SOURCE: "Socrates on Disobeying the Law," in The Philosophy of Socrates: A Collection of Critical Essays, University of Notre Dame Press, 1971, pp. 299-318.

[Here, Woozley studies the apparent discrepancy between (1) Socrates's statement at his trial that if he were discharged on the condition that he give up philosophy, he would disobey the order, and (2) Socrates's insistence after the trial, when prompted by a follower to escape, that he must obey the law.]

I

Socrates is commonly characterised, and indeed on occasion characterised himself (or is so represented by Plato), as a negative thinker: one who provoked a member of his circle to propose a confident opinion on, say, the nature of virtue, or of one of the virtues, and who then proceeded, by unrelenting use of the elenchus method, to destroy first the opinion offered, and then the successive amendments and substitutions advanced to meet his earlier objections. The result of a philosophical conversation would be that half a dozen or so suggestions had been eliminated, but not even a tentative positive conclusion reached; the Euthyphro is a typical example. Although the method was liable to exasperate his victims, Socrates insisted that it was not eristic, but reflected his own genuine perplexity on the subject under discussion (cf. Men. 80C). His unremitting scrutiny of received opinions, deflating them but confessing himself ignorant of what the true answer was, must have done much to create the establishment's antipathy to him, resulting in his trial and conviction on a charge of corrupting youth.

A noteworthy feature of Socrates' discussion of a man's duty or obligation to obey the law is that it does not follow the usual would-be eliminative method. In the Crito he does not play the part of the interrogator, asking Crito whether and why we should obey the law, and wearing him down with counterquestions; he comes out forthrightly himself with his own answers and with his reasons for them. And the Apology, which also raises the question of obedience to the law, is not a dialogue at all; throughout, Socrates is represented as speaking in his own person, first defending himself at his trial, then, after his conviction, proposing a suitable sentence, and finally, after sentence of death had been passed by the court, making his final address.

While the detailed ordering and dating of Plato's dialogues are likely to remain beyond any definitive settlement, there is nowadays little disagreement among scholars about the general sequence. While both the Apology and the Crito cannot have been composed before Socrates' trial in 399 B.C., they were almost certainly written shortly afterwards and belong to the early group of dialogues in which the character "Socrates" may be taken fairly to represent the views of the actual Socrates. Furthermore, whatever use Plato later made of "Socrates" to expound and discuss Plato's own philosophical views, it is impossible to believe that, when writing about something on which he felt so strongly as the McCarthyite trial and execution of his revered teacher, he would have done anything other than present the beliefs and arguments of the historical Socrates as accurately as he could; both works are by way of being obituary memoirs. We can, therefore, confidently rely on them as a source of Socrates' views on one's duty to obey the law.

That in itself generates a problem, for there appears to be a flat contradiction between the two works. In the Apology Socrates says (29D) that if the court were to discharge him conditionally on his giving up engaging in philosophical enquiry and debate, he would unhesitatingly disobey the order. In the Crito he suggests (50B) that a city cannot survive if its court's verdicts and orders do not prevail; furthermore, if it is his general principle that any law must be obeyed, that, taken together with the statement (50C) that there is a law of Athens laying down that the judgement of a court is legally binding, entails the conclusion that one must not try to evade the court's judgement, including the prescribed sentence. The Crito proceeds to develop arguments, not merely for obeying the laws in general, but also for abiding by court decisions in particular, even if, in a particular case, the decision was unjust or wrongly given (50C). The underlying thesis here is that a court's judgement or order is verdictive (in this respect analogous to the ruling of an umpire or referee in a game), and that, even if the legal system provides for appeals, a series of appeals has to be finite, and where it stops it stops; if an error in justice persists right to the end, then, even so, the sentence must be carried out; and where the sentence is, as in the case of Socrates, execution by suicide, the sentenced man owes it to the laws to carry it out himself.

How are we to relate the views in the Apology with those in the Crito? In terms of Socrates' biography, the end of the trial and the conversation in his prison cell are separated by little, if any, more than four weeks. In terms of composition, the two works were probably more widely separated, by how much we cannot tell; but, for reasons already given, we can hardly doubt that they are substantially accurate in their report of Socrates at that time; that rules out misrepresentation by Plato.

