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Plato’s discussion of justice provides a paradigm case of how we can think that a person having morally questionable commitments does not possess integrity. Although he does not use the word ‘integrity,’ his account of justice seems to give some insights on the position. In Republic,54 _{Socrates, Plato’s} mouthpiece throughout the Republic, discusses why a just person’s life is better than an unjust person’s. At the beginning of Book 2 of Republic, Glaucon offers a challenge to show why it is good to be just. With the story of the ring of Gyges,

54 _{Plato, Republic, E. Hamilton & H. Cairns (eds) (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University}

he argues that there is no reason for a just person to continue to be just if he can get away with being unjust and profit from it.55

Before proving that justice is always in our interest, Plato has to offer an account of justice. He starts with the relationship between functioning or doing well and virtue. In Book 1, Plato claims that each thing has its function and a thing does well by means of its own peculiar virtue.56 _{Therefore, one way to find} the virtue of a certain thing is to imagine what it would be for the thing to function well. According to him, the condition that enables the thing to function well is the virtue appropriate to that thing.

Holding the view that justice is a virtue appropriate to both a city and an individual, Plato describes the perfectly good city in order to see its own peculiar virtues that enable the city do well. Plato defends the idea that we can discover the nature of the virtues of a city, in particular, the virtue of justice by isolating the features of a city that enable it to be good. According to him, the perfectly functioning city is the city which all of the citizens are provided the greatest possible happiness.57 _{Plato argues that the needs of the individuals which} constitute a city are best fulfilled when each person does the work that suits him

55 _{For a discussion of what question or implication the tale of Gyges exactly presents, see}

Christopher Shields, “Plato’s Challenge: the Case against Justice in Republic II,” in G. Santas (ed), The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic (Malden, Oxford, and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 63-83.

56 _{Plato, Republic, 353b-c.} 57 _{Ibid., 420b.}

or her best by nature.58 _{Therefore, some individuals, for example, have natural} tendencies to be good at farming, building and selling whereas others are at defending the city against enemies. Finally, some individuals, the guardians, are best suited for developing and living in accordance with their rational capacities and these guardians should rule the city.59 _{With this description of the perfectly} good city, Plato identifies the condition that enables the city to flourish, or justice in the city. According to him, justice in the city is that each individual does his or her own work and does not attempt to do another’s work.60

The real question, however, is whether we can apply such an account of justice to the individual. There is an immediate problem for thinking that the same account of justice applies to the individual: if the same account is to apply, the individual must have parts, each of which is best suited for playing a certain role in the individual’s life. Plato gives an account of why the human psyche has also parts. According to Plato, we often experience mental conflict. We could want something, for example, a drink, but at the same time wishing that we did not want that drink.61 _{Our reflecting and calculating part will convince us not to} drink the seawater even when we are extremely thirsty because it will cause nausea later. The reason why we have such mental conflicts is that psyche has

58 _{Ibid., 370a-c.} 59 _{Ibid., 370c-414b.} 60 _{Ibid., 433a-d.} 61 _{Ibid., 439a-c.}

distinct sources of motivation that can come into conflict. He distinguishes at least three parts of the psyche: the appetitive part, the spirited part, and the reasoning part.

According to Plato, the three parts of the soul represent the values that motivate our actions and each part of the soul loves a certain object. For instance, the appetitive part loves money which is the means for satisfying things that appear pleasant.62 _{Secondly, the spirited part is described as loving honor,}63 _since we are honored when we live up to our own or others’ ideals. Lastly, the reasoning part of the soul is characterized as loving learning and wisdom.64 _In this account, a person experiences conflict because he or she reaches different conclusions from the perspective of each part of the soul. What is clear to Plato is that only reason can resolve this issue since reason knows what is best for ourselves as a whole.

With this picture of our moral psychology, in Book 4, Plato provides his definition of justice. According to Plato, “it [justice] is not concerned with someone’s doing his own job on the outside. On the contrary, it is concerned with what is inside; with himself, really, and the things that are his own.”65 _When

62 _{Ibid., 580d-e.} 63 _{Ibid., 581a-b.} 64 _{Ibid., 580d-581c.} 65 _{Ibid., 443c.}

a person does an unjust thing, in this account, it is a bad thing not because a person may be caught by other people. Rather, it is a bad thing because what happens to the person’s own soul. Plato continues to explain that

he [a just man] does not allow the elements in him each to do the job of some other, or the three sorts of elements in his soul to meddle with one another. Instead, he regulates well what is really his own, rules himself, puts himself in order, becomes his own friend, and harmonize the three elements together … He binds together all of these and, from having been many, becomes entirely one, temperate and harmonious. Then and only then should he turn to action, … he considers and calls just and fine the action that preserves this inner harmony and helps achieve it[.]66

