3.8: Doctors and Judges

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See 405a-410a. The goal of medicine, Socrates argues, is to restore sick or injured people to health and active living, not to prolong pointless, inactive living. Life does not benefit people who cannot do their work, nor does it benefit their cities, and so it is appropriate to let people die who are suffering from incurable, incapacitating diseases. Capital punishment is, for the same reason, an appropriate sentence for people who are incurably unjust. If one is morally unfit to do one’s work, then one has no proper place in the city. Socrates notices a certain basic similarity between doctors and judges. Doctors treat illness in the body; judges treat injustice in the soul. But while the best doctors “are not especially healthy by nature, and have themselves experienced the illnesses they treat,” the opposite is true of judges, the best of whom do not discover what injustice is like in youth, indulging in it themselves, but at a later time, “as an alien thing present in other people’s souls.” One might think that firsthand experience would benefit doctors and judges equally, but Socrates thinks that injustice is significantly different from illness in being an affliction of the soul that tends to pervert a person’s judgment, leaving them “stupid, distrustful at the wrong time, and ignorant of what a healthy character is.”

When is it right to let a person die? This has never been a more pressing moral question than it is at present, physicians now having at their disposal antibiotics, intravenous feeding, radiologically-supported surgery, blood transfusions, organ transplants, respirators, blood pumps, dialysis machines, hormone treatments, and a host of other devices and procedures. Nowadays it is no longer even necessary for a human being to have a living brain to be maintained on life support.
Socrates thinks that the only life worth supporting is a meaningful life, and the only meaningful life is a life of doing good work. So if one cannot do good work – work that makes good use of what one has to offer and benefits the city in some way – then one may as well die. Do you agree?
Can a person be incurably evil? What would such a person be like?
When Socrates suggests that the best judges come from people who are kept free from injustice in their youth, he seems to be assuming that injustice is permanently damaging to the souls of young people who have been afflicted by it. Is there any reason to believe this is true?
Suppose someone were to object that people who have always been good – who have never themselves fallen deeply into moral corruption – never really understand what it is like to be morally corrupt. And just as patients in drug abuse treatment programs need to be able trust that their counselors know what they are going through, criminals in community abuse treatment programs need to be able to trust that those working with them are similarly knowledgeable. Therefore, the best judges would be those who used to be unjust. How might Socrates reply?