I finished reading Plato's Republic for the first time a short while ago. This is a book with many layers and ideas that will take a few more readings to fully grasp. However, there was a controversial idea that stuck with me, and gave me food for thought.
Society or Family?
The family unit (at least in a traditional sense) in Plato's Republic is seen as a negative thing. Something that can be put above what Plato sees as a higher good - society's well being. When you are so close to other citizens, we can only naturally care about their needs more deeply then people we never met. People often do small "unfair" things for their family. Whether its getting them a job somewhere just because you work there and know the boss, or maybe you give some money to a family member that's well fed instead of a starving person, or maybe its giving a discount on some service that another more needy citizen had to pay for. Whether or not this is unfair is debatable. It really has to do with the main point of what we should value most. In Plato's world view, children should not know their family ties, but instead be stripped away at birth so neither the parents nor the offspring know who they are related to. Only the birth month will be known in order to avoid interfamilial relationships. This shows in stark comparison to the ideas of the founding fathers of The United States, where individuals have inherent freedoms. Family in a traditional sense is seen as a higher good. I suppose to Plato I would ask, "how far do we go?" If our nation is higher than our family or individual needs, what about something higher than our nation? Wouldn't the world then be more important than our county? And wouldn't the universe be more important than our world? What about natural order, the law of the universe? What if it is in the natural order of the universe for man to make a family? This concept of levels of importance really is the ground for all thought afterwards ethically. For someone to attempt to make an ethical claim, they must have a "highest good" in mind.
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