The Ant And The Grasshopper By Aesop

In the fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper” written by the the world renowned author Aesop it tells what seems to be a child's tale about about preparing for the future and working hard by gathering food. This story is actually a lot deeper than what it seems to be on the outside, addressing key flaws and points of justice in the world. In this fable a grasshopper is happily moving through life eating and abundance of food and playing around. One day on a summer while prancing through life the grasshopper seen an ant work hard. So the grasshopper asked the ant if he wanted to come chat. The Ant said no and suggested that the grasshopper start preparing for the winter like he was doing. The grasshopper replied with “we have plenty of food

in the present”. The grasshopper’s mentality of living for the present and worrying about the future when it comes continued until one day in the winter when it found itself dying due to a lack of food and the ants prospering sharing the food they collected. The moral of the story is”It is best to prepare for the days of necessity”.
The first question asked is “What is your author’s conception of justice?How is it different similar to the standard concept of justice?”.Based on the story I can conclude that Aesop believes hard work, team work, and sharing with equal distribution results in justice.This can be supported by the fact that the grasshopper suffered during the winter, while the ants live comfortable. This view of justice is parallel to to the standard concept of justice, which is hard work pays off and there are consequences of not working hard.
In the disney retelling of aseop’s fable a few deatils change.In the disney cartoon an ant is going about life happily when stumbles upon a colony of ants working hard.

Next he pulls one ant aside and asks why was he working so hard,but once the queen ant sees the ant talking to the grasshopper she forces the ant to get back to work. The grasshopper tries to convince the queen that her and her ants should stop and have fun because “the world owes them a living” and they have plenty of time to prepare for winter. The queen tells the grasshopper that he will regret not preparing now when the winter comes. Once the winter comes the grasshopper is starving and out searching for food. on the verge of death the grasshopper sees the ants all having a good time with plenty of food. He crawls to the door and the let him in and take care of him.he then realizes he was living life wrong and changes his song from “the world owes us a living” to “we owe the world a living”.

This disney retelling displays the advantages and ideas of social fairness vs the the disadvantages of individual morality. In this example societ trumps the individual,but is not all that fair due to the fact that the queen did not do any work at all ,but was treated the best and survived alongside the hardworking ants.In the original fable the battle was between the individual morality of the ant and the individual morality of the grasshopper, which is misleading and does not make since because there isn’t a society

to display social fairness.
There are many different conceptions of justice.Karl Marx and John Rawls published their views of society several years later after Aesop wrote this fable. In Rawls's Two Principles of Justice he states”First:each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second:social and economicv inequalities are to be arrages ao that they are both(a) resonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all”. After these two statements in the beginning he goes on to give a blueprint on how to create a just society. From these two statements along the blueprint he laid out , it can be concluded that his conception of justice is that society should be altered so that everyone has an equal advantage in life and that people in should sacrifice the their abundance of wealth to help out the less fortunate thus creating an equal society. Karl Marx has a similar view , but Aesop shows that he believes an individual deserves whatever they work for and should not have to compensate for the misfortunes of others. Varoufakis uses Aesop's fable to describe the bailout of the greeks by the germans,which is not an accurate comparison do to the fact the all greeks and germans do not have the same work ethic. My chief criticism with Aesop’s conception of justice is that it is not detailed enough or contain enough variables to be relevant to the issues with justice in today’s society.