The Golden Rule

The Laws can get tedious. Unlike The Republic, which outlines Socrates/Plato's ideal state, the laws were meant to be practical. The Athenian Stranger's self-imposed task is to lay down the laws that will govern an colony. Consequently, Plato spends an inordinate amount of time giving technical details for the best way to create a stable state. After all, stability, even in The Republic, is his end goal.

There are moments when The Laws surprise you. One of which is when Plato lays down principles for "dealings between man and man" in Book XI. "The principle," he tells us, "is very simple: Thou shalt not, if thou canst help, touch that which is mine, or remove the least thing which belongs to me without my consent; and may I be of a sound mind, and do to others as I would that they should do to me."

I have italicized the last few words to emphasize their similarity to the Golden Rule in the New Testament. However, what is really interesting is that Plato connects the self-interest of the first clause to the charity of the second clause with "may I be of a sound mind." I'm not sure if that was intended as a prayer or a logical proposition. In other places he argues that no one intentionally does a neighbor wrong, because no sound person would want to live near someone who had ill will toward them, thus making "love thy neighbor" a reasonable rather than a spiritual act. Though, distinctions between reason and spiritual is a distinction that is more of the 20th Century than Plato's.