At this, Socrates is compelled to ask: “is it the part of the just man to harm any human whatsoever?” Going through some examples with animals and asking whether harming them makes them better or worse with respect to their virtue as animals, Socrates then turns to humans: don’t we make a man worse with respect to human virtue when we harm him? And, “isn’t justice human virtue?” Whoa… slow down! Socrates is doing a lot here. He has introduced the idea of the “virtue” of a thing. But what is the virtue of a horse? Does he mean its horseness? What would that even mean? A horse become less like a horse if it is harmed? Or is there some other virtue of a horse or of a dog? Of humans, Socrates asks, “isn’t justice human virtue?” So the virtue of a human being is justice?

 

Where did that come from? Did we agree to this in the conversation already, or is Socrates just sneaking it in? Aren’t we still stuck trying to figure out if justice is doing bad to enemies? I mean, isn’t it fair to ask, “isn’t it just when we harm a man by killing him if he has killed another? Isn’t it just to harm a man by wounding him if he tries to wound us? If a bad man keeps women against their will in his house, are we not just in leaving him stranded on a mountain when he seeks our assistance after a fall?

 

Though, I suppose when we think about it, it is not the harm to the person that makes our actions just, but the good that is brought to the person we are trying to help. For to kill or lock up killers is for the good of the people who we want to keep from being killed. And to wound a person who would attack us is only good in that it will reduce the likelihood and ability of that person to wound us or others. And, finally, leaving the man on the mountain is good, not because we bring harm upon the man, but because we bring freedom and respite to the women. So, in that sense, indeed, justice is not doing harm, but bringing about good.

 

Oddly, Socrates goes about it differently. He suggests that when you harm a person, you make the person more unjust. He then asks whether a person can become more unmusical through music or a poorer rider through horsemanship to get at his real question: “are just men able to make others unjust by justice?” Which, of course, seems as absurd as imagining that a chef would make a person a poorer cook by giving them cooking lessons. So, by threshing out the chaff of the argument, we have landed on a kernel of truth: “For it has become apparent to us that it is never just to harm anyone,” says Socrates.

 

Somehow, this is still unsettling. Is it really not just to harm anyone? We harm people in society all the time. Is it unjust whenever we do so, or are there circumstances where it is just? I suppose it depends on what we mean by harm. Let’s go back to our cake sharing problem. Let’s imagine that one brother is walking off with the cake by himself. If we stop him, divide the cake, and give half to his brother, have we harmed him? For we have taken half a cake away from him. And what about the man we leave on the mountain. He is harmed by our lack of saving him, is he not?

 

I suppose it depends, again, on how you see it. For leaving the man and taking away half the cake is the by-product of justice. In carrying out justice, some people will be harmed. But it is not the intent of justice to harm. If people have put themselves into a position such that they will be harmed when justice comes around, it is not the fault of justice, but of their unjustness. It is their unjustness that causes the harm. It is injustice, not justice, that causes harm to befall them. It is interesting to think of that with respect to the Bible. For the people condemn themselves through their injustice according to the Bible. Hmmm? I’ll have to think about this more later.

 

In any case, I think the question becomes obvious now. If it is never just to do any harm to someone, but a person is being unjust, how do you deal with that? Isn’t it just to remove an injustice, even if it means harming the unjust? And, if others can’t justly do harm to you, wouldn’t it be wise to be unjust, for you’d get to eat all the cake? There is something unsettling about this whole talk of justice. We want to think justice is about righting wrongs. Is Socrates suggesting it is otherwise?

 

Let’s imagine a world in which human beings never harm one another, by nature, and everything is done fairly, such that we would say there is no injustice in that world. Would we say the world is just, then? Or would the idea of justice cease to have meaning in the absence of injustice?

 

If we go back to the beginning of the argument, justice was not cheating people of money and not cheating the gods of the offerings due to them. Leaving aside the religious part, would we not agree with Polemarchus that justice consists in not cheating people? He wanted to make sure he wasn’t the person that essentially stole money from another person by not repaying it. And Socrates led us astray with his question about giving weapons back to a madman. But this would be akin to saying that it would be unjust to give each brother equal shares of the cake if one brother had an eating disorder that would lead him to die if he had that much cake in his possession at one time. We wouldn’t doubt that we had divided the cake in a just manner because of this, but we would consider that we were reckless with the person’s life if we let them eat it all at once. So has Socrates led us astray by asking a false question? Or is he leading us astray now by suggesting that it is not just to harm anyone? For what do we call it when we put a murderer in jail if not justice? If we don’t use the word justice for these sorts of actions, we will just invent another word, such as ecitsuj. Then, we will still struggle with what exactly the ecitsuj of any particular situation is. In order to do ecitsuj, should Canada make payments to aboriginals for treating them poorly in the past?
Or perhaps Socrates is inviting us to stop thinking about the harm to an unjust person as being harm? If we tax Canadians to pay aboriginals a settlement, are we harming Canadians, or providing them the chance to do good? When we lock up a murderer are we harming them, or simply turning them toward the good by correcting their habits? I think it would be a stretch to try to define harm away in this manner. What is the point of language if we just pretend that words don’t mean what we commonly take them to mean?