Righ and Wrong

656 Words Apr 21st, 2014 3 Pages
Each one of us has been accused of something in our lives that we didn’t do. And to be sent to prison for that crime would be very hard to except. If you were sent to jail for something you felt was right, and just, and had the chance to escape and not be caught again, would you? That is that is the dilemma Socrates had to face. He had the chance and the means yet he chose not to escape. Did he do the right thing by not escaping from jail?
Socrates was a man who believed that is was immoral for him to escape his sentence because he had accepted the ruling of the courts. And for him to escape he would be sending the wrong message to his peers. He would be telling them that all of his ideals and believes really had no meaning to him and
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Obedience to our parents, after all, is a temporary obligation that we eventually outgrow by learning to make decisions for ourselves, while Socrates means to argue that obeying the state is a requirement right up until we die. Here it might be useful to apply the same healthy disrespect for moral authority that Socrates himself expressed in the Euthyphro.
The second argument is that it is always wrong to break an agreement, and since continuing to live voluntarily in a state constitutes an agreement to obey it, it is wrong to disobey that state. (Crito 52e) This may be a better argument; only the second premise seems open to question. Explicit agreements to obey some authority are common enough—in a matriculation pledge or a contract of employment, for example—but most of us have not entered into any such agreement with our government. Even if we suppose, as the laws suggest, that the agreement is an implicit one to which we are committed by our decision to remain within their borders, it is not always obvious that our choice of where to live is entirely subject to our individual voluntary control.
Nevertheless, these considerations are serious ones. Socrates himself was entirely convinced that the arguments hold, so he concluded that it would be wrong for him to escape from prison. As always, of course, his actions conformed to the outcome of his reasoning. Socrates chose to honor his commitment to truth and morality even though it cost him his