We talked about Plato’s dialog Crito. I wanted to get two things out this.
First, of course, I wanted to discuss the arguments that Socrates makes for the conclusion that it would be wrong for him to break the law by escaping. I think it’s fair to say that we were at best uncertain about whether he had genuinely shown that this is so.
Second, I wanted to isolate something that I think Socrates is basically correct about: his understanding of what accepting the state’s authority involves. Even if we don’t accept his conclusion, I think we can take this away from the dialog as a genuine insight.
Socrates says that “the one who disobeys does wrong in three ways” (51e):
The first of these is mysterious to me. Since Socrates has a plausible case for saying that the state played an important role in raising him that is at least similar to that of a parent, I proposed that we move on to the second. No one stopped me, so that’s what we did.
Here is how I understand the second argument.
Before getting into the substance of this, I want to make a note about how it works. The argument starts of with a general proposition that applies to a variety of things: it is always wrong to do harm to those who bring you up, even if they harm you. The subsequent premises (2 and 3) assert that the general proposition in (1) applies to the case under discussion, namely, whether Socrates should disobey the law or not. That’s what we mean when we say the conclusion “follows from” the premises.
As for the substance of the argument, we challenged almost all the points.
I started by asking why Socrates felt the need for the first point since he has already established that it is wrong to harm anyone, even if they harm you (49b-e). If he felt confident in that point, he would not need to go through the trouble of establishing that the state played a role in bringing up Socrates (2); he would just have to show that breaking the law would be harmful (3).
Russell pointed out several reasons for thinking that the very general claim that it is wrong to hurt anyone seem dubious; Xiya chipped in here too. If so, that would be a good reason for Socrates to have tried to make the narrower point that it is wrong to harm those who have brought you up. That said, Chloe had some pretty convincing reasons for thinking that even the narrower point (1) is not true.
Michelle took aim at the third premise. She said that disobedience is not always harmful to the state; sometimes it improves it, especially if the state is behaving unjustly. Adam said that we have to know more about what Socrates means by “harm” in order to evaluate the point. I offered my opinion that individual acts of law breaking do not obviously harm the state; crimes happen every day but the system rumbles on. Of course, if a lot of people ignored the law, that would be a different story. But what is at issue here is whether one guy, Socrates, should break the law by running away from a death sentence. I think Athens would have survived the blow.
The third argument appeals to an agreement Socrates is said to have made with the city.
Thanks to some poor time management on my part, we didn’t discuss this one. (The 2:45 class on Tuesday and Thursday ends on the hour; the 9:35 class ends ten minutes before the hour. When you get to be my age, these things can get confusing.)
If we had, I can predict how it would have gone.
First, we would have had to ask whether it is really always wrong to break an agreement (1). Indeed, as Russell pointed out, we’re about to see Plato himself say that it can be wrong to keep an agreement to return weapons to a madman.
Second, it’s not at all obvious that it’s right to say that Socrates agreed to obey the laws because he lived in the city (2). This is going to come up again when we talk about Locke.
Socrates has the laws say that they offer two alternatives: “one must obey the commands of one’s city and country, or persuade it as to the nature of justice” (51b). It’s a lot easier to live under the authority of someone else if that person is willing to listen to your concerns and is open to persuasion.
But what if the state isn’t willing to listen? What if it’s led by irrational and corrupt people? That’s the question that motivates the Republic.
These are the things you should know or have an opinion about from today’s class.