Thinking Toward Justice: Hannah Arendt on Plato and the Crisis of Moral Relativism
Sara Fleming • Colorado College
“When Socrates said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, he made a statement which according to him was a statement of reason, and the trouble with this statement ever since has been that it cannot be proved.”
—Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt characterizes liberal-democratic society as caught in the midst of a moral crisis. Having witnessed the atrocities of the 20th century, we are confronted with the reality that entire societies can turn into what can only be called systematic machines of evil. Their own citizens are rendered complicit cogs in this machine. Arendt writes that Nazi Germany revealed this moral crisis by showing that the values that govern political life are easily malleable: “It was as though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people.” Nazi Germany took the more that says, “all human life is of equal value” and replaced it with the new more, “Jewish life is a threat to the much-higher-valued Aryan life, and therefore must be destroyed.” Perhaps only the masterminds at the top held this new more as a conviction, but nearly everyone in that society knowingly enacted its implications—as Arendt puts it, “No one had to be a convinced Nazi to conform.” In her coverage of trials of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt controversially described this phenomenon as “the banality of evil.” The bureaucrats who made sure the death trains ran on time were fully aware that they were doing so in order to make sure Jews were killed. They played an undeniable role in the massacre of millions. But rather than an exceptional drive to do evil, it was a sort of ordinary inability to think, uninterrupted by a voice of moral conscience, that prevented them from rejecting their society’s new mores.
It seems obvious to us who live in the values of 21st century liberal democracies, that the more that all human life is equal is more “moral” than the more that ranks Aryan and Jewish life. But can we explain why? At the core of the moral crisis Arendt lays out is her observation that no one has been sufficiently able to do so. Many canonical thinkers (theologians like Aquinas and rationalists like Kant, for example) have tried to point to “things or principles from which all virtues are ultimately derived." But the collapse of moral standards has been so total that we must confront the implausibility of the assertion that there is some universal moral standard to which we are held. In other words, the degree of evil human beings have committed might point not to the irrevocable failure of human beings to live up to a moral standard, but to the lack of any standard at all. At the very least, widespread moral corruption indicates that no one has made a very convincing account of this standard or why we should hold ourselves to it.
But if there is no universal standard, then the Holocaust—indeed, any perceived atrocity—would in fact be morally neutral; neither wrong nor right, just a historical fact. We have thus worked ourselves into a paralyzing confusion: everyone must agree that the Holocaust was wrong, yet no one can really explain what “wrong” means. We shrink from the problem out of fear. Arendt laments that in the wake of the Holocaust, we are merely left in “speechless horror.” Underlying our speechlessness is a terrifying truth: that if what we’d like to call “morality” is merely a set of mores, we have no grounds to say that one set of mores is more moral than another. We have way to justify our judgment that the more of Nazi Germany was wrong.
Even most of those who recognize that morality is nothing but a set of mores still tend to make moral judgements as though these judgments were endowed with absolute authority. Perhaps this is because we cling to the hope for a universal standard as the solution to this problem. We still hope that if we could better articulate what we mean by justice, we could construct an argument for why we should be just, and convince societies to be moral in their actions. We still hope to find a rational explanation for why “it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.” But Arendt doesn’t believe there is a universal justification for this judgment. She does not believe there is a way to endow our moral judgments with absolute authority. She is a moral relativist (though she herself does not use this term), in the sense that she does not believe that any set of mores is more related to a universal truth than another. But she is not a moral nihilist, because she does not think moral judgment is impossible. In fact, she argues that we need to restore moral judgment. How can this be? I will try to show that Arendt is more consistent in this than any of us.
What Arendt shows us is that moral relativism is not a symptom of historical atrocity, but rather the cause. And so our contemporary moral crisis is actually an ancient problem: it is because we have never known why we should be moral that we have created societies capable of mass genocide. Plato faced this problem in the Republic. Notably, the Republic begins to imagine a utopian society, a just city, without first figuring out what justice is. Arendt’s insight into this mysterious philosophical project is that we lose the question of what justice because there isn’t an answer to that question—no one in Plato’s dialogue can come up with a coherent conception of justice that withstands any dose of Socratic interrogation, precisely because there is no coherent ideal of justice. According to Arendt, Plato only shows us why there is no rational explanation of why it is bad to do wrong. But Plato and Arendt both want to save morality. Plato attempts to do so by inventing a universal standard, while Arendt urges us to fully confront the implications of its nonexistence.