One writer indeed has taken the step of supposing that the inconsistency was deliberate, and is to be attributed to Plato, not to Socrates. Grote (Plato, Vol. 1) maintains that in composing the Crito Plato quite deliberately presented Socrates as an out-and-out defender of the law, complete with highly emotional appeals to patriotism, in order to counteract the bad impression which he had made at his trial (correctly reported in the Apology) of being an intellectually arrogant person, who regarded himself as being a privileged exception who was above the law. One of the accusations levelled against him at his trial, according to Xenophon, was that of "inducing his associates to disregard the established laws …"; if he had such a reputation, his performance at his trial would have done nothing but confirm it. And people who claim for themselves the right to break the law with impunity do madden their fellows, both by their arrogance, and by the fact of their not being amenable to rational consideration of the possibility of their being wrong. It is not difficult to believe that, whether deservedly or not, Socrates had that reputation, and that for it he was widely hated. Plato then, according to Grote, deliberately set out in the Crito to do whatever he could to correct the unfortunate public impression which Socrates had made, and to restore his reputation; the dialogue, in consequence, is meant not as a serious philosophical discussion, but as a rhetorical performance designed solely to change people's attitude to Socrates; and that is why Plato has Socrates rest all the emphasis on two themes: first, the paramount necessity of obeying the law and a legal decision, however unjust it may be; and second, his own personal devotion to his native city of Athens.

The trouble with this interpretation of the Crito is that the only thing tolerably certain about it is the public reputation of Socrates from which it starts. The rest is pure conjecture; we have no evidence, external or internal, that the Crito was not a genuinely Socratic dialogue. If we could independently establish that it was not, then we could use that to explain the difference in Socrates' attitude towards disobedience to the law in it and in the Apology respectively. But, as we cannot independently establish that it was not a genuinely Socratic dialogue, we cannot just say that it was not, and then conclude that that accounts for the difference; this is simply to beg the question at issue. We have no positive reason to read the Crito as a job of rhetorical whitewashing by Plato. And, in view of Plato's known opinion of rhetoric, as expounded in the Gorgias, we should in any case only be patching up one inconsistency at the price of disclosing another.

In default of other evidence we have, then, to take it that, as presented by Plato, Socrates was speaking sincerely both in the Apology and in the Crito; which rules out knowing inconsistency. Similarly, we can rule out a change of mind within the last month of his life, for in the Crito he insists that there has been none; he cannot abandon his old principles unless confronted by arguments better than anything so far produced (46BC). We are left, then, with two alternatives: (a) that there was an inconsistency, but he was unaware of it; (b) that there is an interpretation of the passages involved which does not render them incompatible. (a) is so implausible that it is very hard to accept. How could a man with any pretensions to being reasonable and high principled, let alone a Socrates, declare at his trial that he would not obey a particular court order, and then less than a month later refuse to disobey a court order because such orders must always be obeyed—and not notice the contradiction? Such an inconsistency cannot be rationally explained; it will have just to be accepted, but only if no alternative under (b) can be found.

Various possibilities offer themselves.

