I here repeat the precise state of the question, which is very apt to be lost amidst the mæanderings of a Platonic dialogue. First, What is Justice? Sokrates had declared at the close of the first book, that he did not know what Justice was; and that therefore he could not possibly decide, whether it was a virtue or not:--nor whether the possessor of it was happy or not. Secondly, To which of the three classes of good things does Justice belong? To the second class--_i. e._ things good _per se_, and good also in their consequences? Or to the third class--_i. e._ things not good _per se_, but good only in their consequences? Sokrates replies (in the beginning of the second book) that it belongs to the second class. Evidently, these two questions cannot stand together. In answering the second, Sokrates presupposes a certain determination of the first; inconsistent with that unqualified ignorance, of which he had just made profession. Sokrates now professes to know, not merely that Justice is a good, but to what class of good things it belongs. The first question has thus been tacitly dropped without express solution, and has given place to the second. Yet Sokrates, in providing his answer to the second, includes implicitly an answer to the first, so far as to assume that Justice is a good thing, and proceeds to show in what way it is good. Some say that Justice is good (_i.e._ that it ensures, or at least contributes to, the happiness of the agent), but not _per se_: only in its ulterior consequences. Taken _per se_, it imposes privation, loss, self-denial; diminishing instead of augmenting the agent's happiness. But taken along with its results, this preliminary advance is more than adequately repaid; since without it the agent would not obtain from others that reciprocity of justice, forbearance, and good treatment without which his life would be intolerable. If this last opinion be granted, Glaukon argues that Justice would indeed be good for weak and middling agents, but not for men of power and energy, who had a good chance of extorting the benefit without paying the antecedent price. And Thrasymachus, carrying this view still farther, assumes that there are in every society men of power who despotise over the rest; and maintains that Justice consists, for the society generally, in obeying the orders of these despots. It is all gain to the strong, all loss to the weak. These latter profit by it in no other way than by saving themselves from farther punishment or ill usage on the part of the strong. [Side-note: Position to be proved by Sokrates--Justice makes the just man happy _per se_, whatever be its results.]