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ETHICS of virtue, but as the crony of the lowest part of the soul The conclusion that justice beneWts its possessor, however, is common ground both to the Republic and to the earlier Socratic dialogues Moreover, if justice is psychic health, then everyone must really want to be just, since everyone wants to be healthy This rides well with the Socratic thesis that no one does wrong on purpose, and that vice is fundamentally ignorance However, the conclusion drawn at the end of Republic is only a provisional one, for it makes no reference to the great Platonic innovation: the Theory of Ideas After the role of the Ideas has been expounded in the middle books of the dialogue, we are given a revised account of the relation between justice and happiness The just man is happier than the unjust, not only because his soul is in concord, but because it is more delightful to Wll the soul with understanding than to feed fat the desires of appetite Reason is no longer the faculty that takes care of the person, it is akin to the unchanging and immortal world of truth (585c) Humans can be classiWed as avaricious, ambitious, or academic, according to whether the dominant element in their soul is appetite, temper, or reason Men of each type will claim that their own life is best: the avaricious man will praise the life of business, the ambitious man will praise a political career, and the academic man will praise knowledge and understanding It is the academic, the philosopher, whose judgement is to be preferred: he has the advantage over the others in experience, insight, and reasoning (580d–583b) Moreover, the objects to which the philosopher devotes his life are so much more real than the objects pursued by the others that their pleasures seem illusory by comparison (583c–587a) Plato has not altogether said goodbye to the hedonic calculus: he works out for us that the philosopher king lives 729 times more pleasantly than his evil opposite number (587e) Plato returns to the topic of happiness and pleasure in the mature dialogue Philebus One character, Protarchus, argues that pleasure is the greatest good; Socrates counters that wisdom is superior to pleasure and more conducive to happiness (11a–12b) The dialogue gives an opportunity for a wide-ranging discussion of diVerent kinds of pleasure, very diVerent from the Protagoras treatment of pleasure as a single class of commensurable items At the end of the discussion Socrates wins his point against Protarchus: on a well-considered grading of goods even the best of pleasures come out below wisdom (66b–c) 265
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