"And that allows Socrates to make two kinds of arguments in favor of the intrinsic value of justice.
The first comes at the end of Book IV [Plato's "The Republic"], where he argues that justice is a kind of health. Roughly, justice is to the soul as health is to the body. A healthy body is one whose parts are doing what their parts are supposed to do. Your body is healthy if your heart is pumping blood at the right sort of pace, so that your brain is getting the amount of oxygen that it needs, and your fingertips are getting the amount of blood that they need, and so on.
So just as health is of both intrinsic and instrumental value to us in the body, so too is justice, which is the health of the soul, of both intrinsic and instrumental value to us as spiritual in addition to physical beings. We're spiritual here in a very modest sense."
© Tamar Gendler
Yale Lectures on Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature, 2011
[link]
The first comes at the end of Book IV [Plato's "The Republic"], where he argues that justice is a kind of health. Roughly, justice is to the soul as health is to the body. A healthy body is one whose parts are doing what their parts are supposed to do. Your body is healthy if your heart is pumping blood at the right sort of pace, so that your brain is getting the amount of oxygen that it needs, and your fingertips are getting the amount of blood that they need, and so on.
So just as health is of both intrinsic and instrumental value to us in the body, so too is justice, which is the health of the soul, of both intrinsic and instrumental value to us as spiritual in addition to physical beings. We're spiritual here in a very modest sense."
© Tamar Gendler
Yale Lectures on Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature, 2011
[link]
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