1. Is the court at Apology 29C being imagined to be offering Socrates a conditional discharge, the condition being that he will no longer spend his time in philosophical enquiry and discussion? Socrates, in his reply that he must obey God rather than them, and that he would not change his way of life, even if he had to die many deaths (30C), would be rejecting the offer. This would not be inconsistent with his line in the Crito, for he would be saying that he could not accept an offer, the terms of which were such that he could neither abide by them (this would be to disobey his God), nor violate them (this would be to disobey the law). But this interpretation will not do, because it depends on the notions of an offer and its acceptance or rejection; and they are not there in the text. We must not blur the distinction between a court offering an accused man a conditional discharge on the one hand, and a court discharging an accused man conditionally on the other. In the first case, the discharge is not made, unless and until the conditional offer is accepted; in the second case the discharge is made, but it holds good for only as long as the man meets the condition. It is like the difference between binding a man over in his own recognisances to keep the peace, and releasing him on probation, subject to his keeping the peace. There is no doubt that what we have in the Apology is the notion of the court discharging Socrates conditionally, not its offering him a conditional discharge. The court says (as imagined by Socrates): "This time we shall not be persuaded by Anytus; instead, we are discharging you—however, subject to this condition, that you no longer spend your time in this pursuit or in doing philosophy; and, if you are caught still doing it, you will die" (29C). And Socrates' reply begins: "If you were to discharge me on these terms …" (29D). There is nothing about offering to discharge, only about discharging.
2. Could Socrates be making use of the distinction between a law, which must (as a matter of logic) be legally correct, and a legal decision of a court, which might not be? He would be announcing that he would not meet the condition laid down by the court, because it was itself in some way illegal; it might be unconstitutional, or the court might be acting ultra vires—that court might not have the authority to impose that condition. This situation is real enough. Leaving aside cases in which there is a problem of legal interpretation, it does happen from time to time that a trial court gets the law wrong or exceeds its jurisdiction; and one of the prime reasons for the existence of appeal courts is to provide an opportunity for reversing such errors. So Socrates would be maintaining throughout that we must obey the law, and consistently with that claiming the right, or even the duty, to ignore a court's judgement if it was illegal.

   Nevertheless, this interpretation of Socrates' attitude in the Apology cannot be accepted either, and for two reasons. First, he nowhere does suggest that such a decision by the court would be illegal, let alone that its illegality would be his reason for refusing to comply with the condition which it imposed. The nearest he comes to giving his reason is in his references to God: "I will obey God rather than you" (29D); "for know well, this is what God commands, and I think no greater good has yet befallen you in the city than my service to God" (30A). Second, this interpretation would repair one inconsistency between the Apology and the Crito, but only by opening another; for, as previously mentioned, Socrates in the latter insists that requirement to obey the law carries with it requirement to abide by the judgement of a court, however unjust it may be (SOB). It cannot be said that such a judgement is illegal, for there is a law on the books specifically excluding that. And if, for reasons yet to be considered, we are morally obligated to do whatever we are legally required to do, we cannot justify disobedience to a court along the lines of the present interpretation.

