Justice

Giving each what is owed. For the Greeks, justice was not just law but the harmony of the soul and the city.

Plato’s Republic is, at its core, a long argument about justice. He concluded that a just person is one whose soul is in harmony: reason governs spirit, and spirit governs appetite. A just city mirrors this structure. Aristotle distinguished distributive justice (fair shares) from corrective justice (righting wrongs). But the deeper question persisted: is justice natural, or merely conventional? The Sophists said one thing. Socrates said another. The argument never ended.