It is worth noting that Plato takes up the question of justice, while Arendt takes up the question of morality. For the purposes of this essay, I will treat these terms as essentially related. “Justice” would be the ideal standard that informs “morality,” the set of values or principles that a person follows in order to uphold “justice.” When I say “a just person” or “a moral person,” I mean the same thing: a person who does what’s right. The difference between justice and injustice, between morality and immorality, is also, for these purposes, the difference between good and evil, virtue and vice. None of these things, however, are the same as “ethics,” which are closer to what Arendt calls mores. Ethics or social mores are only relativist sets of values that lay out how to be good in a particular context, but not how to be good. Social mores show how to be excellent in a particular field or at a particular role, but they have nothing to do with virtue itself. A set of social mores could just as well tell someone how to be a good Nazi. This, of course, is the core of Arendt’s crisis: there is no such thing as virtue itself. Mores actually are all that we have.
Arendt’s Interpretation of Plato: Please Believe in the Following Tale
The Republic begins with Cephalus’s deluded conception of what justice is: “the truth and giving back what a man has taken from another.” Socrates destroys this easily by showing that his definition means that it is just to return weapons you borrowed to a friend of unsound mind, who would presumably use them for some kind of irrational harm. This troubles Cephalus because he knows that he wants to call such acts unjust. Socrates subsequently dispels several of his other interlocutors’ conceptions of justice. He shows that they are incoherent by pointing out that their definitions of justice do not align with their own judgments of moral and immoral acts. Socrates knows that his interlocutors want to be able to say certain acts are unjust. So his strategy is to point out that their definitions of justice don’t encompass that—in that case, they must not be the true definitions of justice. Already, the dialogue places more trust on intuitively shared judgments than incoherent attempts at rational definition. One might expect that the rest of the dialogue would proceed as an attempt to create a coherent definition that encompasses people’s previously held judgments, thus establishing a rational definition of justice and a standard for morality. But importantly, Plato does not do this. Instead of defining justice, he begins to ask why we even care about it.
A turning point of the text comes when Thrasymachus intervenes. Thrasymachus shifts the entire dialogue by asking why we would bother to be just at all, since in his view justice is not self-beneficial. Socrates’ disciples Glaucon and Adeimantus implore Socrates to defend justice, before they have figured out what justice is. The question turns from “What is justice?” into “Why is justice better than injustice?” This question parallels the one posed by the epigraphical dictum: "Why is it better to suffer wrong than to do wrong?" The implication here is that doing justice might involve suffering wrongdoing at the hands of other people. Both are essentially asking, "Why should we do the right thing?"
Thrasymachus is a sophist who valorizes tyrants: claiming not to care about truth, he admires those who can twist their circumstances to benefit themselves and gain power. Arendt writes that Thrasymachus disrupts the apparent direction of the dialogue by holding that those who truly know what is good for them behave in a way we would want to call “unjust,” people who ruthlessly seek self-benefit at the expense of others. As Thrasymachus explains, “the just man everywhere has less than the unjust man.” This greatly disturbs Glaucon and Adeimantus, because they find themselves agreeing with Thrasymachus that acts that seem just are not beneficial from the person who commits them, while unjust acts do benefit the unjust person. Importantly, no one in the dialogue has yet agreed on what justice actually is. They base their discussion around a shared assumption that any conception of “justice” or “morality” would demand some amount of self-sacrifice—at the very least, tyrants who ruthlessly seek their own benefit are not moral people. At the other extreme, consider an example of apparent self-sacrifice: a person runs into a burning building to save a child, knowing that he will perish but the child will live. We, like Glaucon and Adeimantus, would probably call this person a hero and laud him for his morality. But Thrasymachus would only call him a fool—how could he possibly benefit himself by sacrificing his own life?
The obvious rebuttal to Thrasymachus’s argument is that less extreme acts of justice do benefit the moral person. A moral person accrues respect, success, love of his peers, etc. There is a reason, however, that this response strikes us as a deliriously optimistic. Do we really believe that those at the top of our own society deserve such positions because of their moral character? And even if we did live in a hypothetical society that rewarded just behavior, there would be no motivation to be just, only motivation to appear just. If the good in justice is about the benefits that society rewards, the value of justice becomes obsolete as soon as someone can accrue the same benefits through alternative, even unjust, means. Thus, for justice to truly be better than injustice, it can’t be about rewards granted by society.
Glaucon and Adeimantus thus want Socrates to show that justice is “good for its own sake." He must show that justice is self-beneficial, but extend the conception of “self-benefit” beyond Thrasymachus’s narrow conception of it. On the one hand, this seems like it could be easy. Thrasymachus values money and power, so of course justice is going to be contrary to what he really wants. If I value love and equality, might justice be more consistent with my desire? Moreover, if I value morality above all, I should be happy to run into that burning building. Sacrificing my own life isn’t actually a selfless act if I change my values—if I sacrifice myself not because I value another’s life over my own, but because I value my own morality over my own life. I run into the burning building for an essentially selfish reason: I would not be able to live with myself if I were to let that child die. Importantly, we are already agreeing with Thrasymachus that people do and should seek their own benefit.
