Clearly, it can never be right to arm a lunatic, whatever the circumstances. The old man cheerfully shrugs the problem off and heads off to attend to some ritual, leaving his son to carry on the argument. The son, polymarcus, switches gears. Clearly, his father hadn't meant deat in the literal sense of returning what one has borrowed. He meant it more in the sense of giving people what is owed to them, repaying good with good and evil with evil, helping one's friends and hurting one's enemies, demolishing this one takes a little more work. Are we saying justice plays no part in determining who one's friends and enemies are? If so, wouldn't some one who decided he had no friends and therefore tried to hurt every one be a just man? And even if you did have some way to say for certain that one's enemy really is an intrinsically bad person and deserves harm, by harming him, do you not thus make him worse? Can turning bad people into even worse people? Really be an example of justice? But it is eventually accomplished. At this point, a sophist, thrasimachus, enters and denounces all the debaters as milky eyed idealists. In reality, he says, all talk of justice is mere political pretext designed to justify the interests of the powerful. And so it should be. Because in so far as justice exists, it is simply that the interest of the powerful. Rulers are like shepherds. We like to think of them as benevoently tending their flocks. But what do shepherds ultimately do with sheep? They kill and eat them, or sell the meat for money. Socrates responds by pointing out that thrasimachus is confusing the art of tending sheep with the art of profiting from them. The art of medicine aims to improve health, whether or not doctors get paid for practising it. The art of shepherding aims to insure the well being of sheep, whether or not the shepherd or his employer is also a business man who knows how to extract a profit from them. Just so with the art of governance. If such an art exists, it must have its own intrinsic aim, apart from any profit one might also get from it. And what can this be other than the establishment of social justice? It's only the existence of money, socrates suggests, that allows us to imagine that words like power and interest refer to universal realities that can be pursued in their own right, let alone that all pursuits are really ultimately the pursuit of power, advantage or self interest. The question, he said, is how to ensure that those who hold political office will do so not for gain, but rather for honor. I will leave off here. As we all know, socrates eventually gets around to offering some political proposals of his own, involving philosopher kings, the abolition of marriage, the family and private property, selective human breeding. Boards clearly, the book was meant to annoy its readers, and for more than two thousand years, it has succeeded brilliantly. What i want to emphasize though, is the degree to which what we consider our court tradition of moral and political theory to day springs from this question, what does it mean to pay our debts? Plato presents us first with the simple, literal, business man's view. When this proves inadequate, he allows it to be reframed in heroic terms. Perhaps all debts are really debts of honor after all. But heroic honor no longer works in a world where, as apollydorus sadly discovered, commere class and profit have so confused everything that people's true motives are never clear.