  There is another reason to worry about explaining just actions by the motivating power of knowledge. If the philosophers are motivated to  do what is just by their knowledge of the forms, then there would  seem to be an enormous gap between philosophers and non-philosophers. In addition to the epistemic gap—the philosophers have  knowledge and the non-philosophers do not—we have a  motivational gap: the philosophers’ knowledge gives them motivations  to do what is required by justice, and the non-philosophers are not  similarly motivated. This gap suggests some rather unpalatable  conclusions about the character of non-philosophers’ lives even in  the ideal city, and it also sits poorly with Socrates’ evident desire to take the philosophers’ justice as a paradigm that can be usefully  approximated by non-philosophers (472c–d).