Fair Society Is A Happy Society: Plato

Fair Society is a happy society: Plato

The concept of Physis refers, to the natural, an order that has its own laws independent of the desires of the human being. Since it constitutes a structuring of the reality of harmony, balance and stability, that is, they are the laws of nature. Nomos understands everything that the human being has added to the physis, artificial construction that would not exist of not by man: custom, politics, language, law, norms, etc. The contrast of both concept and another, in any case, is introduced by the sophists, since they consider that human laws and customs are conventions invented by the human and these do not respond to natural laws or of divine origin. 

This is due to the agnosticism of protágoras and the birth of criticism of culture in all its aspects, both political and legal, religious or moral. Once the difference between nature and culture was raised, the sophists would take various positions when assessing one or the other, disdaining the culture, as it does, as an imposition of the powerful, as protágoras, as overcoming the natural state. To this can be added that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle accused him of distributing false teachings and charging for them. However, despite some negative opinions, in general the relativism of sophistics is considered as the expression of an "enlightened" era. For sophistry is characterized by its trust in human reason and its laws to raise the fundamental problems of man and society in its particular historical context.

And, in addition, it is also characterized by its efforts to rebuild a much more fair social organization, this through a criticism of traditions.

 Now, the trend between the sophists was that justice is ‘by consensus’, which means, that something is just when it is remembered that it is fair in terms of polis, and is considered unfair when it is agreed that it is unfair. That someone is happy or unhappy does not have, in principle, nothing to do with being fair or unfair. In opposition to sophists, Plato also said that justice is a condition of happiness. Plato says for Socrates’s mouth that the unfair man can never be happy. The notion of justice is one of the main issues of the Republic since it was interested in justice as virtue and as the basis of the Constitution of the Polis. It is possible, and probable, that in a fair society not all citizens are happy, although for Plato happiness should not be measured individually, or considering a certain group or class of society, but to measure yourself taking into account the entire polis. In a fair polis there is justice for all. If fair society is a happy society, then all members of society will also be fair and happy.