understanding mansfield
...gs and bad.” Socrates would ask his students, “What is justice?” as if justice were a constant and non-changing variable. He believed in a natural justice or a natural right in which he taught his students to recognize and obtain as their highest virtue. As a student in a University, one must comprehend this idea of justice. The most obvious evidence of natural justice is the belief in it, or rather the belief in injustice. In today’s world, everyone is ruled by passion, Eros, and injustice. No longer are there concerns with the moral— the possibility of justice—but everything is self-centered and value neutral. The fault of this change should be left in the hands of the corrupt government. However, Socrates has an answer to this “Who is good enough to rule?” dilemma that even faces us today: only a true philosopher who has acquired justice, the philosopher king. But one will realize that those who have obtained knowledge do not want to rule and those who rule do not wish to acquire knowledge. This is ironic and leaves one with a government full of non deserving rulers. Rulers that take out the moral issues, and anything to do with justice—good, just, noble—and replaces them with value-neutral terms abstracted from partisan dispute. Moving forward, it is important to also not the ideas of Aristotle, one of Socrates’ students. He, too, was in search for the justice and believes that nature can lean a person toward the ‘good’ but does not actually define the term or move one closer to the good as it does with animals. “Human nature includes both the freedom and the necessity to construct a regime, for we could not have freedom if nature had done everything for us.” According to Aristotle, it is important to understand what is by nature, in which there is no choice and what is according to nature, the standard by what is chosen. Only then can we decipher what is just. In the ancient times, all of these ideas from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero had nothing to do with the Christian world. As Christians, it is important to recognize how that has changed. These political ideas of justice were first introduced to the Christian world when Cicero presented them, starting with St. Augustine. Augustine argued that “moral virtue is always tainted with human self-interest and always in need of God’s grace.” A true virtue is Christian and open to anyone and everyone, whereas philosophic virtue is only available to a select few. However, when the Greek government realized that was happening—their power was being stripped away because the people were believing in a higher and more powerful command: God—they took dualistic action and separated the church from the state. This action sparked the separation between ancient and modern philosophy. Machiavelli, the first modern thinker was amazin...