20.1 Justice and Democracy

What is Justice? This is a question Socrates asked no less than, What is Temperance? What is Piety? What is Courage? But the stakes seem larger with justice, because this virtue plays an immense role in community interactions. Socrates acted on an ideal of justice when he stood up against the Assembly at the trial of the generals. How we treat others, and how we explain what we should do when we interact with others, makes a big difference in our ability even to live in a community, as it did on that day in 406 when Socrates made a courageous stand. The question of justice is one that is prominent in poetry and sophistical treatises because the issue is important to living itself. And in Athens the problem of justice was especially acute. On the one hand, Athens was a pioneer in the most radical political experiment ever undertaken, the notion that ordinary people could rule themselves. Originally people had lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers who treated their members as equals. As societies had grown larger and more complex, hierarchies had emerged to distinguish the noble from the base, the haves from the have-nots, the rich from the poor, the elite from the masses. <a href="https://medium.com/the-first-philosophers/20-1-justice-and-democracy-b101556ecf8">Read More</a>