One might counter that people sometimes do, in fact, willingly sacrifice their own benefit. But Socrates, his interlocutors, and Arendt all agree that people do and should seek to benefit themselves. As Arendt puts it, “Throughout the dialogue runs the conviction of all concerned that every man wishes and does what he thinks is best for himself." Socrates himself responds to Thrasymachus with the hauntingly simple dictum, “everyone who knows would choose to be benefitted by another rather than to take the trouble of benefiting another." In Socrates’ own view, anyone who does something contrary to his own good is merely mistaken. By an extension of that logic, anyone who tells themselves that their actions are based on something other than their own good is merely deluding themselves. According to Socrates, we can’t change the fact that people seek their own good, but we may be able to change the good that people seek. Is it more beneficial for us is to be moral or to accrue money and power? Should we value morality and run into that burning building, or value earthly pleasures and let that child die? It is not enough to say that some people do run into burning buildings to sacrifice their lives—we must convince the rest that moral integrity is somehow more beneficial than life. The trouble is making the argument that one should seek a different kind of good, one that’s not mere selfish desire and immediate fulfillment at any cost, but a just soul.
Socrates does not make this argument. As soon as he is compelled to answer this question of why we should value morality over worldly desires, he once again shifts the entire direction of the dialogue. Explaining to Adeimantus that it will be easier to consider justice on a larger scale, he beings to construct “a city coming into being in speech." Socrates tells him that they will figure out what it takes to make the city just, which will tell them what it takes to make the soul just. For Plato, a just person must suppress her hedonistic desire, and a person who takes justice seriously must go to extreme lengths to do so. This is suppression is what the just city ends up creating. Plato goes on at length about how the guardians must cultivate courage and moderation by “purg[ing] the city that a while ago [they] said was luxurious." In fact, for the “guardians” of the utopian city of justice, the city ends up looking like a totalitarian dystopia in which private property is abolished, speech is restricted only to that which omits mention of injustice, sex is prohibited, consistent but moderated exercise is required, poets are heavily supervised and made to praise the gods as good and peaceful, and laughter is deemed unacceptable because it makes men seek change. This is all explicitly in the name of forsaking desire for justice—throughout this section, Socrates and Adeimantus repeatedly make remarks such as “it is not just, in any case, to praise such things." Justice essentially comes to mean moderation, courage, and wisdom. But we still have never figured out why this should be so. Nor has Socrates given us any reason that we should benefit our souls at the sacrifice of nearly every worldly pleasure.
Arendt writes that, although Glaucon and Adeimantus make convincing logical arguments about why justice is not valuable, they both appear to be good people who want to consider justice valuable. According to Arendt, “It is clearly their own nature that has convinced Glaucon and Adeimantus of the truth that justice is better than injustice … It is not the logos that convinces them, but what they see with the eyes of the mind.” Their judgment was the result of a moral framework they already had. Now they only want Socrates to lay out the truth with reason.
But Socrates can give no rational answer to this question of why justice is better. Instead, according to Arendt, he “turns from a moral quest to a political question” and starts imagining how a city might make justice better than injustice. But this takes for granted that Glaucon and Adeimantus, at least, already know what they want to call “just.” Arendt claims that Plato knows that, contrary to the epigraphical Socratism, “The political concern is not whether the act of striking somebody unjustly or of being struck unjustly is more disgraceful. The concern is exclusively with having a world in which such acts do not occur." The city, then, is an elaborate hypothetical construction of what such a world might look like—a world that makes it better for an individual to be just than unjust. Socrates never gives a reason that justice is better, and neither can we. What he gives us is a plea to value it anyway.
According to Arendt, the city is meant to convince Glaucon and Adeimantus of what they already know—not through reason, but through persuasion. This project, Arendt says, is predicated on a Platonic elitism that holds that only certain people can know the truth. Glaucon and Adeimantus are, in Arendt’s reading of Plato, apparently of “the few whose nature, the nature of their souls, lets them see the truth." The Republic ends up being a myth, a transcendent metaphysical truth that shines through the dark cave of worldly illusions “as a kind of alternative to reasoned argument." The “underlying tenor” of these myths, Arendt says, is that some people who already have good Glauconic souls can see the truth. It is though Socrates has resigned himself to the notion that “if you cannot be convinced by what I say, it would be better for you to believe in the following tale." For all those others without these souls, Arendt says, “some means has to be found to make them behave, to force them to act, without being convinced—as though they, too, had ‘seen.’” Hence, the city is an essentially totalitarian reign of censorship and a “noble lie.”
