The disturbing regularity with which in recent months certain judicial proceedings have been the focus of media attention (the Bárcenas, Noos, ERES cases in Andalusia, etc...) is an invitation to reflect not only on the health of our rule of law, but also on the moral foundations of justice.

"The offender has a right to his punishment." By expressing himself in these terms, Hegel manages to convey two important ideas: neither is right a matter of whim, nor is punishment a matter of revenge. In reality, to speak of punishment as a "right" of the offender is a way of recognizing the freedom necessary for the commission of the crime. From this perspective, punishment represents the way offered to him to restore to him, as a person, the moral dignity he has deprived himself of by his act. Certainly, punishment alone does not restore moral dignity to the person who has lost it, if it is not preceded by repentance, by which the offender personally distances himself from the crime committed, reproving his past action and preparing himself for the necessary reparation, making clear the difference between the person and his act.    

This vision of punishment, without being incompatible with the one that contemplates it in core topic pedagogical or preventive, emphasizes another aspect, disfigured in our strategic-emotional culture: the notion of moral dignity; the idea that our behavior may not be up to what our condition of rational beings demands; the idea that being rational is something more than being singularly complex animals, and behaving rationally something more than being able to strategically satisfy interests and desires not very different from those that in final could move any other animal. For, more radically, to be rational is degree scroll of a peculiar dignity, defined by the possibility of opening oneself to a different universe of reasons, specifically ethical, that close the way to any purely instrumental consideration of the human being.

Plato was moving in this universe of reasons when, five centuries before Christ, in the dialogue Gorgias, he made Socrates say the celebrated phrase: "It is better to suffer injustice than to commit it". The laughter with which Socrates' interlocutor receives these words can be compared to the condescending smile of those who, at this point, are inclined to think that real life runs according to quite different categories.

But it is precisely in this that Plato's philosophical audacity lies: in questioning the thesis consecrated by the dominant moral mediocrity, and affirming categorically, contrary to deceitful appearances, "that it is necessary to be more careful of committing injustice than of suffering it, and that one should take care, above all, not to appear good, but to be good, in private and in public. That if anyone does wrong in anything, he must be punished, and this is the second good after that of being just, that of being just again and satisfying the guilt by means of punishment".

Reading Plato in our social and cultural context is subversive. It gives occasion to regret that the Philosophy has almost disappeared from the programs of study plans of the high school diplomareplaced by apparently more useful and productive knowledge. It would be wrong to think that religion classes can make up for this lack. The European identity, today reduced to economic issues, has been forged in the heat of a dialogue, encounters and misunderstandings, between reason and faith. Disregarding either of these extremes weakens the nucleus on which our convictions have been nourished for centuries, because it cuts off the root that nourishes them. Strictly speaking, the most dangerous thing for the present and future vitality of Europe is the lack of convictions. And it is the deaf perception of this lack that explains the deterioration of public confidence in political and legal institutions, whose credibility must be reinforced as a matter of urgency.

It is possible that, in following the information on the judicial processes opened in our country, more than one philosophical soul may have thought of the lesson that Socrates extracts from the myth with which Plato closes the Gorgias, where he refers to the existence of a law in force since the time of Cronus, according to which, at first, the judicial processes that decided the final destiny of men - the Island of the Blessed, or the prison of expiation and punishment, called Tartarus - took place during the lifetime of the accused, the judicial processes that decided the final destiny of men - the Island of the Blessed, or the prison of expiation and punishment, called Tartarus - took place during the lifetime of the accused, and this gave rise to many imperfections in the trials, because the men came to be judged "covered with beautiful bodies, with nobility and riches, and.... presenting numerous witnesses to assure that they had lived justly". Therefore, he says, Zeus arranged for the trial to take place after death, to observe the souls naked, unadorned, with only the wounds of their crimes in sight, and thus not to be seduced by appearances.