According to Plato, a person achieves justice when elements of one’s soul do their own work and there is no disunity in his soul. Considering his explanation of each part of the soul, justice in an individual is the state where a person’s reason does its work to decide what to do. For Plato, it is clear that the person with a just soul would not engage in unjust actions such as embezzling, temple robberies, thefts, betrays of friends in private or of cities in public life, breaking promises or other agreements.67 _{In this account, a person acting} immorally does such an act because his calculating and wise reason does not do the job properly and the person acts out of ignorance.

There is a gap to fill out, of course, because it is not clear why a person ruled by one’s reason does not perform immoral acts. Furthermore, it seems

66 _{Ibid., 443c-444a.} 67 _{Ibid., 442e-443a.}

problematic that one should not act immorally not because of what it does to others but because of what it does to oneself.68 _{Nonetheless, what seems to be} clear from Plato’s discussion of justice is that once a person commits to unjust or immoral acts, he would suffer from the disunity of his soul. Plato’s discussion of justice brings us one representative case of the moralized view of integrity. True that it would require a substantial argument on why a just person is the same as a person of integrity. Nevertheless, without even assuming such a thing, we can say that the same point on justice could be said on integrity. After all, what Plato says about justice sounds very much like one representative understanding of what integrity is for the average person. It seems to be a common way of thinking that if a person commits to unjust or immoral acts, his soul would not be unified and the person fails to possess integrity.

Against Thrasymachus, Plato’s Socrates pointed out already in Book 1 that an unjust person’s injustice will make him “incapable of acting because of inner faction and not being of one mind with himself.”69 _{At first glance it seems too} much to say that a person is not able to act at all when he has some injustice.70 _If

68 _{Singpurwalla suggests a different interpretation of Plato’s defense of justice that behaving}

unjustly is incompatible with being unified with others. See Rachel G. K. Singpurwalla, “Plato’s Defense of Justice in the Republic,” in G. Santas (ed), The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic (Malden, Oxford, and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 263-282.

69 _{Plato, Republic, 352a5-7.}

70 _{For a serious work to show that this is really what Plato means, see Christine M. Korsgaard,}

we do not take Plato’s wording of incapability of action literally, this may mean some psychological instability. We see a person performing unjust or immoral actions all the time. So, it is not true that a person acting immorally fails to act at all. Still, it seems true that when a person performs immoral actions, he could experience some hesitance. Different from what Plato had to say about justice, people often know that what they are about to do is wrong. In those cases, they could have mental conflicts; one side of his mind would say that he should not do it and the other side would say that it is okay to do it. Therefore, a person who is about to do those actions may experience some hesitance of his actions.

Nevertheless, for Plato, what injustice does to a person is not just some psychological instability. If it was just psychological instability, Plato’s project to show that an unjust person’s life is far worse than a just person’s is unsuccessful. It would not be a significant fact for an unjust man that he had some difficulty to overcome when he did an unjust thing, as long as he continues enjoying the gains from his unjust actions. Therefore, if the effect of injustice is a moment’s unstable feeling of what a person is about to do, it should not be the only effect that Plato has in mind. There must be, then, something else that can affect him more permanently.

According to Plato’s account of justice, a person performing unjust or immoral acts has his soul in conflict. This conflict seems to lead not just to a

moment’s pause but to a more permanent one because it affects his soul than anything else.71 _{Although a person did the act out of his reason’s malfunction, the} person could rationalize what he did after his wrongdoing. The problem is that such a rationalization does not make any difference since it does not justify his action and does not allow him to discard his deed. If the person already knew about the action’s wrongfulness deep down in his mind, his thought of the fact that he is doing something wrong would have been permeated in his soul before he is aware of. When a person sees something, he remembers the thing. It would be even more if he does the thing. This seems to give enough reason to think that a person doing unjust or immoral deeds is in a disparity between what he wants him to be and what he is. This in turn will make his soul fail to be harmonized.

A person who has morally vicious commitments or principles would experience the same sort of disunity in his soul whereas having unity or a harmonized oneness in one’s soul seems to be the very definition of integrity. So, one could build the position based upon Plato’s discussion of justice to say that it is impossible for one to possess integrity when he commits to immoral principles.

71 _{For an account of a unitary condition of the psychic parts with the emphasis on temperance, see}

A. W. Price, Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 85-111, especially p. 110.