Essay On Unjust Life

He further responds to the third difficulty, that people have good reason to act unjustly “for the life of an unjust person is… much better than that of a just one,” in Books VIII and IX. Most importantly, he states that “even if one has every kind of food and drink, lots of money, and every sort of power to rule, life is thought not worth living when the body’s nature is ruined” (445 b). As addressed in the response to the first difficulty, the body’s nature is to be good and just. Therefore, justice in and of itself is not only better than injustice, but an unjust life is a life not even worth living. To explicitly further support this, Socrates explains that, again on a large scale, how what justice is through explaining different constitutions. Foremost, he reiterates that a just constitution is an aristocracy, which is the one he described in Books II-IV (544 e). He then explains four unjust constitutions, ending with the most unjust. This explanation helps a reader further understand why an unjust life is not only not better than that of a just one, but also that it is hardly a life at all. The four unjust constitutions are a timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny (545 a).
Timocracy emerges from an aristocracy by people taking less …show more content…
Specifically it considers “insolence good breeding, anarchy freedom, extravagance magnificence, and shamelessness courage” (560 e). Consequently, a democratic man “doesn’t admit any word of truth… for if someone tells him that some pleasures belong to good desire and others to evil ones, and that he must pursue the former and restrain from the enslavement of the latter, he denies all this and declares that all pleasures are equal and must have equal value” (561 c). Just as in an oligarchy there was an insatiable desire for wealth and neglect of other things, in a democracy there is an insatiable desire for freedom, which consequently perverts and destroys what true freedom actually is (562