ETHICS & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Theories of right action, virtue, duty, and the good life, together with the nature of justice, political authority, and the ordering of the city. The ancient and medieval traditions did not cleanly separate these; neither does the index at this stage.

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The Republic

Justice, Plato argues, is the proper ordering of the soul and the city: reason ruling over spirit and appetite in the individual, philosopher-kings ruling over auxiliaries and producers in the state. The just life is not merely instrumentally beneficial but intrinsically superior to injustice, because it corresponds to the natural hierarchy of the soul's parts. Knowledge of the Form of the Good, attained through dialectical education, is the only reliable foundation for political authority.

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