Justice In The Republic, Glaucon, And Adeimantus

In book II of the Republic, Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus explore the question "What is good about living a just life?". They start by analyzing goodness and then they move onto categorizing what kind of good is justice. When I was first asked the question "what is good about living a just life?" the first thought that came to my mind was that when an individual is living a just life he/she does not go to jail. Up until I started reading The Republic, the picture of justice that I had in my head was the one of a judge, court, police officers, etc. but after reading Plato's words, I realized that there is much more to justice. The portrait of justice I had in mind was what Glaucon identifies as the third kind of good: "burdensome but beneficial to us", the kind of acts that "we would not choose them for their own sake, but for the sake of their rewards and other consequences" (Plato 357c7-d1). …show more content…
However, Glaucon's vision of justice goes a little bit further than that. He identifies two other types of goods. The first type is the one that we just enjoy for its own sake, rather than for its consequences, an example of this is eating a chocolate cake. We don't do this action because of the good consequences it had on our bodies, we do it because we enjoy the action of eating a piece of chocolate cake. The second type of the good is the one that we enjoy both the actual action and the consequences it brings. For a person like me that likes swimming, when I swim I am enjoying it and it also is good for my body, therefore in my case this is the second type of