n hurt and injury, Plato says that
mere hurt is not injury; but that a benefit when done in a wrong spirit
may sometimes injure, e.g. when conferred without regard to right and
wrong, or to the good or evil consequences which may follow. He means
to say that the good or evil disposition of the agent is the principle
which characterizes actions; and this is not sufficiently described by
the terms voluntary and involuntary. You may hurt another involuntarily,
and no one would suppose that you had injured him; and you may hurt him
voluntarily, as in inflicting punishment--neither is this injury; but if
you hurt him from motives of avarice, ambition, or cowardly fear, this
is injury. Injustice is also described as the victory of desire or
passion or self-conceit over reason, as justice is the subordination of
them to reason. In some paradoxical sense Plato is disposed to affirm
all injustice to be involuntary; because no man would do injustice who
knew that it never paid and could calculate the consequences of what
he was doing. Yet, on the other hand, he admits that the distinction of
voluntary and involuntary, taken in another and more obvious sense, is
the basis of legislation. His conception of justice and injustice is
complicated (1) by the want of a distinction between justice and virtue,
that is to say, between the quality which primarily regards others, and
the quality in which self and others are equally regarded; (2) by the
confusion of doing and suffering justice; (3) by the unwillingness to
renounce the old Socratic paradox, that evil is involuntary.

III. The Laws rest on a religious foundation; in this respect they
bear the stamp of primitive legislation. They do not escape the almost
inevitable consequence of making irreligion penal. If laws are based
upon religion, the greatest offence against them must be irreligion.
Hence the necessity for what in modern language, and according to a
distinction which Plato would scarcely have understood, might be termed
persecution. But the spirit of persecution in Plato, unlike that of
modern religious bodies, arises out of the desire to enforce a true and
simple form of religion, and is directed against the superstitions which
tend to degrade mankind. Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, is in favour
of tolerating all except the intolerant, though he would not promote to
high offices those who disbelieved in the immortality of the soul. Plato
has not advanced quite so far as t