The Ring of Gyges
(I need 5 unique copies for this assignment mine and my other 4 classmates )
The Republic and the Ring of Gyges
The Republic (written by Plato around 375 BCE) in is a long dialogue in which Socrates and others ask a basic question: what is justice, and why should anyone want to be just? While there are numerous people in the dialogue, we will focus on a particular conversation between Socrates and Glaucon.
Early in Book II (The Republic is divided into Books, but you can think of them as chapters), Glaucon basically says: “You haven’t really proven justice is worth it.” To sharpen his challenge, he tells the story of the Ring of Gyges to show that if someone could act unjustly without consequences, they would. Both a just and unjust person, given the ring, would eventually behave the same way—proving (he thinks) that people are only just out of fear or convenience.
This forces Socrates to spend the rest of The Republic (Books II–X) trying to demonstrate the opposite—that justice is valuable in itself, because it brings order and harmony to the soul, just as it does to a city.
Here is a shortened version of The Ring of Gyges story. Read it and answer the discussion questions below. Then, respond to at least one of your classmates: https://www.keyschool.org/uploaded/Community/Adult_Education/The_Ring_of_Gyges.pdfLinks to an external site.
Discussion Question: Do you agree with Glaucon that somebody who got such a ring and didn't use it for their benefit would be an idiot? If you had the Ring of Gyges—so you could do anything without ever being discovered or punished—would you still choose to act justly? Why or why not? Spend some time really thinking through and justifying your response.
For those interested, here is an optional lecture from Yale on the topic. It provides history background on Plato, the reading, etc: