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"This book attempts to situate Plato's ethics within his profoundly revisionist metaphysics. It aims to show why Plato makes the keystone of his metaphysical system a normative principle, the Idea of the Good. In doing this, we can see how Plato's metaphysics helps explain his politics and his theological doctrines"--

Plato's moral realism rests on the Idea of the Good, the unhypothetical first principle of all. It is this, as Plato says, that makes just things useful and beneficial. That Plato makes the first principle of all the Idea of the Good sets his approach apart from that of virtually every other philosopher. This fact has been occluded by later Christian Platonists who tried to identify the Good with the God of scripture. But for Plato, theology, though important, is subordinate to metaphysics. For this reason, ethics is independent of theology and attached to metaphysics. This book challenges many contemporary accounts of Plato's ethics that start with the so-called Socratic paradoxes and attempt to construct a psychology of action or moral psychology that makes these paradoxes defensible. Rather, Lloyd Gerson argues that Plato at least never thought that moral realism was defensible outside of a metaphysical framework.

AbstractNeither a doctrine of rights nor a doctrine of justice can provide a non-question-begging foundation for political philosophy. Instead, all political philosophical theories must rest on the recognition of the existence of moral agents, individual members of a natural kind capable of entering into associations with other moral agents. Beginning with moral agency, we can deduce that for there to be any associations, political or otherwise, there has to be the mutual recognition of self-ownership. The nature of moral agency excludes the possibility that groups like states or societies or nations can be moral agents. From moral agency and self-ownership, we can deduce the exigency of property ownership. On this basis, we can explain a state of affairs as just when and only when there is no aggression against moral agents. And we can show that the only nonarbitrary right is the right to self-ownership and property ownership. Thus, A has a right to p means: to deprive A of p is unjust. So, rights are founded on justice and justice is founded on property and property is founded on self-ownership and the recognition of self-ownership is a necessary condition for the mutual recognition of moral agency, the only possible basis for the existence of human associations. Thus, rights and justice are derivative or dependent concepts; they are not basic or foundational.