Plato and John Stuart Mill Glaucon\'s Challenge

Plato and John Stuart Mill

Glaucon's challenge to Socrates at the beginning of Book II of Plato's Republic is to clarify in what sense justice is a human "good." Glaucon begins by separating goods into three categories: those which are harmless pleasures with no results, those things which are good in themselves but also lead to good results (like knowledge or health), and those which are unpleasant in themselves yet lead to good results (like caring for the sick, or physical exercise). Glaucon wants to know how Socrates would characterize justice in these categories. This leads Glaucon to the famous discussion of the "ring of Gyges" -- like the ring of Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, Gyges' ring confers invisibility on the wearer. Gyges is a shepherd who, according to myth, discovered such a ring and used it to sleep with the local queen, kill the king, and take over the country. Glaucon tells the story to challenge Socrates to clarify the difference between a just and an unjust man, if we imagine both types had the chance to use Gyges' ring: "the just man would put one on, and the unjust man the other, no one, as it would seem, would be so adamant as to stick by justice and bring himself to keep away from what belongs to others and not lay hold of it, although he had license to take what he wanted from the market without fear, and to go into houses and have intercourse with whomever he wanted, and to slay or release from bonds whomever he wanted, and to do other things as an equal to a god among humans. And in so doing, one would act no differently from the other, but both would go the same way" (1991: 37). This is Glaucon's argument, and it is astonishingly cynical: it holds that justice vanishes when public accountability no longer holds it up as a public good. Socrates gives the rather un-cynical response to the challenge posed by Glaucon's invocation of Gyges' ring that -- in an inversion of the notion that virtue is invariably its own reward -- vice would prove to be its own form of punishment to the invisible person. The wearer of the ring of Gyges would not be able to abide his own conduct if he devoted himself purely to injustice and selfishness.

But what if we replaced Socrates in this argument with John Stuart Mill? We can, to a certain degree, construct what Mill's response to Glaucon might be, from an examination of the fifth and final chapter from Mill's work Utilitarianism, which bears the title "On the Connexion between Justice and Utility." In other words, this is Mill's own direct statement on the subject of justice, and how it relates overall to his ethical principles. We must begin by examining Mill's position overall -- to a certain degree, it bears a resemblance to Glaucon's, in approaching Socrates initially on the question of different types of human "good." This is what Mill's Utilitarianism aims to do: Mill wishes to establish the ethical value, good or bad, of an action is derived from the results of the action, not from some quality inherent in the action itself. As he defines the principle in Chapter 2 of Utilitarianism: "The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness." In terms of Glaucon's challenge, Mill seems to be questioning the existence of the category of an action which is "good in itself" -- the only way that good can be measured is in terms of what in practice increases human happiness overall. In other words, Mill backs away from Socrates' notion of actions having some kind of intrinsic moral value -- for Mill, it is only the results that hold this value.

In terms of Glaucon's challenge with the Ring of Gyges, however, Mill would probably first make it clear that no such ring exists, and therefore no such person exists. The Ring of Gyges permits anti-social actions without consequence, and for Mill it is the natural state of man to exist not as an individual but as part of society. As he notes in Chapter V of Utilitarianism, "The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that, except in some unusual circumstances or by an effort of voluntary abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body." Gyges -- besides being mythical -- is just such a "voluntary abstraction." Mill might note that this is implicit, of course, in the actions that Glaucon tells us were performed by Gyges: by sleeping with the queen and killing the king to take his place, Gyges is performing implicit homage to the existing social order. If Glaucon pressed Mill further to explain Gyges, Mill might concede that Glaucon has the role that an "absolute monarch" has in the moral calculus of Utilitarianism, in the discussion of justice in Chapter V: "Society between equals can only exist on the understanding that the interests of all are to be regarded equally. And since in all states of civilization, every person, except an absolute monarch, has equals, every one is obliged to live on these terms with somebody; and in every age some advance is made towards a state in which it will be impossible to live permanently on other terms with anybody. In this way people grow up unable to conceive as possible to them a state of total disregard of other people's interests." This is Mill's response to Glaucon. Even if Gyges' ring permits him to exist as though he had no equals -- and no-one else whose idea of happiness he was obliged to respect -- society simply does not work that way. And because society does not work that way, people do not grow up with the ability to "conceive as possible to them a state of total disregard of other people's interests." Just as a ring that makes you invisible is impossible, so is the ability to behave like Gyges did impossible. In this way, Mill conceives of justice as being quite unlike Socrates' conception -- for Mill, justice is not such a perfect ideal that it is a good in itself, and good to practice for that reason. Instead, justice is a societal ideal, manifest in measurable results, and no more possible to evade than existence within society is. If Glaucon believes that justice without public accountability would vanish, Mill believes that some sense of public accountability is a necessary component of human social existence, and human social existence will never vanish.