 All these arguments rely on the hypothesis that the ‘real ruler’ is practising a craft [technê], and appeal to various features of the recognised crafts to establish that real ruling has a Socratic rather than a Thrasymachean profile. This is not only a direct attack on Thrasymachus’ account of the real ruler, it raises the very basic question of how justice is related to practical reason. The real ruler is, for Socrates and Thrasymachus both, an ideal of successful rational agency; and the recognized crafts provide a model for spelling out what that ideal must involve. By asking what ruling as a technê would be  like—self-interested or other-directed, dedicated to zero-sum goals or  not—they are really addressing a more general and still-vital set of questions: what does practical reason as such consist in? Is it reducible to the intelligent pursuit of self-interest, or does it involve some responsiveness to non-self-interested reasons? The dispute can also be framed in terms of the nature of the good, which the rational person is assumed to pursue: does it consist in zero-sum goods like wealth and power (and the pleasures they can provide), or in ones which can be attained in a cooperative rather than a pleonectic way?