QuestionsWhat makes something right?The ring of Gyges: would we be just if we were invisible?
What makes something right?Morality questioned

The ring of Gyges: would we be just if we were invisible?

The ring of Gyges

Plato c. 428 BC · c. 348 BCBeyond appearances, the eternal Forms.
See profile
What it claims

Nobody is just willingly, but under constraint: justice is not a good for the one who practises it, only a convention respected out of fear of punishment.

Why

If we could do wrong without ever being punished we would: we respect justice only out of fear of punishment.

The same idea through history
Hérodote430 BCHistories I, 8-12: Gyges, bodyguard of King Candaules, kills the king and takes his place. In Herodotus there is no magic ring: Plato turns the story into a thought experiment.
Plato375 BCRepublic, book II: the version presented here. It is spoken by Glaucon, Plato's brother, who says he does not believe it himself: he takes up Thrasymachus' thesis to force Socrates to defend justice for its own sake.
Cicero44 BCOn Duties III, 38: Cicero retells the story, but to argue the opposite: the wise man, with the ring, would allow himself nothing more.
Thomas Hobbes1651Leviathan, chapter 15: "the Foole" who says there is no such thing as justice takes up the same idea: if one can break one's word without harm, why keep it? Hobbes sets out to answer him.
In short

"The ring of Gyges: would we be just if we were invisible?" is an argument by Plato (Republic, II, 358e-360d (c. 375 BC), 375 BC) on the question "What makes something right?" (answer: morality questioned). Its claim: Nobody is just willingly, but under constraint: justice is not a good for the one who practises it, only a convention respected out of fear of punishment. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Republic, II, 358e-360d (c. 375 BC)
Valid with an implicit premise

A shepherd finds a ring that makes him invisible. Within days, he seduces the queen, kills the king and takes the throne. And you, what would you do if nobody could ever see you? In the Republic, Glaucon (Plato's brother) uses this story to argue that nobody is just by choice. Note: he says he does not believe it himself, he wants Socrates to refute him.

P1Doing wrong without being punished would be the greatest good, suffering it without being able to take revenge the greatest evil. Since people cannot have the one without risking the other, they agreed to neither do nor suffer wrong: that is the origin of laws and of what we call "just".
P2Give a ring of invisibility to the just man and to the unjust man. The just man would not resist: he would take what he wanted from the market, enter houses, kill. He would act exactly like the unjust man.
P3 · implicit premiseIf someone stops acting justly as soon as he risks nothing, then he was only just out of fear of the consequences, and not because he held justice to be a good.
P4Besides, anyone who had the ring and refused to use it would be thought, by those who knew, the most wretched and foolish of men, even if they praised him in public out of fear of suffering wrong themselves.
Therefore nobody is just willingly, but under constraint: justice is not a good for the one who practises it, only a convention respected out of fear of punishment.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a world where the invisible just man starts stealing, and yet he held justice to be a good: for instance, he judged it good but was too weak to resist so huge a temptation. Being tempted is not the same as not believing in the good.
The argument is valid once P3 is added, which Glaucon does not state: he assumes that behaving differently when invisible proves one was only just out of fear. The heart of the debate is P2: is it true that everyone would act like Gyges? Socrates mainly attacks the conclusion: even when invisible, the unjust man harms himself. P4 is not logically essential: it explains why, according to Glaucon, everyone would want the ring.
Analogy. A pupil never cheats in tests. One day the teacher leaves and says: "nobody is watching you, and nobody will ever know". If the pupil takes out his phone, was he honest before, or only watched?

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Socrates (Plato's character) 375 BC · attacks the conclusion

Justice is not first a matter of external laws: it is the inner order of the soul, where reason rules and desires obey. Just actions produce this order as healthy things produce health. Virtue is the health of the soul, vice its disease. So being unjust, even unseen, means making oneself ill. In book X, Socrates concludes that the soul must act justly "whether it possess the ring of Gyges or not".

Platon replies
D
David Sachs 1963 · A famous modern objection
Socrates changed the subject. Glaucon asked whether ordinary justice (not stealing, not killing, keeping one's word) is a good. Socrates shows that a well-ordered soul is a good, but he does not show that such a soul will necessarily refrain from stealing or lying when it risks nothing. The two senses of "just" are not connected.
The debate goes on (our summary) Plato's defenders reply that Gyges' great crimes (stealing, killing for a throne) come precisely from desires no longer held by reason: an ordered soul has no wish for them. In book IX (588e-589b), Socrates compares the unjust man to someone who feeds a many-headed monster and a lion within him, and starves the inner man. The discussion of the "fallacy" spotted by Sachs is not closed.
Cicero 44 BC · attacks premise 2

If the wise man had this ring, he would not think himself any more free to do wrong than if he did not have it: good men seek what is honourable, not what is hidden. Some reply that the story is invented and impossible: they miss the point. The question is what you would do if nobody could ever know. Whoever answers that he would do it confesses he is ready for crime; whoever answers no grants that what is shameful must be avoided for its own sake.

no reply
Platon never answered this objection.
The debate goes on (our summary) Glaucon could reply that Cicero asserts what needs proving: he says the wise man would do nothing wrong, but the ring argument asks precisely whether such a wise man exists and whether he acts by choice. Yet Cicero's dilemma has force: it makes everyone answer for himself. And Cicero adds later (III, 78) that nothing shameful can be truly useful, because nature resists it.
Hobbes 1651 · attacks premise 4

The Fool says there is no such thing as justice and that it is reasonable to break one's word when one gains by it. This is false. Whoever deceives those who help him cannot be received into any society except by others' error, and he cannot count on their errors for his safety. Cast out, he perishes. Even if he wins by luck, his choice was not reasonable.

no reply
Platon never answered this objection.
The debate goes on (our summary) Hobbes's answer holds in the real world, where one always risks being found out. But the ring removes exactly that risk: Glaucon imagines someone who will never be caught. Hobbes also grants Glaucon his starting point: without a common power there is neither just nor unjust (Leviathan, chapter 13; see the argument "Without a state, the war of all against all").
J
Johannes Abeler, Daniele Nosenzo, Collin Raymond (experimental economics) 2019 · attacks premise 2

The ring can be tested in a lab: people are asked to report a result themselves (for example the outcome of a draw made in secret), with nobody able to check, and lying pays. Pooling 90 studies, one finds that people lie surprisingly little. Many stay honest even when nobody can catch them.

Platon replies
M
Melissa Bateson, Daniel Nettle, Gilbert Roberts 2006 · But being watched matters
In a university coffee room, people pay for their drinks into an honesty box, unchecked. When an image of a pair of eyes is displayed above the box, people pay nearly three times as much as with a neutral image. Merely feeling watched changes behaviour, as Glaucon thought.
The debate goes on (our summary) The results partly vindicate both sides. People cheat less than Glaucon predicts, but the 2019 study concludes that two motives matter: wanting to be honest, and wanting to be seen as honest. And in a lab the sums are small and one is never as invisible as Gyges.