So far in my discussion of the Laws I have left the means by which the laws promote virtue vague and unspecified, apart from suggesting that ‘‘slavery to reason’’ and the subjugation of the appetites are somehow involved. And this has left the most pressing question open: what kind of obedience to the law is attained in Magnesia, and how does that obedience relate to being virtuous?
One way of sharpening the question is to look at what sort of obedience might not be virtuous. Here is the kind of obedience that I originally questioned in this respect: that the citizens obey the laws without really wanting to. In other words:
(i) The citizens follow the rules out of coercion, rather than desiring what the law demands as something good.
The identification of law with reason, however, and the emphasis throughout the Laws on the effects of education and law on the desires and emotions suggest that a distinct kind of worrisome obedience may be in play, that the citizens may obey the law without understanding it. In other words:
(ii) The citizens are habituated by the shaping of their desires and pleasures to obey the law, rather than understanding why what the law commands is good.
Virtue, for Plato, as is clear from the passages I have already cited, involves life under the authority of reason. This seems fine for those with sufficient rational capacity to understand exactly why they live as they do. But will the citizens of Magnesia have this capacity? This question turns out to be crucial for the overall success of the regime of the Laws on its own terms. How exactly will the citizens avoid nonvirtuous obedience?
The interlocutors of the Laws address this question through Plato’s major innovation in legal theory. The laws will have attached to them ‘‘preludes’’ or prefaces that explain the reasoning behind the law (718b-724b). If the prelude is successful, the coercive part of the law, the part threatening punishment, will be unnecessary. It seems to be assumed, however, that the coercive part must always remain in place regardless. For example, the interlocutors set a law for Magnesia that one must marry before age 35, on penalty of yearly fines. This prescription, threatening punishment if not followed, is prefaced by an explanation of the role that marriage plays in the best life - namely, by securing immortality through procreation (721b-e).
The analogy that the Athenian uses to explain the preludes is a comparison between ‘‘slave doctors’’ and ‘‘free doctors.’’ Slave doctors are slaves and have slaves for patients. A slave doctor gives no account of their patient’s condition or their treatment, but ‘‘like a tyrant’’ prescribes what he judges best and rushes off without further explanation. The free doctor, a free man who treats free men, investigates the condition of his patient, and tries so far as is possible to give explanations and ‘‘to teach [didaskei]’ the patient, so that he does not begin treatment until he has persuaded the patient and obtained his consent (720b8-e2). In a later passage referring back to this one, the Athenian describes the free doctor as ‘‘nearly philosophizing’’ when he talks with his patient, as ‘‘practically educating’’ him as if he were being trained to become a doctor (857c2-e5).
The doctor analogy strongly suggests that the preludes to the laws are to persuade the citizens by appeal to their reason, so that their own reason is brought into accord with the reason embodied in the law. To some extent, the preludes we find in the Laws bear out this goal. The prelude to the laws against impiety in Laws 10, for example, is a series of fairly sophisticated theological arguments apparently designed to convince the citizens that the theological theses ordained by the state (that gods exist, are good and cannot be bought off) are actually correct (888a-907c). Likewise, we find philosophical discussions - meant for the citizens to understand - of the distinction between voluntary and involuntary, as well as the nature of justice and injustice (861d-864c). It is also clear enough, given the nature of virtue and the goal of the law to promote it, that rational understanding ought to be sought where possible.
It is less clear, however, how much rational persuasion is actually sought and achieved by the preludes we find in the Laws. Our first sign that something is amiss is that the chief interlocutors, Cleinias and Megillus, get lost in the midst of the sophisticated theological arguments of book 10 (892 dff.). If the interlocutors cannot follow the argument and so be rationally persuaded, why should we think that many or most of the citizens will? There is furthermore an often noticed gap between the preludes as described in the doctor passages and the actual preludes the interlocutors attach to the laws. In addition to (a) the philosophical preludes I have mentioned, we also find (b) sermon-like exhortations, explaining the role of obedience to the law in the good life. The prelude to the law that one must marry before age 35 is an instance of this; it gives a hortatory description of the role procreation has in a good life, and explains that it achieves a certain kind of immortality (721b-e). The ‘‘general prelude’’ to the whole law code, found in book 5, is an even better example: here we find the passages cited above about the relation between the law and reason and the importance of reason and obedience to it in the best life. And further, there are preludes consisting of (c) simple rhetorical flourishes, praising or condemning the behavior in question, as for instance the prelude to the law restricting hunting exclusively to hunting quadrupeds (823e-824b), as well as the preludes to the laws about temple-robbing (854b-c), beatings (879c-880a), and fraud (916d-917b). Lastly, we find (d) preludes threatening punishment after death, as in the laws against injustice (870e, 872e). (The laws themselves threaten bodily punishment, exile, or fines.)
How should we understand the gap between the preludes as they are described in the doctor analogy and the preludes that the interlocutors actually attach to the laws? One possibility is that the doctor analogy describes a certain ideal of the role of law in producing virtue, an ideal that often must be compromised in light of the actual rational capacities citizens have (Laks 2000). Another possibility is to argue that virtue in the Laws has a lower bar than we find in other dialogues, and consists of a fairly low-level rational grasp of good (Bobonich 2002). This fits well with much of the language in the Laws that suggests that virtue can be attained with a true belief about what is good (and a sincere desire for it), as opposed to full-fledged knowledge or understanding (Leg. 653b-c, 654b-d, 659d-e). A citizen persuaded by the prelude to the law concerning marriage, for example, would have a correct belief that he ought to get married, along with some understanding of why he ought to do it: because procreation helps him attain immortality. The prelude thus may not require excellence in reasoning to the highest degree, but it will involve some low-level rational grasp of the relevant good.
