So Plato’s praise of law in the Statesman and the Laws resonates with our own notion of the rule of law in its emphasis on the ultimate authority of law, the importance of constraining official power, and on publicity and clarity. Nor would it have sounded strange at first hearing to an audience of ancient Athenians. But perhaps it ought to have; and perhaps it ought to us. For one thing, the rule of law in both dialogues is said to be second best to the rule of political experts, and furthermore to ‘‘imitate’’ expert rule. One plausible way to understand this is to see the two forms of rule as aimed at the same goal, the production of human excellence (virtue) and human wellbeing (happiness). Plato, like Aristotle, is what we would call in the terms of contemporary political theory a perfectionist, one who believes that the central goal of government is to promote good characters and well-being among its citizens (see Depew, chapter 26). This explains his overriding concern with education and training from birth in the virtues of moderation, justice, wisdom, and courage, as seen in the Republic, Statesman, and Laws alike. The goal of human excellence is shared both by the knowledge-governed regimes described in the Republic and Statesman, and the law-governed regime of the Laws, and it is reasonable to think that this overarching end is at least one key way in which law-governed regimes imitate knowledgeable ones.
How, exactly, does the rule of law promote virtue? One puzzle here is what role the sovereignty of law over magistrates plays in instilling virtue or preventing vice. But it is even reasonable to ask how the laws governing the lives of citizens promote virtue. This question may seem trivial: after all, the laws for citizens prescribe certain beneficial or virtuous behaviors, like marriage or honorable ways of hunting, and forbid the various forms of vice and injustice such as theft, assault, and murder. As Aristotle points out, even ordinary criminal laws aim at virtue (Arist. Eth. Nic. 5.1). The difficulty that arises is that real virtue requires choosing the right things for the right reasons, choosing the good because it is recognized and desired as good - while a law, for Plato as for us, is coercive: it threatens punishment against those who transgress it. What role can coercive law play, then, in the promotion or inculcation of virtue?
This question, it should be recognized, is broad, deep, and universal. Today’s right-wing perfectionist does not want laws governing sexual morality or euthanasia to be obeyed merely out of fear of punishment or force of habit. Rather, he or she wants citizens to grasp the relevant value - the sanctity of life or the primary value of the family. Likewise it is hard to see how a left-wing perfectionist can attain a more compassionate or socially just society only by coercing the rich to contribute to the support of the poor. Beyond any partisan perfectionism, I do not think that any of us want to live in a community where the injunctions of the criminal code, laws against rape, murder, or theft, are obeyed merely out of fear of punishment or force of habit. We want rather that our neighbors not want to do these things, and that they not want to do so for the right reasons.
Laws governing educational systems, as we find in Republic 2-3 and Laws 7, are a straightforward application of perfectionist ideals. Likewise, it is not as puzzling or surprising that restrictive criminal codes might play some role in a perfectionist scheme, as a last resort, for instance, or a concession to the intractably vicious. And so Socrates concedes a role for coercive law even within the highly optimistic and ambitious just state of the Republic, when he argues that the manual worker, if he cannot be ruled by his own reason, ought to be ruled by reason from the outside via law (Resp. 590d). Here the coercion of the law is seen as a last resort, so that those who are not ruled by their own reason may still benefit from its guidance. (If one takes into account the laws restricting the Guardians, for instance the ban on private property, the question about coercion and virtue arises in the Republic as well.) There is the further mysterious claim, repeated throughout the dialogues, that punishment itself is curative and in some way improves the moral condition of the lawbreaker (Stalley 2007: 74-5 has a summary with references; see also Stalley 1995a).
But in the perfectionist law-state described in the Laws, the laws are central, not peripheral, to the ordering of the state, and the promotion of virtue is the explicit overarching end of the laws and of obedience to them. The interlocutors of the Laws seem to recognize the dangers of coerced obedience, and accordingly they suggest that explanatory ‘‘preludes’’ be attached to the laws, so that the laws seek persuasion in the first order, and threaten punishment only as a last resort. We will look at whether and how the preludes dispel worries about the relation between law-enforced virtue and real virtue in the next section. The difficulty will be even more pressing for the Statesman, as it advocates not the making of new virtue-promoting laws but simply strict obedience to whatever laws happen to be in place. Assuming that the innovations of the Laws have a chance to solve the difficulty, how will following ordinary laws, of the kind found in regimes claimed to be degenerate or vicious, be of any use in the improvement of the characters of the citizens? And if they are not useful for promoting virtue, in what sense does Plato think they have any value at all?
In what follows I will look first at how laws instill virtue under more ideal circumstances in the Laws. Then I will turn to the ordinary laws endorsed in the Statesman, and speculate about what use obedience is meant to be in that context. I will conclude with some general remarks about law and virtue for Plato.
World History
