Plato’s Theory of the Soul: The Tripartite Psyche, Charioteer Analogy, and the Four Virtues

Introduction

The previous three Plato lectures established the epistemological and metaphysical foundations: knowledge is possible, its objects are the eternal Forms, and the highest Form — the Form of the Good — illuminates all reality. Now Plato applies this framework to the question that motivated his philosophy from the beginning: how should a human being live, and why should anyone bother to live justly when injustice can be so profitable?

The structure of this lecture follows Plato’s own strategy in the Republic. He does not begin by asserting that justice is good. He begins by examining what a human being actually is — the structure of the self, or psyche. From that examination, he derives a definition of morality, shows why a just life is necessarily a happy life, and then demonstrates that this connection is grounded in human nature itself, not in social convention. The result is a moral philosophy that is simultaneously a psychology, an account of the virtues, and a refutation of moral relativism.

Table of Contents

1. Do Ethical Forms Exist? Bridging Mathematics and Morality

Plato’s earlier arguments established that objective truth exists — most convincingly through mathematical Forms. A square can be exactly doubled; a triangle’s angles always sum to 180 degrees. These are timeless truths, knowable with certainty, independent of any individual’s opinion. But establishing mathematical objectivity does not automatically establish moral objectivity. A critic could accept that mathematical Forms exist while denying that ethical Forms do — perhaps morality is different in kind, too entangled with subjective feeling and cultural convention to admit of objective truth.

Plato’s response to this challenge moves on two fronts.

Argument 1 — The Reductio from Moral Judgement

• If ethical Forms do not exist, moral judgements are meaningless sounds. Good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust — these words would refer to nothing real. They would be no more than expressions of personal preference or cultural habit, with no more binding force than a preference for one flavour of ice cream over another.
• The consequence is absurd: without objective ethical Forms, there is no genuine moral difference between a saint and Adolf Hitler. Both would simply be people doing what they do, and calling one good and the other evil would be purely a matter of whose opinion happened to prevail. We know with certainty that this is false — that the difference between them is real and profound. Therefore, something real must ground that difference: ethical Forms exist.

This is a reductio ad absurdum argument. Plato is not merely appealing to sentiment. He is pointing out that anyone who genuinely believes moral judgements track something real has implicitly committed to the existence of ethical Forms. The only coherent alternative is complete moral nihilism — and virtually no one, including the Sophists, actually lives as a moral nihilist.

Argument 2 — Parallel with Mathematical Forms

• If one concedes that mathematical Forms exist — and the Meno demonstration makes this very hard to deny — then one has already accepted that non-physical, objective, universal truths are possible. There is no principled reason to stop at mathematics. The Form of Courage works exactly as the Form of Triangle does: a courageous action is courageous because it participates in the Form of Courage, just as a triangular shape is triangular because it participates in the Form of Triangle.
• The Laches dialogue makes this vivid. Laches is a decorated Athenian army officer — a man who has witnessed and demonstrated courage throughout his career. He knows courage intimately. Yet when Socrates asks him to define it, he cannot. He offers examples — standing firm in battle, not retreating before the enemy — but each time Socrates presses him, his answer fails. He can recognise courage in particular instances but cannot articulate what all courageous acts share.
• The diagnosis: Laches has experiential knowledge of courage — knowledge of the particulars. What he lacks is formal knowledge — knowledge of the Form of Courage itself. He can judge whether an event participates in the Form, but he cannot state what the Form is. This is exactly the distinction between the biologist who knows many bodies and the Form of the Body, or the mathematician who knows many triangles and the Form of the Triangle. Ethical Forms operate on the same logic as mathematical Forms.

2. Three Categories of Good — The Framework for the Glaucon Debate

Before presenting his challenge to Socrates, Glaucon establishes a taxonomy of goods. This taxonomy is not merely preliminary throat-clearing — it is the precise framework on which the entire moral debate turns. Every good action or state of affairs, he proposes, falls into one of three categories.

• Category 1 covers things that are good in themselves, independent of their consequences. Listening to music is good while it is happening — its value does not depend on what comes next. No one asks ‘but what is music good for?’ in the way they might ask that about an investment or a course of study. The goodness is in the experience itself.
• Category 2 covers things valuable both intrinsically and consequentially — what Plato calls the best category. Reading a rich novel is pleasant and engaging in itself, and the understanding gained from it is also beneficial afterward. The value doubles: the activity and its results are both good.
• Category 3 covers things whose only value lies in what they produce. Taking medicine is not enjoyable in itself — it may be unpleasant, inconvenient, or even frightening. Its entire value is located in the consequence: restored health. The action is purely instrumental.