One might worry that the conception of virtue that the preludes help achieve on this latter view, consisting as it does of a fairly unsophisticated grasp of the good, is a weak or limpid conception of virtue. After all, virtue involves the rule of reason, and reason seems to involve real understanding and not simply the unreflective behavior one might expect from someone with a correct belief about how to live and a sincere desire to live that way, even if in some cases they have a crude justification for that belief. Crude and roughly correct justifications are awfully easy to find: for instance, a person who gets married because he has an idea this would make him happy may well have a low-level grasp of the good of marriage; similarly, a soldier who fights because he judges his native political order to be a good thing. But such a grasp of the good seems not to demonstrate much in the way of human excellence, much less excellence in reasoning. So while the view does successfully provide an account of how a citizen of Magnesia may have some grasp of the good, and so is not simply an obedient robot, the virtue indicated looks substandard or at least very ordinary. The inadequacy of this type of virtue to grasp and secure the overall aim of the city is made explicit late in the Laws, when the Nocturnal Council is said to provide the expert knowledge and surpassing virtue needed (962b; 964b; cf. 632c). Those with merely common virtue (demosia arete) are thus not capable of ruling the entire city (968a). Virtue thus seems to have two levels in the Laws, the ordinary subexpert level, and the level attained by members of the Nocturnal Council.
There is a further difficulty, however, for those who think that the preludes in principle give the rational understanding needed for authentic virtue, and that is that there is a certain lack of connection between the general exhortations of the preludes to the good life and the enormous detail and specificity demanded by the laws themselves. The Laws as a whole contains far more in the way of regulative detail than it contains explanation or justification of those regulations. This means that the citizens may obey the laws willingly, understanding the importance of law and of reason generally, but they will not understand the specific rules they are commanded to follow. The prelude about marriage (that reproduction provides a share in immortality and so a key human good) may well convince the citizens that they ought marry. But how will it convince them that they ought to marry before age 35? And likewise with many of the detailed laws about inheritance, buying and selling, hunting and fishing, and so on found in the dialogue. The ‘‘general prelude’’ to the law code found in book 5 is particularly worrisome on this point. It may convince the citizens that they ought to honor the soul and follow reason in the form of laws, but how does it explain to them that reason demands the particular laws that follow? These features of the preludes raise the disturbing specter that the preludes encourage citizens to obedience generally, without giving much of an explanation of why they ought to obey in these particular and very specific ways.
That the preludes simply soften up citizens into an obedient frame of mind is supported both by the fact that the preludes are meant as preparations for the law itself, and by the dual function of law as both persuasive and compulsive. The preludes are not sufficient on their own, or self-standing without their coercive counterparts, on this view, because they are not capable of justifying the specific types of obedience that the laws command, but only obedience generally. Hence the worry: that the persuasion provided by the preludes is a persuasion to obey whatever laws the lawgivers hand down, and not persuasion that these laws in particular provide the goods promised.
Both worries about the preludes can be generalized in the following way. If the preludes do not produce rational understanding, or if they do so only at a crude level, to obey laws for the sake of the ideal of a certain kind of rational life may yet mean to obey laws that one does not oneself understand. Life under the authority of reason, then, might mean life in obedience to someone else’s reason, as is suggested in the final parts of the Republic (590a-e). Indeed, even the seemingly optimistic analogy of the lawgiver to a doctor that we saw in the discussion of the preludes could suggest that the citizens of Magnesia are not themselves the source of the rational understanding that guides their lives, any more than the free patient could heal himself on his own.
If it is correct that the grasp of the good sought for the citizens of the Laws is very general, so that obedience is judged to be good even without detailed understanding of what sort of obedience is best, this might help to explain why, in the Statesman, obedience to ordinary laws is also praised. The Statesman's praise of obedience to the law even in cities with ordinary laws has puzzled commentators (see C. Rowe 1995, 2000a). After all, given the suspect sources of these laws, in ordinary common sense and the commonplace wisdom of the village elder (Plt. 300b1-5) why should these regimes be praised? What good - from the perspective of Platonic perfectionism - could obedience to ordinary laws obtain?
There are clear parallels between the Statesman's praise of obedience to laws as such and the inculcation of general obedience, as sought by the general prelude of Laws 5, in Magnesia. In both cases, one constrains one's appetites in accordance with public, general rules that aim at least roughly at some good. (A key difference will be that in the Statesman, this good is factional - hence the leaders even of lawful regimes are called ‘‘experts in faction [stasiastikoi]" - whereas in the Laws, a common good is sought.) This opens the possibility that obedience is praised in the two dialogues for similar reasons: that deliberate orderliness, even if partly coerced or encouraged by coercion - even in the absence of the sophisticated grasp of the good that the Republic's philosopher-kings and the Statesman's expert ruler have - constitutes a desirable, if second-rate, form of human excellence for Plato.
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