Phil 160
Crito
By Plato
The setup:
• Socrates is tried and found guilty of
“corrupting the youth” and is imprisoned
pending execution.
• His friend Crito bribes the guards and sneaks
in to smuggle Socrates out and get him on a
boat out of Athens. Socrates decides to stay.
• The dialog is a discussion of Socrates’ reasons
for staying.
Crito’s first ploy:
• Crito appeals to what “everyone would say” if
they heard of the situation. They would all
blame Crito for valuing money above his
friends and failing to bribe the guards so that
Socrates could get away. They would never
believe that anyone would choose to stay.
Socrates:
• The populace, the masses, have no clear grasp
of what is ultimately best, and popularity is no
evidence of the rightness or wrongness of
anything.
The Expert Argument:
• Socrates says that the difference between the
masses and an expert is that an expert’s advice
helps you because they know what they are
talking about.
• If you followed just anyone’s advice when in
physical training, you would spoil the state of
your body.
• If you follow an expert though, your training is
effective and improves you.
• So what is wanted here is a moral expert.
Expertise
• Socrates and Crito note that they have no clear
expert available to them, so Socrates proposes
that if his own reasoning stands up to careful
scrutiny, then they shall follow that reasoning.
• Socrates also notes that what is damaged in
failing to follow moral expertise is that part of us
that goodness belongs to (roughly, the soul) and
that the soul is ore important even than the state
of the body.
Argument from the Laws
• Socrates and Crito both agree that it is always wrong to
ill-treat someone, no matter how they have treated
you in the past.
• Socrates then personifies the Laws of the society in
which he was born, raised, lived in, defended at war,
and stayed in willingly and happily for his whole life.
• He concludes that to disobey the law by fleeing from
it’s sentence now would be to ill-treat not only the
spirit of the law but also his own soul.
• In short, it is not okay to act against morality just
because sometimes it demands unpleasant things of
us.
Prudence and Morality
Prudence is acting in one’s self-interest
Morality is doing the right thing.
A persistent question in ethics concerns to what
extent prudence and morality are related. Is it
in our best interest to be moral? If it is not,
how much can morality demand of us that is
counter to prudence?
Prudence and Morality
• Socrates provides one potential answer to this
question in Crito.
• Socrates clearly insists that living well is more
important than merely living, and seems to
contend that living well means living morally.
• So for Socrates, prudence and morality are the
same, and whatever morality demands of us is
in our best interest.