SOCIAL JUSTICE AND HAPPINESS IN THE REPUBLIC: PLATO’S TWO PRINCIPLES 1 Rachana Kamtekar 2 Abstract: In the Republic, Socrates says that social justice is ‘doing one’s own’, i.e. ‘everyone must practice one of the occupations in the city for which he is natu- rally best suited’. One would ordinarily suppose social justice to concern not only the allocation of duties but also the distribution of benefits. I argue that this expec- tation is fulfilled not by Plato’s conception of social justice, but by the normative basis for it, Plato’s requirement of aiming at the happiness of all the citizens. I argue that Plato treats social justice as a necessary but not sufficient means to hap- piness that guarantees only the production of the greatest goods; ensuring that these goods are distributed so as to maximize the happiness of the whole city requires a direct application of Plato’s happiness principle, which I interpret individualistically and then use to explain women’s equality in work and education. I Introduction In the Republic, Socrates says that social justice is ‘doing one’s own’. By ‘do- ing one’s own’, he says he means ‘everyone must practice one of the occupa- tions in the city for which he is naturally best suited’ 3 (433a4–7, recalling 369e–70a). 4 One would ordinarily suppose justice to concern not only the HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXII. No. 2. Summer 2001 1 I am grateful to Williams College for financial support provided during the research leave in which this paper was written. For their thoughtful comments and important criticisms of this paper (in some of its previous versions), I would like to thank a number of readers: Rae Langton, Stephen Menn, Nicholas D. Smith, Sam Fleischacker, Yaseen Noorani, Katy Abramson, Elijah Millgram and Chris Bobonich. I would also like to thank audiences at the University of Edinburgh Department of Philosophy, the University of Michigan Department of Philosophy, and at a symposium on Greek ethics at the APA Central Division Meetings, April 2000, for useful discussion (I have acknowledged individual suggestions on particular points in footnotes below). But most of all, I am grateful to my commentator at the APA, Richard Kraut, for his sympathetic but challenging remarks on my argument. I hope I have managed to respond to some of them. 2 Dept. of Philosophy, University of Michigan, 2215 Angell Hall, 435 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109. Email: rkamteka@umich.edu 3 Citations given without further identification are to Plato’s Republic. All translations of Plato’s Republic are taken from C.D.C. Reeve (rev.), Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis, 1997). 4 What are we to make of the fact that the definition of justice in the Republic is a candidate definition for temperance in the Charmides? In the Charmides, Critias (not Socrates) is the source of the view that temperance (not justice) is ‘doing one’s own’, which Socrates refutes, on the grounds that craftsmen are temperate but make (do) things not only for themselves but also for others. To save the view, Critias distinguishes between doing and making, and between making and working, so as to be able to claim,