Socrates

by William J Prior

  Despite the fact that Socrates has said that he wants only to consider the question of justice, the speech of the laws touches on other matters as well, such as Socrates’ consistency and his concern for his children. The core of the speech is concerned with justice, however. The laws argue that the agreement with Socrates is a just one, that the relation between Socrates and the state is not an equal but an unequal one, that Socrates has contracted implicitly to obey the laws, and that he had the option to persuade the Athenians that their laws were wrong, unjust. He does not claim that, if this opportunity had been lacking, obedience to the laws would not have been required. It is simply a good feature of the laws of Athens that they add this opportunity to the contract. The essence of the case of the laws is that Socrates has made an agreement, that the agreement is just, and that therefore he must obey it. The agreement includes obeying the verdicts of the courts, and not only those verdicts he deems just. The laws admit, at 54b–c, that Socrates has been wronged; but they insist that he has been wronged not by them but by men, presumably by his accusers and the jurors. Socrates does not say that the law against impiety was unjust, or that his agreement to accept the verdict of the court was unjust. If he had attempted to persuade the Athenians that these laws were unjust, he failed, and as a result he must obey the laws as they stand.

  The Crito and Civil Disobedience

  Some interpreters have been disappointed in this argument. They have wanted Socrates to advocate a doctrine of civil disobedience, and they have thought that they might find a justification for civil disobedience in a remark of Socrates’ in Plato's Apology that if the jury offered him acquittal on the condition that he stop practicing philosophy, he would continue to philosophize in service to the god (29d–30b). There are problems concerning the legitimacy of such an offer,4 but even if it were a possibility, I do not see how the Apology remark applies in the case of the Crito. One traditional approach to the problem of civil disobedience is to invoke “higher laws,” typically God's laws, as taking precedence over human laws. That is what Antigone does in Sophocles’ play. It may be what Socrates does in the Apology. Socrates tells the jury there that he will continue to philosophize because it is part of his divine mission: Apollo has commanded it. A law, or a verdict, that forbade someone to follow a divine command would be an unjust law. But that is not what is at stake in the Crito. It is not Apollo who has come to Socrates with a plan for his escape, but Crito. There is no reason to think that a law is unjust, and might be disobeyed, because Crito, or even Socrates, thinks it unjust. There is no indication, moreover, that the laws in the case are unjust, or that Socrates thinks them so. Further, civil disobedience, as I understand it, is not the view that one may disobey the law with impunity. When Martin Luther King Jr. disobeyed the law during the civil rights movement, he expected to be punished for it, and was. Civil disobedience does not reject the right of the state to enforce its laws, even if it targets some of those laws as unjust. In any case, however, Socrates is not in prison awaiting execution because of disobedience to a law he believed to be unjust.

  The Social Contract

  The heart of the argument of the laws is that the individual has a contract with the state. The laws present what has been called a “social contract” theory of the law. In the social contract theory, the legitimacy of law is traced back to a contract among people to frame laws that protect their interests; the justification of law is that it is agreed to by people. In Book II of the Republic Glaucon presents a social contract theory of justice when he says that people make laws to protect themselves from being harmed by others. What legitimates the laws of Athens, according to their speech, is the benefits of the law in cases such as marriage and education. Laws are just because they benefit people. Nonetheless, the citizen's obligation to obey the law is a matter of agreement, an implicit contract between citizen and state. Consider a modern parallel. The benefit of the traffic laws is that they prevent accidents and ensure good order on the roads. Nonetheless, when one gets a driver's license the state insists that the licensed driver enters into an agreement with the state to obey the traffic laws.

  Socrates’ Response to the Speech of the Laws

  Socrates ends the Crito with a comment that is unprecedented in the elenctic dialogues. He says the speech of the laws “resounds in me, and makes it impossible for me to hear anything else. As far as my present beliefs go, if you speak in opposition to them, you will speak in vain. However, if you think you can accomplish anything, speak” (54d; my italics). To this Crito responds that he has nothing to say. The uniqueness of this remark lies in Socrates’ virtual refusal to hear further arguments. Crito may speak, but Socrates will not listen. His mind is made up. In any other context Socrates would, by inviting Crito to respond, be saying that he is willing to listen to further arguments. It would be a way of saying that he did not think he had attained final wisdom on the matter at hand. (See, for instance, Gorgias 506a.) Not here. Here, Socrates is permitting Crito to speak, but at the same time warning him that it would be futile to do so. Some interpreters, who reject the claim that the speech of the laws reflects Socrates’ views, have thought that Socrates is saying that he has been overwhelmed by the rhetoric of the laws, not by the rationality of their arguments, that he has succumbed to a kind of madness, like the Corybants to whom he compares himself. My response to this is that it would be unprecedented for Socrates to admit to being so overwhelmed by rhetoric that he had no rational response. In the Protagoras, when he has heard Protagoras’ Great Speech, when he confesses that he was entranced by it, Socrates still finds a response which permits the dialogue to continue. In Republic I, when Thrasymachus bursts into the conversation at 336c, Socrates admits to being almost dumbstruck, but he nonetheless manages a rational response. Socrates always manages a rational response, except here. I suggest that this is because Socrates is not just overwhelmed by the rhetoric of the laws’ speech, but convinced by their arguments. The laws present their case like an orator, but they also ask Socrates at each point in the argument whether he has anything to respond. In each case he does not.

