Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

told (back at 47e–48a) that the soul, or more accurately ‘that part of us, whatever it is, which is concerned with justice and injustice’, is much more valuable than the body. But we haven’t been told why or how; and there has been no explanation of why it should be so valuable that the prospect of damage to it instantly overrides any little matters like friends’ reputations or the well-being of one’s children. And besides, if children are not well cared for, might that not damage ‘that part of them, whatever it is, which is concerned with justice and injustice’? It looks as if Socrates needed a different discussion-partner, someone who might have started calling for answers to a few of these questions.
But let us hear Socrates out, and get a view of the full picture, as he argues that it would be wrong for him to escape into exile. First he asks Crito to agree that doing someone a wrong is always wrong, even when done in response to a wrong done to you (49a–49e). Revenge may be sweet but it is not permissible. The strategic importance of this is easy to see: if it is accepted, then whether anyone has wronged Socrates—the State, the jurors, his accusers—becomes irrelevant; the only question is whether he himself would be doing a wrong in following Crito’s plan. Clearly Socrates does not expect there to be widespread agreement on this point. He knows only too well that there are many who hold that retaliation is permissible, even that it is positively right. But it is Crito he is trying to convince, and the two of them have evidently been here in discussion before—‘our former opinion’ he calls it. And Crito agrees: ‘I stand by it.’
Socrates now puts forward two much less controversial premisses: doing harm to people is wrong (49c), and breaking a fair agreement is wrong (49e). He is now about to argue that if he tries to escape he will be doing both. The injured parties would be the State of Athens and its laws; he imagines them coming forward, personified, to put their case.
In the first place, he would be doing them harm (50a–50b), indeed he would be ‘intending their destruction’. That sounds odd—surely the only thing Socrates would be intending is to escape execution? But the next sentence tells us what is meant: if what he proposes to do were taken as an example, the result would be the collapse of the law and hence also of the State, neither of which can survive if private individuals ignore the decisions of the courts. What we have here is an appeal to a very familiar moral argument: ‘What would happen if everybody behaved like that?’ When I do something, it is as if I were giving everyone else my permission to do the same, and I have to consider the consequences of that, not just of my individual action. The German Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), some would say the most influential philosopher of modern times, made this the basic principle of morality (though he found a rather more complicated way of stating it). We have all heard of it, we have all had it thrown at us, and here it is popping up in 400 bc.
In the second place, they suggest (50c), Socrates would be breaking an agreement. But from here to 51d what the Laws and the State have to say does not seem to be about an agreement at all, in any normal sense—no voluntary consent to anything on the part of Socrates is in question. It might be better described as being about obligations of gratitude, or about the deference owed by a creature to its creator, or both. The burden of this paragraph is that the Athenian State, which is compared to a parent, made Socrates what he is; and he is not dissatisfied with how it did it. So he is bound by its wishes, and it is ridiculous to suppose that he might have a right of retaliation against it.
The last point really ought to be unnecessary, since Socrates has already said that retaliation is wrong anyway. But he can be seen as covering himself twice: even if retaliation were sometimes right, as many think it is, it would still not be right in this case, where the parent-like State is the other party. As to his being bound by the State’s wishes, this totalitarian conception of the State’s powers and the corresponding view of parental authority is more stipulated than justified in this passage. That isn’t surprising, because it wouldn’t be at all easy to justify the doctrine that the State, by virtue of its role in the lives of human individuals, thereby acquires the right to dispose of them much as if they were inanimate artefacts made for its own purposes. A State may do a lot for its citizens, but can it conceivably do so much that they can lay claim to no purposes of their own beyond those it allows them? And once we grant that Socrates might be allowed some purposes of his own independent of the will of Athens, then might not staying alive (if that is what he wants) be one of them? Crito, were he not the perfect Yes-man, could have had rather more to say at this stage.
However, at 51d Socrates’ imaginary antagonists introduce a point which, if correct, makes a very big difference: Socrates has of his own free will entered into an agreement with them to respect and obey the laws. Not that he ever signed a document or made an official statement; but his behaviour was a sufficient indication of his agreement. For the law allowed him, once an adult, to take his possessions and leave Athens without any material penalty. He stayed. Nor has he ever in his seventy years been away even temporarily, except on military service. At his trial he made it clear that he had no interest in