3. Can Socrates in the Apology passage be advancing a doctrine of natural law—that no putative law or legal requirement which is not in accordance with the commands of God is legally valid? Socrates clearly is in a position in which he finds a conflict between a supposedly valid requirement of law and the commands of God, and he clearly is saying that the commands of God are to be preferred to the commands of man. But he cannot be saying that putative legal requirements are not actually legal requirements if they are in conflict with the commands of God; for, if he were, he would be involving himself in the same inconsistency as under the previous interpretation, allowing in the Apology and disallowing in the Crito that a court order could fail to be legally valid. Socrates may have been a natural law theorist of a sort, but he was not one of that sort. We have to distinguish between appealing to the will of God in justification of disobedience to a law or legal order, and appealing to the will of God in justification of a denial that they are a law or legal order. Correspondingly, while few of us were distressed by the fate of men like Goering or Eichmann, some had misgivings about the legality of the trials.
4. It is certain that Socrates is appealing to the will of God in justification of his preparedness to disobey the court, if it puts a ban on his philosophical activities. In declaring that he will undergo anything, even death, rather than submit to what is morally wrong (32A), he is adhering to the principle of the conscientious objector. What is wrong and what is illegal may coincide; and they did in the case of the decision to try collectively the ten admirals after the battle of Arginusae, which Socrates was the only member of the executive of the time to oppose. But they may not coincide; Socrates does not suggest that the Thirty, in instructing him to go with others to arrest Leon of Salamis, were giving an order that was illegal. But, because he was not prepared to be terrified by a powerful government into doing anything that was either adikon or anhosion (i.e., either wrong in relation to men or wrong in relation to God), he disobeyed the order (32D). This is in line with one theme in the Crito, viz. that, regardless of what popular opinion may say, there are no circumstances in which one should willingly do wrong; if that is so, a man should not willingly do wrong, even when he receives an order from his government to do something which in fact is wrong (49A). It perhaps does not appear to be in line with another theme in the Crito, viz. that a man must either do whatever his city orders him to do or must persuade her where the rightness of the matter lies (51C); and he specifically mentions a law court as an instance where this rule must hold. It is true that Socrates distinguishes between a state and the politicians who act in its name, so that he was able with a clear conscience to disobey the wicked orders of the Thirty; and again he distinguishes between the laws and the men who supposedly implement them (54C). A convicted man may (if he is able to) console himself that it was human error or evil in the application of law that brought about his conviction; the law itself was not at fault. But this does not help us, because of Socrates' insistence that it is not for a private citizen to render a court's judgement ineffective; the rule that the judgement of a court is to be effective is itself a rule of law (50B).
5. Nevertheless, the permitted alternative to obedience, viz. persuading the laws that their order is wrong, suggests a solution to the difficulty. What in the Apology Socrates is prepared to do against the court is not the same as what in the Crito he is not prepared to do against the court. Generically, it is in both cases a question of obedience or disobedience, but at the specific level there is a difference. In the Apology Socrates is not taking the line which he had the reputation of taking, namely that being divinely directed he was altogether above the law, and consequently would ignore the court's judgement, no matter what it was. It is only one possible judgement that he is prepared to disobey, namely one banning him from further philosophizing in Athens. And his disobedience will take the single form of openly continuing to practise philosophy the way he always has; there is no suggestion of concealment, of trying to evade the law by holding clandestine philosophical meetings. He will conduct himself exactly as he always has, pursuing the truth with anybody he meets, foreigners or citizens of Athens alike (30A). On the other hand, the disobedience to a lawful command which he is not prepared to countenance in the Crito is of the kind which would do violence and injury to the law, and which would be exemplified by the course of action which Crito is urging on him, viz. escape. And all disobedience to lawful commands is of this kind, with the single exception of attempting to convince the state that it is wrong in the law or command concerned. But this permitted exception to the rule of obedience is precisely what he had proposed to follow in the Apology. There, while insisting that he must obey God rather than the court, he made it clear that obedience to God not merely coincided with trying to convince Athens that he was right, it actually consisted in that: "I shall obey God rather than you, and, as long as I breathe and have the ability, I shall never give up philosophizing, and both exhorting you and demonstrating the truth to you" (29D).

This is civil disobedience indeed, but of the kind that stays and attempts to change minds by reason, and does not try to escape the legal consequences of doing it; not of the kind that uses violence, or tries to dodge the law by escaping. Socrates' kind of civil disobedience may be quixotic; that will depend on how ineffective in the particular circumstances the lone voice of the protester is. But such obedience is not dishonourable: as long as the protester stays within the reach of the law, no harm is done to it, and it does not suffer any disrepute—as might be the case, if a successful escape were to show its ineffectiveness. The one course other than obedience to the law and its commands which Socrates' argument in the Crito (51-52) permits is the one course which he had said in the Apology (29-30) he would, if banned from philosophy, take. Once we see that it is not the doctrine of the Crito that a man must always, and no matter what, obey the laws of his state, the supposed conflict between that dialogue and the Apology disappears.

II

Socrates' arguments in the Crito why he should not make a last minute escape fall into two parts: first a negative section (44B-48D) in which he convinces Crito of the inadequacy, indeed the irrelevance (48C), of the reasons which he had given why Socrates should allow his friends to organize an escape; and then a positive section (49B-54D) in which he himself gives the reasons why he should not. The two points to notice about the first section are the nature of Crito's plea, and the unsatisfactoriness of Socrates' reply to it. Although it has not always been appreciated, the reasons which Crito advances are moral ones, reasons why Socrates ought to agree to the escape; appeals to Socrates' sense of prudence or personal advantage would, no doubt, have been useless, and Crito sensibly makes none. (It has to be acknowledged, however, that here, as in the Republic, Socrates does in the end rest the case for doing what is right on its being the best policy, i.e., to the advantage of the agent [54B-C].) Crito claims (1) that Socrates owes it to his friends to escape, (a) because, if he does not, he will be depriving them of his irreplaceable friendship (44B); (b) because, if he does not, they will thereby acquire a poor public reputation: it will be generally (although incorrectly) believed that, when they could have saved him, they failed either through meanness or from fear of the risk to themselves (44C-E). (That a man should, at such a time, be concerned with his own reputation may not be morally creditable. But that does not have the consequence that the claim that a second man should consider the effect of his conduct on the first man's reputation is not a moral claim.)

