Plato and a PageRank solution to “Justice”
While eating lunch in one of the many free cafeterias, Plato is cornered by a somewhat self-important, dreadlocked coder named Marcus, who tries to convince Plato that Google PageRank has finally solved the problem agonized over in the Republic, of how to define justice. By using the Internet, we can simply crowd-source the answer, Marcus declares: get millions of people to render moral judgments on every conceivable question, and also moral judgments on each other’s judgments. Then declare those judgments the most morally reliable, that are judged the most reliable by the people who are themselves the most morally reliable.
.. Not surprisingly, Plato is skeptical. Through Socratic questioning—the method he learned from the horse’s mouth—Plato manages to make Marcus realize that, in the very act of choosing which of several variants of PageRank to use in our crowd-sourced justice engine, we’ll implicitly be making moral choices already. And therefore, we can’t use PageRank, or anything like it, as the ultimate ground of morality.