The Core Disagreement

• Glaucon’s position: justice and moral goodness belong to Category 3. Living a just life is restrictive, tiresome, and frequently costly. People who live justly do so not because it feels good but because they fear punishment or hope for reward — social approval, legal safety, divine favour. Remove the consequences and the motivation evaporates.
• Socrates’s position: justice belongs to Category 2. A just life is intrinsically good — it is good in itself, independent of what it produces — and it also tends to produce good results. Plato must prove this, not merely assert it.

3. Glaucon’s Two Challenges

To put maximum pressure on Socrates’s position, Glaucon presents two thought experiments. Together, they constitute the strongest possible version of the challenge to moral philosophy. Plato clearly designed Glaucon’s arguments to be formidable — he wanted the final answer to earn its conclusion.

Challenge 1 — The Ring of Gyges

Glaucon tells the story of Gyges, a shepherd in the service of the King of Lydia. One day, exploring a chasm that opened after an earthquake, he discovers a bronze horse with a golden ring inside. He takes the ring and later discovers its property: rotating the bezel inward makes him invisible; rotating it outward makes him visible again.

• Armed with this power, Gyges arranges to be sent as a messenger to the royal court. There, invisible and undetectable, he seduces the queen, conspires with her to kill the king, and seizes the throne for himself. He becomes king — having committed adultery, murder, and usurpation — and faces no consequences whatsoever.
• Glaucon’s argument: imagine two such rings — one given to a just person and one to an unjust person. According to Glaucon, the behaviour of both would converge. Both would use the ring to take what they want, to act on their desires without restraint, to accumulate power and pleasure. No one, Glaucon claims, is so virtuous that they would consistently resist such an opportunity. Justice is nothing but the constraint imposed by the threat of getting caught.
• The philosophical point: if justice were genuinely good in itself — intrinsically valuable, a source of real happiness — then having a ring of invisibility would not change the just person’s behaviour at all. The ring removes all consequences. If removing consequences removes all reason to be just, then justice was never valued for itself. It was always and only valued for what it prevented or produced.

The purse test: You find a purse full of money on the street. You could keep it anonymously — no camera, no witness, no record. Do you return it? If you return it only because you fear being caught, you are Glaucon’s thesis in action. If you return it because returning it is the right thing to do and doing the right thing matters to you regardless of observation — you are Socrates’s thesis in action. The Ring of Gyges is simply the purse test, taken to its logical extreme.

Challenge 2 — The Two Persons

Glaucon poses a harder, more direct challenge. He asks us to imagine two lives stripped of all misleading surface features.

• Person A — The unjust person who appears just: supremely talented at concealment and manipulation, this person commits every form of injustice while maintaining a spotless public reputation. Society respects, trusts, and rewards them. They live in comfort, accumulate wealth and influence, and enjoy every external good.
• Person B — The just person who appears unjust: despite living with complete integrity, this person is systematically misunderstood by society. They are seen as a troublemaker or a fraud, subjected to persecution, legal harassment, perhaps imprisonment. Their life is, by every external measure, painful and unrewarding.
• Glaucon’s technical demand: ‘Socrates — prove that Person B has the better life.’ If justice is intrinsically good, then the just-but-suffering person must be genuinely happier than the unjust-but-flourishing one. This must follow not from the consequences — those are stipulated to be bad for Person B — but from the nature of justice itself.
• The personal dimension: Plato is almost certainly thinking of Socrates. The most just person Athens had produced — by Plato’s own reckoning — was imprisoned and executed by that city. If Socrates’s life was better than the lives of those who condemned him, this must be shown on grounds other than external success or comfort.

4. The Tripartite Soul — Plato’s Account of Human Nature

Plato’s response to both of Glaucon’s challenges begins not with a direct argument about justice but with a careful examination of what a human being actually is. The answer to ‘why be just?’ depends entirely on what justice does to the person who is — or is not — just. And that requires understanding the structure of the self.

The Greek word Plato uses is psyche — translated variously as soul or self. It is important to note that Plato does not mean ‘soul’ in any religious or supernatural sense. The psyche is the natural psychological core of a person — their identity, their inner life, the seat of thought, feeling, and desire. ‘Self’ is probably the most accurate modern translation.

The Proof That There Are Three Parts — Not One

Plato does not simply assert three parts. He argues for them from a principle: a single thing cannot simultaneously be in two opposite states or perform two opposite functions. If it is, there must be two distinct parts doing the opposite things.

• The thirst example: a person is intensely thirsty but refuses to drink the water in front of them because they know it is contaminated. Two things are happening simultaneously: one part pulls toward drinking (the desire is real, physical, urgent) and another part holds back (the knowledge that drinking would cause harm). These are opposite impulses occurring at the same moment. They cannot come from the same source. There must be two distinct parts: one that generates the physical desire — Appetite — and one that overrides it through reasoning — Reason.

The Dead Bodies Story — Proving the Third Part

With Reason and Appetite established, the question is whether a third part is needed. Could emotions like anger simply be a type of appetite, or a function of reason?

• The story: a man passing by a place where executed criminals have been left sees their dead bodies. He is simultaneously attracted to looking at them — a morbid fascination, an appetite — and repelled and ashamed by the attraction — a moral objection, from reason. He fights himself for some time, covering his eyes. Eventually the attraction overwhelms his resistance and he rushes to look.
• The crucial moment: as he looks at the bodies, he does not simply satisfy his desire. He shouts at his own eyes, furious with himself: ‘There — look at them, you wretches! Take your fill of the fine spectacle!’ The anger is directed at his own appetite, which has defeated his reason. It is neither appetite (it condemns the appetite) nor reason (it is not a calm rational judgement — it is passionate, emotional). It is a third thing.
• The argument: if Spirit were simply a form of appetite, it would not consistently ally with reason against appetite — it would be on appetite’s side. But here Spirit is furiously angry at appetite. If Spirit were simply a form of reason, it would be expressed as a calm, detached judgment rather than a passionate emotional eruption. Spirit is genuinely distinct from both.

The Three Parts of the Soul — Defined

• Reason (Logistikon) — the thinking part. Reason understands, analyses, judges, and decides. It is the part that grasps the Forms, recognises truth, and knows what is genuinely good for the whole person. Reason’s natural function is to govern — to assess all desires, all impulses, all options, and direct the self toward its genuine long-term wellbeing. Plato identifies this as the highest part.
• Spirit or Thymos (Thumoeides) — the passionate part. Spirit is the seat of honour, pride, anger, indignation, devotion, and the will to fight for what is right. It is not a physical need — no one needs anger or a sense of honour to survive biologically. And it is not a rational calculation — a soldier charging into battle is not performing a cost-benefit analysis. Spirit is the emotional drive toward nobility, justice, and excellence. When properly trained — when it learns to follow reason’s lead — Spirit becomes reason’s most powerful ally. When undisciplined, it can be as destructive as runaway appetite.
• Appetite (Epithumia) — the desiring part. Appetite encompasses all physical desires and needs: hunger, thirst, sexual desire, the craving for comfort and pleasure, the drive to avoid pain. This is the most primitive part, connected to our biological nature. Plato calls it the lowest drive — not because it is evil (physical needs are real and legitimate) but because it operates without reason, cannot think or judge, and, if uncontrolled, would pursue immediate gratification at the expense of everything else.

The Charioteer — Plato’s Image from the Phaedrus

In the Phaedrus, Plato expresses the tripartite soul through one of his most memorable images. The self is a chariot drawn by two horses, driven by a charioteer.

• The charioteer = Reason. The driver must control and direct both horses, steering the chariot toward its proper destination.
• The first horse = Spirit. This horse is noble, well-bred, and responsive. It has a natural sense of honour and dignity. It requires only light guidance — a gentle touch of the reins is usually enough to keep it on course.
• The second horse = Appetite. This horse is unruly, impulsive, and physically powerful. It can bolt in any direction at any moment, dragging the chariot off course, or simply stopping to graze. It requires constant, firm control. If the charioteer loses hold, this horse will wreck the chariot.
• The lesson of the image: a good journey — a well-lived life — requires not the suppression of either horse but their management. Both horses are needed; the chariot cannot move with only one. But without the charioteer’s firm control, neither the good horse nor the bad one will reach the destination.

5. The Four Virtues — Derived from the Soul’s Structure

The four cardinal virtues of Plato’s moral philosophy are not arbitrary values inherited from tradition. Each one is defined precisely by the state of a particular soul-part — or by the relationship between all three parts. Understanding this derivation is essential for understanding why Plato’s ethics is a psychology as much as a moral theory.

Wisdom

• Wisdom is the virtue of Reason. It is not merely the accumulation of information but the genuine understanding of what is good — for oneself, for others, and ultimately in reference to the Form of the Good. A wise person does not simply know many things; they know how to govern their own self well, how to weigh competing desires and impulses, and how to direct their life toward its genuine purpose.

The army commander analogy: A general with wisdom does not just follow orders or act on impulse. They have a comprehensive understanding of the terrain, the enemy, the strengths and weaknesses of their own forces, and the strategic goal. From this understanding, they direct every other element. Wisdom in the soul is exactly this: Reason understanding the whole situation and directing accordingly.

Courage

• Courage is the virtue of Spirit. But it is a specific kind of courage — not recklessness, and not mere physical bravery. Platonic courage is Spirit aligned with Reason: the emotional and passionate part of the self, directed toward what is genuinely right and genuinely good, holding firm against fear, pain, pleasure, and social pressure without losing sight of what matters.
• Crucially, courage is not about being unafraid. It is about Spirit not being distracted or deflected. A courageous person can feel fear, pain, and desire — but these do not divert them from the direction reason has set. Their emotional energy is focused, disciplined, and oriented toward truth and goodness rather than dissipated in meaningless conflict or misdirected by appetite.

Temperance

• Temperance is the virtue of Appetite. But it is emphatically not asceticism — the denial of physical pleasure and need. Plato is not asking anyone to stop eating, drinking, sleeping, or enjoying physical life. Physical needs are real, and satisfying them appropriately is good. Temperance is the state in which Appetite operates in proper balance with the other two parts — taking what the body genuinely needs, neither more nor less, and doing so without dominating the whole self.
• The diabetic and sweets: a person with diabetes craves sweets (Appetite). Reason knows that eating sweets will cause serious harm. Spirit calls out the stupidity of allowing Appetite to override this knowledge. Temperance is the stable state in which Appetite’s desire is acknowledged but appropriately bounded — not through constant willpower struggle (which suggests the parts are still at war) but through a settled harmony in which moderate behaviour is natural.

Justice — The Comprehensive Virtue

• Justice in the soul is not a separate activity of one part. It is the state of the whole. When Reason is wise, Spirit is courageous, and Appetite is temperate — when each part is doing what it does best without encroaching on the others — the person is just. Justice is what we call the soul that is in this state of ordered harmony.
• The health analogy: for the body, health is not the virtue of one organ. It is the state of the whole body when every organ is functioning properly and all systems are working in coordination. A strong heart in a diseased body is not health. Justice in the soul is analogous: it is the health of the self — the state in which every psychological faculty is sound and working in its proper relation to the others.
• The inverse — injustice as disease: just as physical illness is the state in which the body’s systems are out of order, injustice is the state in which the soul’s parts are in conflict. An Appetite-dominated self — one in which physical desire overrules Reason and Spirit — is a diseased self, regardless of how wealthy or powerful the person may be externally. Injustice is, literally, a psychological illness.

6. The Final Argument — Why Justice Is a Natural Good

With the tripartite soul and the four virtues established, Plato can now construct the argument that directly answers Glaucon’s challenges. The argument is a syllogism — and its conclusion is that morality is a natural good: good by the nature of what a human being is, not merely by social convention.

Premise 1 — Moral Actions Come from a Just Soul

• An action is genuinely moral when it comes from a self that is in order. A just person — one whose Reason governs, whose Spirit is well-directed, whose Appetite is tempered — acts from a state of inner harmony. Their actions express the proper functioning of all three soul-parts working together. An unjust person may perform actions that look moral from the outside but are not genuinely motivated by the ordered self. They may be acting from fear (Appetite avoiding punishment), from pride (Spirit seeking approval), or from calculation (Reason serving Appetite rather than governing it).

