Autor: Plato

Buch: Republic

Titel: Republic

Stichwort: Plato, Ring des Gyges

Kurzinhalt: 'Suppose there were two such rings, then-one worn by our moral person, the other by the immoral person. There is no one, on this view, who is iron-willed enough to maintain his morality ...

Textausschnitt: (359c) thought-experiment. Suppose we grant both types of people--moral and immoral--the scope to do whatever they want, and we then keep an eye on them to see where their wishes lead them. We'll catch our moral person red-handed: his desire for superiority will point him in the same direction as the immoral person, towards a destination which every creature naturally regards as good and aims for, except that people are compelled by convention to deviate from this path and respect equality.
'They'd have the scope I'm talking about especially if they acquired the kind of power which, we hear, an ancestor of Gyges of Lydia1 once acquired. He was a shepherd in the (359d) service of the Lydian ruler of the time, when a heavy rainstorm occurred and an earthquake cracked open the land to a certain extent,2 and a chasm appeared in the region where he was pasturing his flocks. He was fascinated by the sight, and went down into the chasm and saw there, as the story goes, among other artefacts, a bronze horse, which was hollow and had windows set in it; he stooped and looked in through the windows and saw a corpse inside, which seemed to be that of a giant. The corpse was naked, but had a golden ring on one finger; he took the ring off the finger and left.
Now, the (359e) shepherds used to meet once a month to keep the king informed about his flocks, and our protagonist came to the meeting wearing the ring. He was sitting down among the others, and happened to twist the ring's bezel in the direction of his body, towards the inner part of his hand. When he did this, he became invisible to his neighbours, and to his astonishment (360a) they talked about him as if he'd left. While he was fiddling about with the ring again, he turned the bezel outwards, and became visible. He thought about this and experimented to see if it was the ring which had this power; in this way he eventually found that turning the bezel inwards made him invisible and turning it outwards made him visible. As soon as he realized this, he arranged to be one of the delegates to the king; once he was inside the palace, he seduced the king's wife (360b) and with her help assaulted and killed the king, and so took possession of the throne.

'Suppose there were two such rings, then-one worn by our moral person, the other by the immoral person. There is no one, on this view, who is iron-willed enough to maintain his morality and find the strength of purpose to keep his hands off what doesn't belong to him, when he is able to take whatever he wants from the market-stalls without fear of being (360c) discovered, to enter houses and sleep with whomever he chooses, to kill and to release from prison anyone he wants, and generally to act like a god among men. His behaviour would be identical to that of the other person: both of them would be heading in the same direction.

'Now this is substantial evidence, it would be claimed, that morality is never freely chosen. People do wrong whenever they think they can, so they act morally only if they're forced to, because they regard morality as something which isn't good for one personally. The point is that everyone thinks the rewards of (360d) immorality far outweigh those of morality--and they're right, according to the proponent of this view. The sight of someone with that kind of scope refusing all those opportunities for wrongdoing and never laying a finger on things that didn't belong to him would lead people to think that he was in an extremely bad way, and was a first-class fool as well-even though their fear of being wronged might make them attempt to mislead others by singing his praises to them in public.