What Makes a Law Good? Plato on Legal Theory in the Statesman

Plato's legal epistemology is simultaneously context-sensitive and generalist. Particularly in the Statesman, Plato prefers a competent individual to the rigid rule of laws ( 294a), but it seems implausible that he does so on the basis of a moral particularism. Although nowhere utilizing the word epieikeia to appeal to a perfect personal knowledge distinct from written rules, Plato outlines a competence quite similar to Aristotelian epieikeia: He introduces a twofold "art of measurement" (metretike) whose second part is concerned with "the mean, and the fit, and the opportune and the due, and with all those words, in short, which denote a mean or standard removed from the extremes" (pi rho omicron sigma tau omicron mu epsilon tau rho tau omicron nu kappa alpha iota tau omicron pi rho epsilon pi omicron nu kappa alpha iota tau omicron nu kappa alpha iota rho omicron nu tau omicron delta epsilon omicron nu kappa alpha iota pi alpha nu theta omicron pi omicron sigma alpha epsilon iota zeta tau omicron mu epsilon sigma omicron nu 284e6-7). This competence can deal with the shortcomings of written law. What he describes as the insufficiency of the law is that it does not perfectly comprehend "what is noblest and most just for all" and that it "therefore cannot enforce what is best". Plato tells us that "the differences of men and actions, and the endless irregular movements of human things, do not admit of any universal and simple rule, and no art whatsoever can lay down a rule which will last for all time" (294b2 ff.; transl. B. Jowett). Apparently, the metretike under discussion is the competence to find the mean and the fit which makes Plato's perfect leader superior to the written laws. As we are told in the Statesman, laws are no more than necessary substitutes for the perfect knowledge of the man who possesses full insight. Plato's political personalism, however, is certainly not founded on a particularist idea of decision-making. The underlying Platonic epistemology tends to favour an absolute expert who is in possession of an ideal type of abstract knowledge, not of practical experience. What Plato seems to have in mind is a sort of infallible and invariant knowledge, not a radically context-dependent Wittgensteinian capacity of deliberation and judgment.