Why Bother Being Good if you Could Get Away with Being Bad? (Part 2)

In a previous podcast, we examined Plato’s famous “Myth of the Ring of Gyges” story. In that story where, as usual, Socrates is Plato’s primary dialogical character, we faced the ultimate moral challenge: what would we do if we were put into a situation (the invisibility ring) in which all of the rewards for justice were replaced by all of its penalties in this life and in the next, in which the reputation for justice were replaced by its opposite in the view of both gods and men? Is justice—is a just soul—still worth it? And wouldn’t it be more profitable to choose injustice if we attached to it all of the rewards usually associated with justice, all of the praise of gods and men, in this life and in the next? And if so, then perhaps the real reason we choose justice is that it happens to work. In reality, however, we value power over goodness, might over right, for justice is merely a means to an end, but, because we happen to be too weak to secure our own futures through power, we pretend to love justice.