Plato, then, according to Arendt, implied the right problem (that we can’t actually appear to find a reason that justice is better than injustice) but was wrong about the solution (that the only thing to do is hope some people just get it and force the rest to follow them). Arendt’s alternative is that we recognize that there is no real, transcendent good; no ideal standard of justice; no universal basis for morality. But that doesn’t necessarily invalidate our judgment that the Holocaust was wrong and that we don’t want it to happen again. Arendt pays as much attention to these shared judgments as Socrates does. But Plato thought that they come from a previously known universal good, and that only a few could see them—in the just city, Socrates goes so far as to say that those who are deemed not to share them deserve to be killed. Arendt, by contrast, thinks that these moral judgments are inherited, and that everyone has the potential to make them (most of us, in fact, as I’ve pointed out throughout this essay, already do). What Plato thought was the ability of certain souls to see the truth beyond themselves is, for Arendt, actually the product of faculties that everybody has, which are not always active but can be cultivated. It requires nothing special to cultivate these faculties of judgment. All you have to do, Arendt says, is to be able to think.
Arendt: Judgment, Solitude, and Thinking
Arendt takes her concept of judgment from Kant’s aesthetics and applies it to morality. Essentially, Arendt says, when someone says, “X is the right thing to do,” they are operating under the same set of assumptions as someone who says, “X is beautiful.” These propositions are not, however, the same as saying, “I want x.” The difference between judgments and desires is that judgments inherently hope to be intersubjective. Arendt writes, “When somebody makes the judgment, this is beautiful, he does not mean merely to say this pleases me … but he claims assent from others because in judging he has already taken them into account and hence hopes that his judgments will carry a certain general, though perhaps not universal, validity.” Kant hoped that judgment could reach universal validity; that it could be predicated upon “a community of mankind.” Arendt is skeptical of this. But she does think that “the validity of common sense grows out of intercourse with other people." This means that moral judgments are produced within society. They are still not objective, not held to any standard of “justice,” not derived by each human being from the incontrovertible laws of reason. But they are more than whims of each person’s individual desire.
So Glaucon and Adeimantus shared a common judgment that the tyranny Thrasymachus exalted was wrong—a judgment we probably share, too. Because judgments such as “merciless killing is wrong” are so commonly shared, we often mistake them for universal, rationally-backed moral laws. We fall back on our shared assumptions that certain things do and don’t constitute justice, forgetting that we haven’t seen any logical proof that they do. However, judging without proof is acceptable—in fact, it’s all we can be asked to do. Judgment allows us to construct shared moral values despite their lack of universal validity, because as long as we are judging, we are operating under the assumption that we exist in a shared community. This also means that some judgments are shared only between certain communities, and not with others. But perhaps discrepancies in judgment would be better addressed by acknowledging this lack of logical proof rather than relentlessly trying and failing to establish it, or pretending that we already have.
Judgment is informed not by isolated communities constructing moral values anew, but by a long history of cultural heritage that gives us moral examples. Whereas Plato thought that certain people knew what was right by accessing an abstract idea of “justice,” Arendt proposes that people determine what is right by accessing concrete, historical or fictional examples—people who our culture has deemed are superb moral beings. She writes, “We judge and tell right from wrong by having present in our mind some incident and some person, absent in time or space, that have become examples." Plato, too, believed that in place of rational morality that can be proven, and in light of his perceived divide between those who can “see” the truth and those who will never be able to, justice must be taught through examples. The education of the guardians of the city consists of constructing “models” of gods that diverge radically from the corrupted, violent gods of Homer and Hesiod.
One can easily see, then, why reliance on moral examples does not “solve the problem” of morality. We have a plethora of sometimes-contradictory cultural examples to choose from, and in order to share common judgments and moral values, a society must value some over others. By this metric, a community could just as easily share the judgment that the extermination of Jewish people was a moral act (as Hitler’s Germany did). Why couldn’t someone today simply choose Hitler as moral example rather than Jesus?
Judgment does not depend on individual choice, but rather the implied hope of a community with shared values. And a new set of mores cannot be created at will.Turning good citizens into Nazis does not happen overnight—one does not merely choose one moral example over another, because these examples are not abstract entities divined out of nowhere, but passed down through historical reality. In Nazi Germany, the ghost of Jesus should have stepped in and said, “It’s not right to hate Jews.” In fact, if enough people were passing judgment, this would have happened. The problem, Arendt says, is that some people “refuse to judge at all." In the case of Nazi Germany, many refused to judge, and something that would have been unthinkable became the norm. But only once culturally inherited examples had been forgotten or subverted could the Nazi regime construct a new moral culture.
