The ring of Gyges

Ring of Gyges

Plato, either an extraordinarily brilliant, talented, successful, and influential moral believer or history’s most successful fraud, in The Republic puts in the mouth of his own brother, Glaucon, a little story that Glaucon believes to show any man who thought he could get away with it would be unjust.

The ring of Gyges makes the wearer invisible when the head is turned to the inside of the hand.

Masked by anonymity, the hypothetical wearer of the ring is expected to behave without regard to justice, however rigidly just he may ordinarily be.

Both he and the lookers-on in the story are represented as holding the supposed moral properties of things, actions, and men as of no account.

And Plato's mouthpiece, Socrates, does not contradict Glaucon’s implicit claim that the on-lookers in the tale are typical of the general run of humans, in these regards.

All the same, neither here nor elsewhere does Plato ever seem to contemplate the obvious explanation that moral terms denote nothing, that there simply are no moral distinctions, truths, considerations, or facts for us to take properly into account, and that morality is just a hocus-pocus of social control that is not entirely successfully in duping even the crudest and least educated of people into obedience "when the cat's away."

Wikipedia quotes Jowett, 360b-d,

Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice.

No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.

Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point.

And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust.

For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right.

If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.