Of Interest to the Stronger

I finally paid out the drakhmas to get the proceedings (both print and electronic, so over $100 total) of the Athens conference I went to in 2008. Here’s my contribution: “Thrasymachus and the Relational Conception of Authority” (in Patricia Hanna, ed., An Anthology of Philosophical Studies, vol. 3 (Athens: Athens Institute for Education and Research, 2009), pp. 27-36).

And here’s the abstract:

Thrasymachus defines justice as the interest of the stronger/rulers. Hence one might expect him to hold that when the stronger/rulers act in their own interest, they are being just. Yet Thrasymachus says just the opposite – that when the stronger/rulers act in their own interest, they are being unjust. This apparent inconsistency is to be explained by Thrasymachus’s having a relational conception of the notion of stronger/ruler; to act in the interest of the stronger/ruler is to act in the interest of someone stronger-than-oneself, of a ruler-over-oneself. Hence when a subject acts to benefit the ruler, he acts justly, by putting a superior’s interests before his own; but when the ruler acts in his own interest, he acts unjustly, since he pursues his own interests and defers to no superior.

This is something I think almost everyone who teaches Plato’s Republic gets wrong.