to it. The second is what adimantus wants to hear. The sacrifices that justice requires aren"t that painful. The most obvious obstacle that socrates faces is that they don"t know what justice is. Socrates proposes the construction of a city in speech as a way out of their dilemma. The city in speech is not the point of the dialogue. The point is to defend justice in the individual, and the goodness of the virtue of justice to the individual. In the first stage, socrates converses with adimantus.
