[BLANK_AUDIO] Justice is, helping friends and hurting enemies? How does Polemarchus' simple definition fall apart? You know it's going to. This is Socrates we're talking about. Wait? Didn't it kind of fall apart already? In the last video I was sort of making it sound bad, wasn't I? Lets think about this. I constructed what you might call a reductio ad wierdum. I just made that word up, by the way. A reductio ad absurdum exposes an actual contradiction by implication, p and not p. Reductio ad weirdum is mm, more of an informal social affair. You take something that seems intuitive and normal, something like help friends, hurt enemies, them versus us, most normal thing in the world. You make it sound weird. Example, I tried to make out how Polemarchus apparently intuitive position, justice as payback, is really some crazy sort of monetary scheme. I wasn't following the text very closely at that point, but I think I was following the subtext. Polemicas's account of justice is connected to his dad's. And his dad's is definitely about money. In general, Socrates constructs a lot of refutations by strict contradiction, but he also spends quite a bit of time frustrating people just by making the stuff they think sounds normal sound weird since one of the main reasons Socrates is inter locking to hold those views is that they feel they are normal. Making them sound weird could be an effective strategy for getting people to give them up. By asking questions in his funny way, Socrates sort of alienates normal views from their natural habitat, that is, real life. Then again, this is also why everyone ends up thinking, it's just a game, which is ironic. But I'm getting a bit ahead of the game. Let's go back a few moments. Help friends, hurt enemies. Like I said last time, I'm not going to insult your emotional intelligence by explaining why this feels right. The strictly logical problems, Polemarchus runs into, are also pretty easy to grasp and frankly, quite predictable. Help friends and hurt enemies only plausibly equals to justice if your friends are good and your enemies are bad. That's pretty much game over for Polemarchus right there. Checkmate in two. Let me game it out. I want to focus on an aspect of Socrates' basically obviously argument. It sounds a bit weird. Unless you get why Socrates is pointing out obvious problems in this non obvious way, you might miss the larger moral of the story. Socrates isn't just winning the game. He's clearing the board for a new game. But what are the new pieces going to be? The confusing bit is all these craft analogies and craft questions Socrates keeps coming up with. Specifically, what is the craft of justice? Who practices the craft of justice? Craft, as in arts and crafts? What does that question even mean? The Greek is Techne, there should be a little line over the e there. Sorry about that. It's the root of our words like technique, technology, but obviously focusing on these etymologies would only produce an even stranger image. Who builds the technology of justice? Are we just assuming it's some sort of bizarre science fiction justice machine? When you start imagining what the machine parts might be, it's kind of silly. Socrates's examples give you a pretty good sense of how it works in Greek. The ship's pilot practices the craft, the techne of navigation. The doctor practices the craft of medicine. There's the techne of music, which the harpist practices. There's the techne of shoe making, which the shoemaker practices. There's the techne of fighting, which the boxer or wrestler practices. I'm going to stop there because you get it. You now know how to use the word. There's a slightly non-obvious usage point, however. You call it a techne if it's a technique and it's useful like medicine or navigation. This creates a kind of ambiguity that might have serious conceptual consequences. Is the techne defined narrowly by the standard motions you go through, or broadly in terms of the ultimate point? Not quite seeing it? Consider, the point of the craft of soldiering is to kill the other guy, but more broadly, to win battles and even more broadly to win wars, right? But still more broadly, the point of winning wars is to keep the people safe and secure, right? The point of war is peace. That at least opens up the possibility that the best way to keep the people safe and un-killed by any enemy, is not to have a war in the first place. Don't make enemies. So, is the techne the soldiering the craft of going through the usual motions of stabbing other people to death efficiently? Or is it the craft of making peace effectively? If the latter, it could turn out that war protesters are the best soldiers or diplomats. You see where I'm going here. We need to be open to the possibility of getting what we want in a better way. A good craftsman should know how to use his tools. Also know when to use them and not. And when to get better tools to do the job better. Nobody puts up a statue to the guy who is best at solving every problem with a hammer, because that was the only tool he had. But we put up statues to soldiers. But maybe soldiers are guys who solve too many problems with a hammer. It's the only tool they have. You see the relevance to Polemarchus' case, I take it? I really said it already. Maybe fighting is not the best way to do it? More specifically, for Polemarchus, fighting is a virtuous technique. When he thinks about what virtue is, he sees someone fighting. You fight for justice, obviously, but this raises a question. Is there maybe a better technique for achieving justice than regarding it as a form of martial arts? This comes out through a series of questions in which Socrates battles Polemarchus about what use justice is in time of peace. Obviously, you want to say something about that. Justice is a sort of harmony. So it must go with peace. Thus Socrates asks, who truly practices the techne of justice? That is, the craft of justice. In English, this question sounds very weird. Help! Help! An injustice has been done, is there a practitioner of justice in the house? Like I said, weird. You could say lawyers. That's not quite right. Lawyers practice law, further more lawyers are hired guns, they work for the client innocent or guilty, not for justice. And you could say judges, that's still too black letter. Judges, at least in a modern setting, aren't supposed to decide what's just. They're supposed to read the law and determine what's legal. Alright then. Politicians, lawmakers, who are we kidding? If politicians have a craft, it's the craft of politics and a very crafty craft that is. Also, politicians, like lawyers, tend to be partisans. They take a side, they