Republic

⚖The case for it

Glaucon's challenge is the hardest question anyone has put to morality: prove that a decent man stripped of every reward, tortured and despised, is better off than a crook with a spotless reputation. Plato answers by building an entire society just to have somewhere to look, which is either the boldest move in philosophy or an elaborate dodge, and readers have spent two thousand years fighting about which. The cave, the divided line, the ring of Gyges stay in circulation because nobody has bettered them. Every later argument about morality has been conducted in a vocabulary Plato supplied here.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

After Thrasymachus is muscled into silence in Book I, Socrates never faces real opposition again; Glaucon and Adeimantus spend nine books agreeing. The central argument runs on an analogy between city and soul that is asserted, never earned. And the ideal city bans poets, breeds guardians, and lies to its citizens for their own good. Justice, allegedly.

— the honest librarian