  Why Treat Others Justly?

  Socrates’ obligation to obey the laws of Athens is a moral obligation. It derives from the ethical theory that Socrates had articulated in the pages preceding the speech of the laws. It is wrong to disobey the law because that would violate a just agreement, and violating a just agreement is something a just person will not do. To treat someone unjustly is to mistreat him or her, and this mistreatment corrupts the soul of the unjust person. The unjust person ignores this consequence of unjust action at his or her peril, for life is not worth living with a corrupt soul. Now as I have said in Chapter 6, Socrates is a eudaimonist, like all ancient ethical theorists. He thinks that ethical actions are justified by virtue of their contribution to one's eudaimonia, one's happiness or flourishing. It is the agent's own eudaimonia that is supposed to concern him or her, not the happiness of everyone. That means that an argument is needed to connect the happiness of the agent to the well-being of others. Why should not a person, like Polus’ example of Archelaus in the Gorgias, seek his own happiness by trampling on the happiness of others? The major modern ethical theories, Kantian deontology and utilitarianism, take a notion of the moral equality of all persons for granted. The equal dignity of all persons for Kant and the equal susceptibility of all sentient beings to pleasure and pain for the classical utilitarians are for those theorists objective realities, one might say axioms of their systems, from which all moral reasoning begins. It is easy to see why, on both of these theories, mistreatment of others is wrong, and why a moral person would seek to avoid it. To ask, why should I care about the dignity of another person is to ask why I should adopt the Kantian framework of ethics at all. Similarly for utilitarianism. This is not obviously the case for ancient eudaimonism. The attractiveness of eudaimonism is that it seems that one can take it for granted that we all care for our own happiness or well-being or for the best qual
ity of life that we can obtain. Whether this requires us to take interest in the happiness or well-being or the quality of life of another, however, is a question that requires an additional answer.

  Part of the necessary argument is provided by the speech of the laws. They point out to Socrates that the agreement he has made with them is a just agreement. Why should Socrates care about honoring this agreement? The answer of the laws is that they have been beneficial to Socrates, to such a degree that he is in their debt. Though Socrates does not make anything of the following point, the laws of Athens are democratic laws. They accord to each citizen equal rights, equal standing as a citizen. If Socrates is to honor the just agreement with the laws, then he must treat his fellow citizens with respect. This provides a basis for just treatment of one's fellow citizens, but it is a legal argument. It is based on a particular form of government, a particular constitution. It does not provide a moral basis for treating other people, just as people, with respect. It does not tell Socrates how he should treat citizens of other city-states, who may be his enemies. He suggests an argument in favor of treating well those who live in proximity to him, his neighbors, in the Apology, when he asks Meletus, rhetorically, if he is so ignorant that he does not know that it is beneficial to himself to treat his neighbors well (25d–e); but this, again, does not explain how one is to treat those who are geographically or politically distant. Socrates needs a basis for such treatment if he is to extend justice beyond the scope of his immediate friends and neighbors, to human beings or rational agents as such.

  Socrates has eudaimonist, egoist reasons for believing that he has an obligation to treat others justly. He believes that the good life is the admirable, the just life. He believes that in harming or wronging another person one damages one's own soul. As the myth at the end of the Gorgias points out, if one arrives in Hades with a soul that has been scarred by the commission of unjust acts, one will be judged accordingly. What is missing from Socrates’ defense of justice in the Crito is something like an explicit formulation of the Kantian principle that all one's fellow human beings or all rational agents have an equal case for moral treatment, or the utilitarian principle that all sentient beings have an equal case for having their needs, interests, or preferences protected. I do not suggest that Socrates would oppose such a principle, were it proposed to him. I think it might even be implicit in his concept of justice. It is not, however, explicit, and it leaves a gap in his argument. The argument in the Gorgias with Polus and with Callicles would look different if Socrates could put forward the golden rule, or something like it, as a moral principle, even if Polus and Callicles should reject it. Socrates has to argue, however, for the just treatment of others on eudaimonistic and egoistic grounds, not on deontological, utilitarian, or other universalist grounds.

  Socrates as Critic of Athenian Democracy

  The fact that Socrates remained in prison and faced execution shows that he was a loyal citizen of Athens. The Crito provides a philosophical justification for his conduct by basing it on an account of justice and the social contract. Does that mean that Socrates was not also a critic of Athenian democracy? It does not. Socrates was such a critic. His critique of democracy was based on his philosophical preference for another conception of the state. What Socrates desired was a government, a state in which all of the citizens were dedicated to the pursuit of virtue. Socrates did not approve of the state of affairs in Athens, in which people pursued a variety of ends without state interference. (This is a point of which Pericles is particularly proud in his funeral oration; see Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, II.37.) If democratic freedom is the freedom to pursue ends of one's own choice, Socrates did not value this sort of freedom. He thought that it was harmful to the state. What Socrates preferred was not Athenian democracy but what I shall call a “republic of moral inquiry.”