(2) Crito claims that it would not be right for Socrates to throw his life away when rescue is possible, (c) because he will be allowing his enemies to achieve the very result they wanted (45C); (d) because he will be betraying his children: either people should not have children at all, or they should discharge their responsibility of bringing them up and educating them. Socrates professes to have cared for goodness all his life, yet, when given a chance to play the part of a good and courageous man, he is just taking the easiest way out (45D-E).

Of those four arguments, Socrates makes no reference at all to (a) and (c), summarily dismisses (d) as irrelevant (48C), and concentrates only on (b), his reply to which is, in fact, not a refutation of Crito's claim, but at crosspurposes with it. Summarily, his line is not to disagree with the factual element of Crito's argument, viz. that Crito and Socrates' other friends, who could have helped him escape but did not, would be condemned by popular opinion for meanness or cowardice, but to maintain that on such difficult questions as those of right and wrong one should attend not to all opinions, but only to some, namely the sound opinions of those who really know about right and wrong (46D-48A). This does not answer Crito's point, which had been that one has to pay regard to public opinion, just because of the harm it can do, regardless of whether the opinion is correct or incorrect. If the question had been, not whether a certain popular opinion was held, but whether it was either correctly or justifiably held, Socrates' objection would have been to the point. The only assertion that he makes directly counter to Crito's claim is that public opinion is so fickle that it is incapable of doing either great harm or great good (44D). This, if it were true, would be a serious objection to Cri-to, but Socrates does not pursue it. Instead he switches to his theme that one cannot expect to get a well-informed or intelligent opinion from the man in the street. But, as any politician knows who takes seriously his public responsibility, there can be circumstances in which it is more important that a certain opinion is held than that it is incorrect. That such a recognition can easily degenerate into the most sycophantic form of demagoguery is a good reason for being cautious how much weight should be given to it in a particular situation, but is not a good reason for denying it. Erroneous public opinion has to be lived with, until it can be corrected. If living with it can take the form of ignoring it, so much the better; but, as the effect of public opinion is a function, not only of what the opinion is, but also of the strength with which it is held, it cannot be right to say, with Socrates, that the only question is that about the correctness or justifiability of the opinion concerned. If there is a reason why public opinion ought to be ignored in the particular situation of Socrates and his friends who wish to rescue him, it must be a reason more specific to the situation, or type of situation, than that which Socrates produces himself. Injury to Crito's reputation may not be a good, let alone a good enough, reason for Socrates to agree that he ought to escape, but it is not totally irrelevant to it.

In the only place where Socrates even mentions Crito's argument (d), he does so to lump it together with (b) as irrelevant to the question of whether or not it would be right to make an escape (48C). Why he should have been so casual in his attitude towards parental responsibility we cannot tell. He cannot have been reflecting a general attitude of the day: there is plenty of evidence in literature to the contrary, and Crito himself had just expressed the orthodox view. One would all the more like to know what Socrates really believed here, because of the great emphasis which he was shortly going to place on the responsibility of children to their parents: a generalised form of that was one of the two grounds on which he rested the proposition that we ought to obey the law.

He has two positive arguments about why we should obey the law, both stemming from the general principle that it can never be right to do what is wrong, even in requital for wrong treatment that one has suffered (49B); and, as there is no difference between ill treatment and doing wrong, one should not give ill treatment in return for ill treatment which he has suffered (49B-C).