How did Nazi Germany suspend judgment on such a scale? Arendt’s analysis is that they created a society in which it was nearly impossible to think. Judgment, a dialogue between the self and the moral culture of a community, informed by examples, depends on the self being able to have a dialogue with itself. Arendt calls this dialogue “thinking.” She writes, “Moral conduct, from what we have learned so far, seems to depend primarily upon the intercourse of man with himself. He must not contradict himself by making an exception in his own favor, he must not place himself in a position in which he would have to despise himself." Arendt derives her conception of the self as “two-in-one” from Socrates’ own notion, as Arendt puts it, that “even though I am one, I am not simply one, I have a self and I am related to this self as my own self." The reason we already want to avoid this discordance, Arendt writes, is that, “If you are at odds with yourself it is as though you were forced to live and have daily intercourse with your own enemy." Thinking is fundamental: “it is this silent dialogue of myself with myself in which my specifically human quality is proved."
Yet not all people think, by Arendt’s conception, all the time. To think about a decision is to ask myself the question, “Will I be able to live with myself if I do this?” For this, I must be able to remember. If I have done something wrong, something that would make me the enemy of myself, then I can refuse to remember it. I am thus more capable of doing wrong again. Arendt writes, “The danger…for a possibly highly intelligent and still entirely thoughtless creature, is very great. If I refuse to remember, I am actually ready to do anything." The problem today is that it is terribly easy not to think. The bureaucratic structures of totalitarian (and maybe even democratic) societies drill out the possibility for thinking, by giving mandates as “be a good x,” which could just as easily mean “make sure the death trains run on time.” Anyone who was able to step back would realize that, according to all the values he had previously held and inherited from his own society, he would hate himself for doing this. To judge intersubjectively, one must be able to live in dialogue with oneself.
The Holocaust was collapse of moral values, which was a result of a refusal to judge, which in turn was the result of a society that deprived its citizens the space to think. Arendt’s grand solution, “think more and better,” is thus fittingly banal (most acts of evil are, after all, also banal). But Plato’s attempt at convincing us with a long-winded tale was both dangerously authoritarian and dangerously unconvincing. There is a problem with saying that some people simply know that the just is better and that what they truly desire is something more than their own hedonistic fulfillment, without any reason to show them why. The unacknowledged lack of proven universal standards hasn’t imbued our society with a moral conviction that lasts through changing social mores. Let us remind ourselves that we began with a terrifying question: if we agree that morality is constructed, not imbued with divine authority, how do we justify our judgment that the Holocaust was wrong? The question is terrifying because it is consequential. If we can’t explain why it was wrong, it just as easily might happen again. What gives us the authority to say “The Holocaust should not have happened”? According to Arendt, there is still no transcendent ideal that deems our mores better than those of Nazi Germany. We thus need to explain why it is wrong, but not according to universal standards of morality.
It is still valid to say “the Holocaust was wrong” because this judgment is consistent within the mores of a community. As Arendt puts it, “the validity of such judgments would be neither objective and universal nor subjective, depending on personal whim, but intersubjective or representative.” But it would not serve us to leave this judgment uninterrogated, to accept without question the mores we have inherited. To do so would be to assume that our own mores are unquestionable, to ignore the implications of their non-universality. And this has devastating consequences as well: the same liberal-democratic societies that unleash judgment upon Nazi Germany have committed mass atrocities of their own. We only find “better” mores insofar as we find mores that allow us to be more consistent with ourselves when we are able to access dialogue with ourselves. Thus, rather than asking if we inherited our judgments from a morally sound community, we should ask if we inherited our judgments within a community that allowed us to think, to a reasonable degree. No totalitarian regime of censorship accomplishes this. We can thus say that both Plato’s hypothetical just city and the historical Nazi Germany were morally flawed societies. They systematically deprived their citizens of the chance to think, and thus to convince themselves that it is better to do right than to do wrong. Yet we too sometimes choose to forget the things we have done, and the things we are doing, that we cannot live with. The degree to which we find ourselves not thinking indicates that perhaps our own societies do not do such a good job either. So how do we construct a society that allows and encourages thinking? This is now what we must think about.
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.” In Responsibility and Judgment. New York: Schoken Books, 2003.
Plato. The Republic. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1968.
Thank you to my professors Jonathan Lee and Eve Grace, who have helped me attempt to understand this.