Crito
What if my father taught me what Socrates died for?
In Plato’s Crito, Socrates confronts us with the responsibility we inherently accept upon entering the social contract we establish with the nation. When I first read it my immediate reaction was to agree with Crito. Of course Socrates should avoid the death penalty. The law, as a fair and accurate endeavor, still grants him the right to bring people together to prove his innocence, to buy his freedom through powerful friends, or to seek exile and find another beginning somewhere else.
I was briefly proud of myself for arriving at such an obvious rational conclusion to such an enigmatic story. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how wrong I was. Not because doing everything possible to preserve one’s life and prove one’s innocence is wrong, but because it made me question my own duties and responsibilities, the ones I acquired when I decided to become a citizen of a nation, even as a birthright.
It was my father who once taught me that we have rights but also responsibilities. Within the community, the family, the nation’s laws and rules. When we accept to either move to or live in a country, we inherit certain legal rights such as a name, an ID, social security in some cases, in exchange for respecting the law and paying taxes. True, we tend to underscore our rights at the expense of our responsibilities. But as Socrates clearly pointed out, accepting the ruling against him, even at the cost of his own life, was his responsibility as a citizen.
Would that decision make a martyr of him? A martyr in the sense of dying for what is just, not necessarily for the admiration of others. Probably it would. But in the case of Socrates, that reflection was beside the point. He was living and dying for what he believed was right, not for the sake of others, but for his own conviction that preserving the common good was necessary to maintain the stability of the nation.
But here is where the puzzle deepens. If the law is fair and just in principle, can we assume that those who apply it are equally unbiased? Socrates was not condemned by the law itself but by the men interpreting it, men with their own fears, politics and blind spots. Martin Luther King understood this distinction from a prison cell in Birmingham, writing that one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. Thoreau said the same. The social contract demands compliance, but it was never designed to demand silence in the face of its own corruption.
It occurs to me there must be another way to sit with this puzzle. One where unjust application has no place in the argument, where bias can be identified and preempted before it costs a citizen his life. Perhaps the act of reasoning through it honestly is itself the most Socratic resolution. Or perhaps the answer is simpler and more unsettling than any legal argument. The best way to sit with it is with the same certainty Socrates carried to the end. That the only life worth living is the one we are prepared to die for, even when others are wrong about why.
If the law demanded something of you that your conscience refused, which one would you obey? Tell me.