  Socrates was not principally concerned with the question whether the government in such a state was to be invested in a single person (monarchy), a small number of people (oligarchy) or a large number (democracy). He was interested in the principle that qualified a person or persons to rule. For Socrates that principle was knowledge of virtue and its relation to the good life. Now we have seen in the elenctic dialogues that Socrates’ search for such a person has, time and time again, proved vain. The opinion Socrates expresses in the Apology is that such knowledge is reserved for the gods. The doctrine of recollection in the Meno is more optimistic: it indicates that such knowledge is implicit in the mind of each person, but that it needs questioning, elenctic examination, to be brought out. In any case, however, Socrates never encounters anyone in the elenctic dialogues who is in active possession of this knowledge, and he repeatedly denies that he has it himself. Given that, it is very unlikely that he thought that someday the active knowledge of the nature of virtue and the human good would be widely shared. In all of his discussions of political rule in the elenctic dialogues he assumes that at most one person in a given state would have such knowledge. Should it turn out otherwise, should it be that, as Protagoras states in his Great Speech, everyone in the state has the knowledge necessary to participate in ruling, Socrates would probably not be displeased, though he certainly would be surprised. But Socrates did not think that the ordinary citizen of Athenian democracy had that necessary knowledge; nor did he think that the oligarchs who made up the government of the Thirty had it. Socrates did not think that the necessary qualification for rule was free birth and citizenship (as in Athenian democracy), or a certain amount of property (as in the typical oligarchy), or hereditary right (as in traditional monarchy); he thought it was knowledge. What Socrates wanted to do was to find a person with the necessary knowledge and put him or her in absolute control over the state.

  Interpreters sometimes argue that Socrates was democratic or “demophilic,” a lover of the people, even in his criticism of democracy.5 Socrates did think that the pursuit of virtue was something that ought to engage every man, woman, and child, whether young or old, free or slave, in the state. Socrates’ desired republic of moral inquiry would not look much like Athenian democracy. It is sometimes said that, in the absence of a knowledgeable ruler, democracy would be Socrates’ preferred form of government.6 There is something to be said for this proposal. Until it betrayed its principles by convicting Socrates, the Athenian democracy had valued free speech as a fundamental social good, and free speech would seem to be necessary for philosophical inquiry. It is sometimes noted that a possible reason Socrates did not emigrate to Sparta or Crete, states which the laws claim in the Crito that Socrates had praised as well governed, is that they did not provide the freedom of speech necessary for philosophical inquiry. The problem with this proposal, however, is that it is speculative. There are no texts in the elenctic dialogues in which Socrates praises Athenian democracy for its freedom of speech, or in which he states that the government he prefers, as a matter of practice if not in theory, is democracy. In Socrates’ preferred republic of moral inquiry, everyone would pursue moral knowledge by elenctic argument, and such a state would be democratic in the sense that this pursuit would be available to everyone. Such a state would be made up entirely of philosophers in the Socratic mold. Given the fact, however, that Socrates could not find one person who had the knowledge he was seeking and few who were even seeking it, the existence of such a state would seem to be extraordinarily unlikely.

  Socrates’ Political Views

  Socrates’ political views come out in several of the works we have examined. In the Apology Socrates explains to the Athenians why he has not taken an active role in the political life of the city. Such a role was expected for everyone in Athenian democracy: as Pericles states in his funeral oration, “we regard the citizen who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless” (Thucydides, II.40). Socrates gives two reasons for not participating actively in Athenian politics. The first is that his divine sign forbade him to do so (31d). The second is that he would not have lived lo
ng if he had: “if I had long ago attempted to take part in politics, I should have died long ago, and benefited neither you nor myself … no man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time” (31d–32a). Socrates’ complaint is that Athenian society is inherently and dangerously unjust. He offers two examples from his own history to illustrate his point. The first occurred when Socrates was a member of the presiding committee of the council, the body that set the legislative agenda for the assembly. There was great public support for a motion to try as a group the ten Athenian generals who had failed to recover the survivors after the Athenian naval victory at Arginusae in 406. (A storm had prevented recovery efforts.) “This was illegal,” Socrates states, “as you all recognized later. I was the only member of the presiding committee to oppose your doing something contrary to the laws, and I voted against it. The orators were ready to prosecute me and take me away, and your shouts were egging them on, but I thought I should run any risk on the side of law and justice rather than join you, for fear of prison or death, when you were engaged in an unjust course” (32b–c). This occurred under the democracy. During the rule of the Thirty, Socrates was ordered to arrest Leon of Salamis, so that he might be executed. This was the sort of thing the Thirty did regularly: they murdered wealthy Athenians and confiscated their property. As Socrates says: