Who or what is right?  Who or what is just?  These questions, always before us, touch on relationships between persons, between and within communities, between and within nations and races.

        In Book One of Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus, one of Socrates’s interlocutors, is quoted as having provided this answer: “Justice is nothing else than the advantage of the stronger.” 

The implication was not hidden from Socrates.  Going by Thrasymachus, whatever the stronger willed is just and the weaker must accept. Or, in international relations, whatever is to the advantage of a military superpower must be taken as advantageous to a nation of meagre military resources.  If the superpower desires to annex a weaker nation, it would be right for that weaker nation to be subdued, conquered, and its resources exploited by the stronger nation.

        Pressed by Socrates to explain his definition, Thrasymachus used the analogy of governance, saying: “each government makes laws to its own advantage: Democracy makes democratic laws, a despotism makes despotic laws, and so with the others, and when they have made these laws they declare this to be just for their subjects, that is, to their own advantage, and they punish him who transgresses the laws as lawless and unjust.  This then, my good man, is what I say justice is, the same in all cities, the advantage of the established government, and correct reasoning will conclude that the just is the same everywhere, the advantage of the stronger.”

        But Thrasymachus’s definition, upon further scrutiny, collapses like a pack of cards.  For, as Plato’s Socrates would point out, rulers are not immune from error when they make laws.  Some laws they make correctly, others erroneously.  If, by Thrasymachus’s line of argument, whatever the stronger legislates as right is to be obeyed, then, even when the stronger unintentionally and erroneously legislate to the disadvantage of the weaker, the weaker must obey.

        Despite this Socratic refutation, Thrasymachus insisted that the man of great power always gets the better deal.  “Consider him,” said Thrasymachus, “if you want to decide how much more it benefits him privately to be unjust rather than just.  You will see this most easily if you turn your thoughts to the most complete form of injustice which brings the greatest happiness to the wrongdoer, while it makes those whom he wronged, and who are not willing to do wrong, most wretched.  This most complete form is despotism; it does not appropriate other people’s property little by little, whether secretly or by force, whether public or private, whether sacred objects or temple property, but appropriates it all at once.

        “When a wrongdoer is discovered in petty cases, he is punished and faces great opprobrium, for the perpetrators of these petty crimes are called temple robbers, kidnappers, housebreakers, robbers, and thieves, but when a man, besides appropriating the possessions of the citizens, manages to enslave the owners as well, then, instead of those ugly names he is called happy and blessed, not only by his fellow-citizens but by all others who learn that he has run through the whole gamut of injustice.  Those who give injustice a bad name do so because they are afraid, not of practicing but of suffering injustice.”

        The bizarre logic of Thrasymachus has remained attractive at every point in history.  Nicolo Machiavelli’s political philosophy, which he described as focusing on “the practical truths of things rather than to fancies”, was predicated on this logic.  So was Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy.  For Machiavelli, politics is deployment of the might of the prince.  The prince’s ultimate concern is acquisition and consolidation of power, and all means are just in this pursuit.  In fact, what makes the means just is their ability to procure power and satisfy the politician’s insatiable hunger for power.  In this hunger for power, says Machiavelli, “it is necessary that a prince who is interested in his survival learn to be other than good, making use of this capacity or refraining from it according to need.”

        For Nietzsche, it is the powerful who legislate on what is right or wrong.  “Now it is plain to me,” he wrote in On the Genealogy of Morals, “that the source of the concept of ‘good’ has been sought and established in the wrong place: The judgement ‘good’ did not originate with those to whom ‘goodness’ was shown!  Rather it was ‘the good’ themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebeian.  It was out of their pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values.” 

Countries colonize countries to appropriate resources of countries colonized.  To facilitate exploitation, coups are sponsored, propaganda machinery financed using “artificial intelligence”,  electoral processes are manipulated by external and internal actors to produce outcomes that are advantageous to the stronger but contradict the will of the weaker.  “Deals” are proposed: Give us your mineral-producing regions, and we shall protect your land.  What would the industrial revolution in the global North have become if Africa had not been colonized, her riches taken away by colonizers? 

The logic of Thrasymachus operates within countries.  It is written into the 1999 Constitution in Nigeria where federal might is right and, whatever Abuja decides is to be obeyed everywhere in Nigeria.  Federal might suppresses state might, state might suppresses local might, and they all suppress the citizen.  Federal might controls Niger-Delta petroleum resources to the advantage of the mightiest tier of government but to the disadvantage of the weak people who own the land under which the oil is found. 

Even more tragic is when the bizarre becomes the macabre. In the logic of military coups in the history of Nigeria, men with military might, from time to time, used that might to take over reins of government.  On coup days, the mightier faction of the army is right, the weaker humiliated, its members tied to stakes and executed, slaughtered on the premise of might is right.

        The question of justice is the question of how we ought to relate.  How ought the mightier and the weaker relate? Who is right between Israel and Hamas?  Who is right between America and Iran?  Who is right between farmers and herdsmen in Nigeria?  Who is right between the ruling party and the parties in opposition in Nigeria?  Who is right within the fractious and factious political parties in Nigeria?  How are the diverse ethnic and religious communities in Nigeria to relate? 

        Our response will depend on whether we subscribe to the logic of Thrasymachus, Machiavelli and Nietzsche.  But we may want to consider another option offered by Thomas Aquinas when he defined justice as “a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due by a constant and perpetual will.”  In that case, the one who is just renders to each his due, whether the one to whom it is rendered is mighty or weak.

Father Anthony Akinwale, OP