Premise 2 — A Harmonious Soul Is a Happy Soul

• When the three parts of the soul are in harmony — when Reason governs, Spirit supports, and Appetite is balanced — the person is psychologically whole. There is no internal conflict, no faction fighting another for control, no energy wasted on suppressing one part or compensating for the domination of another. This is a state of genuine psychological wellbeing. Plato calls it happiness — and it is a real, deep happiness, not a momentary pleasure.
• The contrast with the unjust soul: a person governed by Appetite is, in Plato’s analysis, genuinely unhappy — regardless of wealth, power, or pleasure. Appetite is insatiable. Satisfying one desire creates another; fulfilling one craving intensifies the next. The Appetite-dominated person is on a treadmill of escalating desires that can never be fully met. This is not happiness; it is a chronic state of unfulfilled craving — what Plato elsewhere compares to trying to fill a leaking vessel.

Applying this to Glaucon’s two persons: Person B — just but persecuted — has a soul in harmony. Their Reason governs, their Spirit is aligned with truth, their Appetite is moderated. Internally, they are whole, clear, and at peace. Person A — unjust but prosperous — may have every external advantage, but their soul is disordered: Appetite or Spirit has overthrown Reason, the parts are at war, and no amount of external success can compensate for this inner disorder. On Plato’s account, Person B lives the better life, in the deepest and most important sense.

Premise 3 — Happiness Is a Natural Good

• Every human being seeks happiness. This is not a cultural preference or a social convention — it is a fact of human nature. Physis, not nomos. The Sophists argued that all values are conventional: what counts as good is decided by society, not by nature. But the desire for happiness cuts through this. No one needs to be taught to want happiness; no society needs to legislate it into existence. It is the universal, natural orientation of every self.
• This premise defeats the Sophists at their strongest point. They claimed that morality is nomos — a human invention, which a clever person can discard when inconvenient. But if morality is grounded in happiness, and happiness is physis — natural, non-conventional — then morality cannot be merely conventional. It is as natural as the desire that underlies it.

Conclusion — Morality Is Intrinsically, Naturally Good

• The syllogism’s conclusion: if moral actions come from a just soul (P1), and a just soul is a happy soul (P2), and happiness is a natural good (P3), then moral actions are naturally, intrinsically good. Not good because they earn rewards. Not good because they avoid punishment. Good because they are expressions of a soul that is genuinely flourishing — and genuine flourishing is what every human being naturally seeks and needs.
• Answering the Ring of Gyges: if a just person receives a ring of invisibility, their behaviour does not change — because their motivation for being just is not external consequence but internal harmony. Their soul is already ordered; the ring changes nothing about their inner state. An unjust person, by contrast, would use the ring to amplify their disordered desires — which only increases their inner disorder, their unhappiness.
• Answering the two-persons challenge: Person B — just and suffering — has the better life because their self is in order. Their suffering is external, inflicted by a society too disordered to recognise genuine goodness. But nothing that is done to their body corrupts their soul. Person A — unjust and flourishing — has the worse life because their self is disordered. Their prosperity is external, but their inner life is the chronic chaos of an ungoverned self.
• Socrates as the living proof: Socrates knew he was going to die unjustly. He could have fled — Crito offered to arrange it. He chose death over self-betrayal because his soul was in order, and he would not disorder it to save his body. On Plato’s account, Socrates lived — and died — the best possible human life. Not despite his suffering, but because his internal state was precisely what it should be.

Conclusion

Plato’s moral philosophy achieves something remarkable: it answers the oldest challenge to ethics — ‘why be good if being bad pays better?’ — not by appealing to divine reward, social contract, or future consequences, but by examining what human beings actually are. The tripartite soul is not a metaphor; it is Plato’s account of psychological reality. Reason, Spirit, and Appetite are the permanent, structural features of the human self. Wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice are not virtues imposed from outside but names for the optimal functioning of those three parts. Justice is the health of the soul — and a healthy soul is, by nature, a happy soul.

This argument connects to every other aspect of Plato’s philosophy. It connects backward to the Theory of Forms — because the Form of the Good is the ultimate object toward which Reason is oriented. It connects to the Allegory of the Cave — because the journey from ignorance to wisdom is the journey from an Appetite-governed self to a Reason-governed one. And it connects forward to Plato’s political philosophy — because the just individual and the just state are mirrors of each other, governed by the same structural principles. The justice of a soul and the justice of a city are, for Plato, the same thing at two different scales.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three categories of good, and why do they matter for Plato’s ethics?

