Jazmine Brown
Oct.8, 2012
Foundations of American Experience
Lundgren
The Republic II – III Ask yourself this question, if you could do whatever you wanted with no punishment or consequence would you? If you could go rob and bank and walk out, without even the slightest chance of being arrested, would you commit this crime? I feel that most people would say yes. In the reading, Glaucon points out that, we as humans, treat justice as something we have to undergo in order to avoid the ultimate evil. Is this the only reason that people are just and do the right thing? I think so. I feel that people do good because they may think that it will pay off somewhere down the road. Whether it pays off as karma or in the afterlife, people only do right because they want the feeling that they will be okay when it gets down to the nitty-gritty; “If I’m a good person, only good things should happen to me.” When their lives end, they want to be accepted into the gates of heaven like anyone else would. This is believed to be achieved by doing good here on earth. Therefore are the just actions committed by us humans truly genuine? For the people who don’t believe in afterlife or god, they may live life by the motto, “What goes around comes around.” Karma. Eventually, under the laws of the universe, their good deed will be repaid to them. This only proves Glaucon’s, statements to be true. If we were raised, not believing in a higher being, or in karma, how different would the world be? The idea of people knowing that nothing that you could ever do would be acknowledged, repaid, or even appreciated, would alter our society as we know it. People would feel no use in committing good deeds if there was not a reward for them in return. We as humans base our decisions off of the need to survive, and surviving in this time and age, is always getting the upper hand on things. Therefore when people commit good deeds, they may feel as if they have the upper hand on life; because something good should be coming their way as repayment. Whatever the reasoning for committing good deeds in the world, the