Briefly explain Socrates view of justice, as found in The Republic. In Essay

Briefly explain Socrates view of justice, as found in The Republic. In your explanation, make sure to include his views on the State and the individual soul. Do you agree or disagree with Socrates' view - Essay Example In short, Socrates argument with regards to justice can be condensed into the following dictum – justice necessarily includes helping friends and protecting them from evil; however, this cannot take place at the expense of another. As a means of building upon this concept, Socrates states that payment of debt in and of itself is a form of justice as is helping a close friend or ally. This discussion of help and aid with regards to a close friend or ally is unique due to the fact that it instantly conjures a situation in the mind of the reader or listener in which a friend is threatened by a third party and it is the responsibility of the other friend, according to Socrates’ understanding of justice, to intervene on his behalf as a means of providing justice to the situation. The issue that arises with this particular understanding of justice is the fact that Socrates goes on to state that violence is not permissible as a means of conflict resolution under any case. This of course leads the reader to question how justice is to be applied under Socrates’ definition if one seeks to rigidly uphold the determinants that he has lain out in his argument. For instance, if one understands that the primal motivator of justice is seeking to the do the right thing and if therefore seeking to do the right thing must necessarily include protecting a friend from the meddlesome or violent threats of a third party/individual, what then is the responsible friend to do in such a situation which is likely to culminate in violence; stand idly by or ignore the first dictates of Socrates’ argument. Socrates’ definition of justice further can be broken down into the wide dictum that if merely everyone showed attention to the way things ought to be, the ideal society, full of justice, would at last be realized. Although one can of course state that such an interpretation is utopian, the fact of the matter is that this definition of what justice entails is also a