Why Be Moral?

Abstract

In the second book of Plato’s Republic Glaucon, discontent with Socrates’ defence of the claim that living a just life is more rewarding to a just man than living an unjust life is to an unjust man, challenges Socrates with the following “contractarian” view of justice: justice is a “compromise between the ideal of doing wrong without having to pay for it, and the worst situation, which is having wrong done to one while lacking the means to exact compensation”; such a compromise is reasonable insofar as most people can neither hope for the ideal outcome nor avoid the worst (they are more likely to lose by suffering injustice than they are to gain by doing it); still, the life of an unjust man who does wrong whenever it pays off, is more advantageous than the life of a just man, hence even the just person would choose to be unjust if only there were no danger of being caught and penalized. The aim of this paper is a modest one: it is to show that some recent attempts to justify the choice of a moral life (or character) by appeal to its beneficial consequences (i.e. instrumentally) fail to undermine Glaucon’s claim that a rational person would prefer a choice of the apparent moral life to a choice of the moral life proper.