Plato identifies three types of goods: Category 1 goods are intrinsically valuable — good in themselves, regardless of consequences, like enjoying music. Category 2 goods are valuable both intrinsically and consequentially — enjoyable in the doing and also productive of further benefits, like reading a book. Category 3 goods are valuable only for their consequences — their activity is neutral or unpleasant, like taking bitter medicine. The taxonomy matters because it frames the entire debate about justice. Glaucon argues that justice belongs to Category 3 — nobody enjoys being just; they do it only to avoid punishment or gain reward. Socrates argues it belongs to Category 2 — living justly is intrinsically good (it produces genuine happiness in the soul) and also tends to produce good external results. The whole of Plato’s moral psychology is developed to prove Socrates’s position.

What is the Ring of Gyges, and what philosophical challenge does it pose?

The Ring of Gyges is a thought experiment presented by Glaucon in the Republic. A shepherd named Gyges discovers a ring that makes him invisible. He uses this power to commit adultery, murder the king, and seize the throne — facing no consequences. Glaucon argues that anyone with such a ring would behave the same way: justice is only a constraint imposed by the fear of being caught, not an intrinsic good. If you remove all consequences, you remove all reason to be just. Plato’s answer is that a genuinely just person would not change their behaviour, because their motivation for justice is not external consequence but internal harmony. A disordered soul does not become ordered by having power to act undetected — it becomes more disordered. The ring changes circumstances; it does not change what you are.

What are the three parts of the soul, and how does Plato prove they are distinct?

The three parts are Reason (the thinking, governing part), Spirit or Thymos (the seat of emotion, honour, and moral passion), and Appetite (physical desires and needs). Plato proves they are distinct through the principle of opposites: a single thing cannot simultaneously perform two opposite functions. If it does, there must be two separate parts. He demonstrates this through two cases. First, a person who is intensely thirsty but refuses to drink shows two simultaneous impulses — desire (Appetite) and refusal (Reason) — that must come from different sources. Second, the man who wants to look at dead bodies, fights the urge, gives in, and then shouts at himself in furious self-disgust shows a third thing: the anger at his own Appetite is neither a physical desire nor a calm rational judgment. It is Spirit — emotional indignation directed against Appetite. Three simultaneous opposing activities confirm three genuinely distinct parts.

What is Spirit (Thymos), and why is it so commonly misunderstood?

Spirit, or Thymos, is the seat of honour, pride, moral indignation, anger, devotion, and the passionate drive to fight for what is right. It is most commonly misunderstood in two ways: students either treat it as a form of appetite (a desire, albeit for honour rather than food) or as a mild form of reason (a kind of emotional wisdom). It is neither. It is not appetite because it is not rooted in physical need — a person can live without a sense of honour; they cannot live without food. It is not reason because it is not calm, analytical, or calculating — it is passionate, forceful, and immediate. Crucially, when properly trained, Spirit allies with Reason against Appetite — as in the dead-bodies story, where Spirit’s anger was directed at Appetite’s victory over Reason. Examples of Spirit include: the soldier’s devotion to duty not from calculation but from loyalty; the athlete’s drive for glory; Socrates’s refusal to abandon his mission even at the cost of his life; the indignation you feel when you witness an injustice done to someone who cannot defend themselves.

How does Plato’s tripartite soul lead to the conclusion that justice is naturally good?

The argument runs in three steps. First, moral actions are those that originate from a harmonious soul — one in which Reason governs, Spirit is properly oriented, and Appetite is balanced. Second, a soul in this state of harmony is, by Plato’s account, a genuinely happy soul — the parts are not at war, energy is not wasted in internal conflict, and the person has a stable sense of wellbeing that no external circumstance can easily destroy. Third, happiness is a natural good — not a social convention but a universal feature of human nature. Every person by nature seeks genuine wellbeing. Combining these three steps: moral actions come from a just soul; a just soul is a happy soul; happiness is natural. Therefore morality is naturally, intrinsically good — not merely conventionally, not merely for its consequences, but by the fundamental nature of what a human being is. This simultaneously answers Glaucon’s challenge and refutes the Sophists’ claim that morality is merely nomos.