He decided to stop overthinking. Immediately he wondered if he was doing it right.
Long before Frodo dragged his hairy feet across Middle-earth, there was another ring, albeit, less epic in production value, – The Ring of Gyges. Whereas Tolkien’s ring had wizards, hobbits, and a disconcerting number of walking scenes, Plato’s version was merely a shepherd and a poor impulse control problem.
Plato introduces this moral bauble in The Republic, in a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon. Glaucon, eager to test whether people are good by nature or just because someone’s watching, recounts the story of Gyges: a humble shepherd who discovers a magical ring that grants him invisibility. Like any upstanding character in mythology, he immediately seduces the queen, murders the king, and snatches the throne.
Glaucon, using this obviously unquestionable foundation, then presents his categorisation of “good” into three types: things we like for their own sake, things we like for their effects, and things we like for both. He unceremoniously dumps justice into the second category, implying people wear their morality, but only when someone’s looking, – like washing hands in men’s public restrooms.
This idea has received the modern psychological equivalent of a Reddit upvote from researchers like Dan Ariely, whose experiments show people will cheat more when they think they’re unobserved, just like Gyges, minus the queen and regicide.
Further weight is thrown behind this human tendency for wickedness in dark corners by the Stanford Prison Experiment, orchestrated by the now-infamous Philip Zimbardo in 1971. The conclusion? When given power and anonymity, your average bloke becomes about as benevolent as a wasp in a bottle.
Socrates – the inventor of answering questions with questions, insists that justice actually belongs to Glaucon’s third category, both good in itself and good for its consequences. He sketches the soul with all the elegance of a GCSE science diagram – reason, spirit, and appetite.
A just soul is led by reason, supported by spirit, and has appetite gagged and strapped to a chair in the back room. The tyrant, by contrast, is ruled by appetite, and thus about as harmonious as a kazoo in a funeral procession. So while Gyges may have bagged himself power, Socrates would argue that he’s as internally disjointed as a flat-pack wardrobe built by a goat.
Kant – who, according to his work, presumably has never actually met a person, insisted that morality is about duty, not the reward, whilst ironing his socks. Nietzsche, on the other hand, swirled his moustache and proclaimed that the pursuit of power is not just natural but necessary, before defacing a picture of Kant with glasses and a tiny moustache. Meanwhile, a man who had a spare moustache above each eye, Confucius, chimed in from across the globe to assert that doing the right thing actually improves the self within.
The West had its own philosophical rumble on the matter: Hobbes saw justice as an iron rod wielded by the state to stop us all from becoming feral beasts, whereas Locke believed we’re born with a moral compass installed by default, though perhaps requiring the occasional recalibration. John Rawls, – who had clearly never witnessed anyone play Sims, had his own concept called “veil of ignorance”, where he suggested that if you removed a person’s personal circumstances, then you encourage fairness and impartiality.
And so, the tale of Gyges endures through time, reborn in psychology labs, ethics debates, and workplace CCTV policies. It’s a question that continues to twitch at our conscience like a spider in the bath. – If handed invisibility, stripped of scrutiny, and gifted consequence-free power, would you uphold justice, or would your moral code crumble like a biscuit in a cup of tea?
:: REFERENCES ::
- Wikipedia – Ring of Gyges
- Ethics Unwrapped – Veil of Ignorance
- Philip Zimbardo – The Lucifer Effect
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