Abstract

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates Famously argues that a just city has to have three distinct classes performing three distinct functions. The producer class is the largest of the three, with the job of taking care of the city’s material needs. It is widely accepted that individual producers in this class are appetitive—appetitive in the sense that they only value bodily and material goods as intrinsic goods and conduct their lives only to maximize those goods.1 In this paper, I want to argue against this reading.The widely accepted picture of appetitive producers is closely tied to the question of what motivates the producers to do what they do. The argument goes something like this. Socrates argues that the soul ..