Alfred North Whitehead claimed that “all philosophy is a footnote to Plato.” The professor for my philosophy 101 class repeated that claim often and earnestly. He narrowed Whitehead’s claim on the first day of class, pronouncing to us that all philosophy was a foonote to The Republic–doubtless seeking to impress upon our 18-year old minds the titanic importance of the overpriced paperbacks we had been required to buy from the bookstore (according to personal habit, my copy was also used, tattered, and had margins full of someone else’s incomprehensible scribbled notes).

I wish I had paid more attention all those years ago, because my professor was right. The question of “what is good” is the central issue of both The Republic and modern American political and cultural debate. The Republic portrays a debate between various perspectives concerning what absolutes should be pursued as “the good.” Today, however, the debate is over whether “the good” should be defined as an absolute, or treated merely as an expedient euphemism for personal or sectarian advantage.

In other words, the fundamental disagreement in American politics is not between competing definitions of “good,” but rather between groups that define “good” in its classical sense as a universal absolute (even if they disagree about what that good should be), and those who use the language of the “good” as shorthand for subjective advantage (”good for me and mine at this particular moment in time”). This disagreement usually forms the background for more concrete arguments, although it often remains unrecognized in specific contexts. The debate can be seen best when we look past what various groups want, to why they want it.

One example is the current protest over the “Jena Six.” In 2006, a series of racially charged incidents occurred in the town of Jena, Louisiana. It appears that whites and blacks each instigated various incidents, with, predictably, a handful of trouble makers on either side. The tensions created by these incidents came to a head in December of 2006, when six black students at Jena High School knocked a white student to the ground and kicked him repeatedly, resulting in serious injuries. The six students alleged to have committed the assault (the “Jena Six”) were arrested and are in the process of being tried for second degree attempted murder.

In response, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and others have joined a subset of the black community to protest any legal action against the assailants and to demand their immediate release. These protesters do not deny that the Jena Six assaulted a fellow student and beat him nearly to death. They claim, however, that, because of the racially charged atmosphere, because the suspects are black, and because no whites have been charged with felonies for racial incidents against blacks, the Jena Six should not be punished. Members of this group have called their efforts to free the Jena Six as “the Civil Rights struggle of our generation.”

If we look past what the Jena Six protesters want to why they want it, we can see a struggle not between competing claims to “good,” but between an absolutist and a subjective definition of that word. The protesters claim that prosecutors are treating the Jena Six worse than they would treat white suspects in similar circumstances. The protesters demand the ostensible goods of justice and equality, and, to those ends, demand that the Jena Six be freed. Justice and equality are, however, evidently not what the Jena Six protesters are after. If the protesters truly sought justice or equality, they would not demand that six alleged criminals be released. They would demand that they be tried fairly and punished proportionately for their crimes. Or, if the protesters insisted on pursuing the debate in racial terms, they would demand that any whites committing crimes be investigated and punished with equal severity.

The protesters appear at first glance to argue for a “good” because they use terms like “justice” and “equality.” In using these words, however, the protesters seek to redefine them. “Justice” in their mouths does not mean that bad conduct should be punished appropriately and “equality” does not mean that the laws should be enforced diligently against all who break them. What the Jena Six protesters mean by “justice” is that the suspects in this case should receive undue leniency, and what they mean by “equality” is that the the suspects should be treated unequally from the law’s requirements as to any other criminal suspect. What the protesters seek does not resemble any coherent traditional concept of “justice” or “equality.” They redefine those words to mean nothing more than sectarian advantage.

The crux of debate on many issues in our cultural discourse (such as gay marriage, welfare, even foreign policy) is not what good we should seek to pursue, but whether we should seek to pursue a “good” in the first place. Underlying this debate, and at the root of the modern culture war, is the issue of whether any “good” (as Plato understood the term) actually exists. But that is the subject for another essay . . .