[At least once a year, I throw myself back into the works of Plato and Aristotle. Or more accurately, it is at least once a year that I find myself thrown, for it is not I that does the throwing, but something else that pulls me back into the gravitational field of these intellectual giants. As I begin my third book, this thrown-ness has swept me away once again. The last few weeks have found me deep in the weeds of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and both Phaedrus and Republic by Plato (which, of course, brings Socrates into the mix). Every time I revisit the fathers of Western Philosophy, I am absolutely floored by how much they influenced the timeline that exists between them and us. Two literary devices used by Plato—the Allegory of the Chariot as a metaphor for the soul and telling the story of the Ring of Gyges to introduce considerations of justice—have consumed most of my thoughts the last few weeks. It is to the Ring of Gyges and Plato’s discussion of justice that I dedicate what remains of this essay.]
To be or to seem. That, with apologies to Shakespeare, is the question. Or, at least, the question Plato sees as the central focus, devoting much of the Republic to its exploration.
It’s a topic that comes into focus in Book II after Socrates insists to Thrasymachus that the just are happy and the unjust are miserable. Having heard Socrates’ argument, Glaucon (Plato’s brother) steps in to challenge Socrates, making the argument that the only reason people act justly is because of the reputational (and societal) damage that would flow their way if they acted unjustly. People don’t act justly because it will make them happy, argues Glaucon; they only act justly because of the results—that is, because they are worried about what others might think of them or do in retaliation. If given the chance to commit injustice without consequence, man will take it because they understand that injustice (without consequence) is more profitable. “[W]hen he obtains the power, [man] immediately becomes unjust as far as he can be.”1
The Ring of Gyges
To illustrate his point, Glaucon recalls the legend of Gyges and his magic ring (a ring with properties that lovers of Lord of the Rings like myself will recognize):
[Suppose men had] such a power as is said to have been possessed by Gyges, the ancestor of Croesus the Lydian. According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvals, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stopping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisble to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result—when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; whereas soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom.2
Having introduced the story which he believes proves his point that men will be unjust when given the opportunity (and benefit from such unjust acts), Glaucon imagines what would happen if you gave such a ring to a so-called “just” man:
[N]o man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can be safely be unjust, there is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual that justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another’s faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.3
Completing his assault, Glaucon rests his case and yields the floor to Socrates. Socrates, in response, points out that they must focus on the state rather than the individual because the state—being the extension of the individual—will better reveal the consequences of how individuals operate. Because the city is larger, justice will be more noticeable.
Over the course of the next six books (Book III - Book VIII), Socrates goes to great lengths to sketch out the contours of the ideal state and its component parts (going so far as to define how certain members, like the guardians and philosophers, ought to be educated). Why? Because for Plato (as expressed by Socrates) the city is like the man. The city is a macrocosm of the microcosm that is man.
When Socrates eventually defines justice as unity (alignment of component parts) and injustice as strife (tension between component parts), Socrates lays the groundwork for his argument that just as injustice in the city results from a disunity of the people in it, injustice in the individual results when the parts of the soul are maligned.
It follows, then, from here, that introducing injustice into the individual (like Gyges does) causes a disunity of the soul which, in turn, defeats the individual’s ability to experience happiness. This argument, of course, hangs on the truth of how Aristotle would later summarize Socrates’ point in Nicomachean Ethics: happiness is the virtuous activity of the soul.
Understanding happiness this way, Socrates is able to land the plane of his point. In Book IX, Socrates finally draws his conclusion that injustice is injurious to the soul regardless of what worldly benefit it may bring (and whether the doer is found out or punished). Injustice in the individual is a sort of tyranny of the soul, enslaving men like Gyges to their appetites and denying them true happiness—the soul will never let the unjust man rest.
Justice, on the other hand, is profitable regardless of what harm may come to the body because of the satisfaction it offers the soul. Justice, therefore, argues Socrates, is good for its own sake. And being is better than seeming, because the soul always knows.
Being vs. Seeming in Internet Age
With the rise of the internet and its enabling of anonymity, the questions raised by Glaucon and the story of the Ring of Gyges are as alive as ever: if given the power to be invisible and anonymous, will people act civil, moral, and justly? Or will they take advantage of the situation?
Socrates makes the case that people ought to act just, but sort of sidesteps the question of what is. He answers the question of how people should act but the question of how they do act is left for us to wonder.
In a set of empirical studies in 1999, Daniel Batson and his colleagues conducted an experiment to try, in part, to answer this question: Do people aim to be moral or simply to appear moral?
In the experiment, the subjects came into a room and were given a positive condition and a negative condition to assign—one to themselves and one to someone they would never meet—and then asked to rate the morality of their actions. Through eight variations of the experiment, Batson observed people rig the results in their favor and nonetheless rate themselves as moral.
In one of the variations, the subjects flipped a coin to determine fates (which should result in roughly 50% of them assigning themselves the negative condition by chance). But what Batson observed, instead, was 90% of the people who flipped the coin somehow ended up assigned to the positive condition (suggesting they manipulated what the sides of the coin meant after they flipped it). What’s more is that among the 90% that assigned themselves to the positive condition, the average morality rating was a 7.11 out of 9 (meaning, they rated themselves as acting morally because they flipped the coin even though the evidence is highly suggestive they fudged the results).
In a significant majority cases, Batson’s study revealed, people given the chance to represent to themselves that they have behaved morally will do that even if what they have really done is taken advantage of an ambiguous situation. The conclusion that Batson drew was that what people really care about is seeing themselves as acting morally more than being moral.4
If what people do shows you what they truly believe, then Batson’s experiment would seem to support Glaucon’s argument that people only care about the appearance of acting morally. Which means we, like Socrates, have our work cut out for us if we are to convince others that they ought to desire being virtuous.
Parting Thoughts
Prior to Plato, the Greek tragedian Aeschylus (quoted in Republic) wrote in Seven Against Thebes: ou gàr dokeîn áristos, all' eînai thélei or “he doesn't want to seem, but to be the bravest.”5
Later, the Roman orator Cicero, in an essay On Friendship, wrote: Virtute enim ipsa non tam multi praediti esse quam videri volunt or “Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.”6
To be rather than to seem.
To care more about being than seeming.
May we all make that our aim in an internet age.
Because if the city is like the man and the world is like the city, then it is not just our soul at stake—it’s the world’s.
Plato, Republic, Book, II.
Plato, Republic, Book II, see 359 - 361 for the story of the Ring of Gyges.
Plato, Republic, Book II.
Batson, C. D., Thompson, E. R., Seuferling, G., Whitney, H., & Strongman, J. A. (1999). Moral hypocrisy: Appearing moral to oneself without being so. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(3), 525–537. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.3.525
Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes, line 592.
Cicero, On Friendship, Chapter 98.