don't rise above all that. The police? They arrest people and hand them over to the justice system. Who does that leave us? I don't know, Batman, Superman, I'm serious here. Okay, I'm joking, but in a serious way. Who practices the techne of justice? If anyone practices justice as such, it's presumably going to be members of a group called oh say, the Justice League, and yet, in the whole history of superhero comics, and I would know, you know what one superpower no one has ever, ever had? Justice. That's what the power of justice, it has never occurred to any writer in all these years to give someone the superpower of just plain being super-just. Practicing justice on the streets of Recipro City, the Justifier and his youthful sidekick Appropriateness Lad make sure everyone gets their due. Or at least that everything looks fair and balanced. Thank you, the Justifier. You've saved the day again. Your solution was just. And without your help, we never would have seen it. Now we can live together in harmony, where before we were doomed to strife. Thank you, Appropriateness Lad, your sense of balance is exquisite. We agreed, you made everything come out even. Sometimes they team up with Agony Aunt, who swoops down to solve peoples personal problems. But can you buy my exciting comic on the rack? No, you can not. In no super hero comic has everyone ever been bitten by a radioactive philosopher and developed a tingling justice sense that allows them to detect the presence of injustice with supreme super human accuracy. Nope. Instead, they just get better at bashing the other guy over the head. But the techne of bashing other people over the head can obviously be used for justice or injustice. These superpowers, supertechnes, have nothing inherently to do with justice. In the comics, two things just go together. Power and goodness. Really, maybe it's three. Power, and goodness, and honor. Superman is a symbol of justice, if might makes right. Not in a bad Polemarchus way, in a good way. What does this have to do with Polemarchus? Well. He wants his life to be like that, like for Superman. More specifically, he wants this, us versus them. That should be this. Power and goodness and honor. They all fit together, not necessarily, but naturally within this larger social scene. Polemarchus doesn't want life to be easy. I'm not saying that. He's willing to fight and only the brave deserve the fair. But he doesn't want his shield to break into moral pieces. He wants to trust this. He needs a shield. Maybe it's the flip side of that coin that I showed you before. Let's make it into a quiz. I won't bother activating the In Video quiz system. You're on the honor system here. Okay, pencils out. You see this guy? Hero or villain? Feel free to pause the video to study the details carefully. You got it right, didn't you? He's a villain. There, I gave it away, but there are lots of clues, right down to the color scheme. Bad guys wear secondary colors, like green and purple. The good guys tend to wear primary colors. Blue and red are very popular options. Okay, okay, I know it's more complicated. The stories aren't always totally cheesy like that. But let's first try to get a handle on the simple version of myth. Given that it's obvious who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. Given that it's obvious what needs to be done. Stop that villain. There isn't any need for a tingling Justice Sense. Superheroes deal with situations in which it's obvious what needs to be done and in which conveniently, because this is the fun part. Strength is what we need to get the job done, and friends, super-friends, like I said. Might makes right in a good, friendly way. Let me put it one last way thereby connecting this thread up with Euthethro and with Minot. One of the fantasies of super hero comics is that the villains want what is bad. That makes them easy to pick out of crowd, even if they weren't already wearing purple and green tights. It also, makes them easy to parody. Because who are we kidding? No one wants what is bad, not as such, not under that description. Everyone wants what they think is good. We went over this in Euthyphro and Minot, and now we're going over it again. But it's important. Walk down the street. Do you see anyone in the purple jumpsuit waving an evil death ray? No. Everyone looks kind of the same, and the thing that brings them into conflict is not that they want different things, although they do, but in the sense that they all want the same thing. They're all competing for goods, but also competing to be good. They're going to fight over money, sure, and power. But they're also going to fight over who gets to be the good guy. The hard part, the thing we need a tingling justice sense for, is dealing with this regular old street scene. If justice were obviously us versus them, and they were all wearing purple, things would get simple real fast. If justice is beating up them, we've got tools for that kind of job. But if justice is just us, how do you figure out who's really good and who's really evil if no one is actually saying, I'm evil? And how do change their minds once our tingling justice sense has done super diagnostic work. Back to the dialog. Polemarchus says justice is helping friends and hurting enemies. Socrates blows up Polemarchus' definition by asking him the most dead obvious question. You shouldn't stick with your friends if they're really bad, right? Or harm your enemies if they're really good? Oh, no Socrates. So justice is helping the good and hurting the bad, which is obviously a totally different game than them versus us, friend versus enemy, which is what we started with. Polemarchus tries to hold it together by saying that presumably we make friends with those we think are good and we become enemies with those we think are bad. But again, it's pretty obvious what's wrong with this, it's backwards. In real life, you get your friends, your family and you come to think they are good and that their enemies are bad. You think your dad is the worlds greatest dad because he's your dad. You didn't pick him out of a line up of possible dads on the grounds that he was the best. So why is this interesting? It might seem that what I've done is spend an entire video demonstrating that if you seriously expect the world to look like this you're probably kind of naive. So Polemarchus is kind of naive. Why so many words and cartoons to explain that life is a little bit more complicated? That's the next video, but here's the short version. Polemarchus and Cephalus, these guys, they have one advantage over their obviously unworkable accounts of justice. They're really interesting these guys. >> Cut
