Instead of saying that questions of justice are “subjective,” we should say that when it comes to a question of justice, my pursuit of the answer is inflected by my personal investment in how it gets answered:

When the question is untimely, we “hand over” an answer that is guaranteed to be found on the tip of our tongue, because we were already speaking it—to ourselves. Or at least we assumed we were.

At one point, Socrates’ interlocutor Alcibiades makes the claim that “the just differs from the advantageous.”

Our load-bearing answers to untimely questions tend to give rise to predictions that specify what needs to be true in the future in order for my answer to guide my action in the present.

Later philosophers speak of this kind of knowledge as “a priori knowledge”—a phrase denoting what we know prior to experience—or “innate ideas,” or “relations of ideas.” They want to hold on to Socrates’ notion that there is some distinct kind of knowledge at play in (for instance) geometry, access to which does not seem to depend on one’s

Our bodies do not content themselves with commands to eat this or drink that. They also command us to acquire the resources that will allow us to fulfill such commands in the future.

Error does not tend to survive introspective awareness of itself:

When I construct objections to my own plan or check my arithmetic, I suspend my commitment to seeing my plan as the right one, or to arriving at a particular sum.

“My” reputation is not something I can ever have in my own possession: it is located outside me—outside