It appears that in talking of giving ill treatment in return for ill treatment one has received, Socrates is thinking in terms of revenge or retaliation, of the injured party getting his own back. Whether he would have thought it was also wrong in the case of retribution, or of institutionalised punishment in general, we have no means of telling. But they do need distinguishing, for it does not follow from the fact that a certain action would be wrong if performed in retaliation that an otherwise identical action would be wrong if performed in retribution. Further, conduct which would be wrong, if it were not the execution of punishment, might not be wrong, if it were. One cannot answer the question whether to deprive a man of freedom by shutting him up in a cell is wrong, without a further description of the situation, in particular of the reasons for and the purpose of shutting him up, together with the rules, if any, which applied to the situation. Descriptions can be correct or incorrect; but, because even when correct they cannot be complete, i.e., such that it would be logically impossible for anything further to be added, selection of the specific description to be used determines the moral assessment to be given. The principle that it is always wrong to give out ill treatment, even in return for ill treatment received, needs more refinement before it can be accepted as the truth which Socrates took it to be.

In order to demonstrate that one should not disobey the law, Socrates develops two arguments showing how disobedience is wrong. Neither of them is the familiar straightforward utilitarian argument that the regulation of conduct by laws provides social benefits not otherwise (as readily, at least) obtainable; but underlying both is the utilitarian consideration of the social harm produced by disobedience, that disobedience destroys laws and state (50B): the appeal is an appeal to the consequences of disobedience. (Producing a utilitarian justification for having a system of laws at all is not necessary to a utilitarian justification, given that we have a system of laws, of the need for obedience to them.)

In view of the fact that concepts like duty and obligation do not fit happily into the framework of Socratic or Platonic thought, it may sound paradoxical to say that Socrates' two arguments foreshadow a distinction between duty and obligation, but nevertheless it seems to be true. The first argument is that a man ought to obey the laws of his country because he owes them the kind of regard he owes to his parents (SOD); the second is that he ought to obey the laws because he has undertaken to do so (51E). (Although Socrates actually formulates the arguments in the singular form, as giving the reasons why he, Socrates, ought to obey the laws of Athens, he would have to allow that, being reasons, they must be general in their application.)

Given the personification of the laws which Socrates imagines for the purposes of the discussion, the representation of them as oversized parents is not too farfetched to be illuminating. By making it possible for people to marry, and to secure the means of rearing and educating their children, the state (which, for these purposes, is not to be distinguished from its laws) has the same kind of rights, only more so, against an individual as his human parents have. The idea that is being foreshadowed here is of something being what we ought to do because it is a duty, where duties are things a man can find himself having without having incurred them. "Duty" is characteristically a role-word, "duty as a …," e.g., duty as a citizen, subject, visitor, parent, child, etc.; and more widely, when used in the plural, it refers to the tasks or jobs that go with the role. The reason why a child ought to obey and respect those who gave him life and saw him through the insecure period before he could fend for himself can have nothing to do with his having taken on a role, for it is not true that he did; they took on theirs, but he did not take on his. A citizen has the role in his native state, although he did not take it on, and with the role go certain duties. In the end, the reason why a man has certain duties towards his parents, or ought to treat them in a certain way, has to come down to some form of gratitude or return for what they have done for him. Provided that the parents/laws have performed their function satisfactorily, they have rights, Socrates thinks, over the children/subjects which the latter do not have over them (51 A). Socrates' parent-laws analogy is not perfect. Although the morality of some societies may require a man to obey his parents even after he has reached adulthood and maybe become a parent himself, this is neither common nor reasonable. And he will have other duties towards them besides; indeed the duty to obey is the first, and perhaps the only one, to lapse. In the case of the law, the only duty is to obey, and it does not lapse. Nevertheless, the analogy goes far enough. By being a citizen of a country which through its laws provides him with certain advantages of security and stability a man has duties which he has in no way undertaken. And his having them does not depend on his being free to leave; he may not be, and the duties do not vanish if he is not; this is indeed part of the reason why duty and obligation need to be distinguished.

Socrates' second argument is the argument later employed in the Social Contract theory of political obligation, that a man ought to obey the law to the extent that he has given an undertaking that he will. A man ought to do whatever he has undertaken to do, provided that what he has undertaken to do is right (49E), and that the undertaking has been freely given, i.e., not extracted by either duress or fraud (52E). Undertakings can be given by actions, as well as by formal written or spoken promises (52D). A man continuing to live in a state when he is free to leave it, as Athenians were (51D), thereby gives an undertaking to obey the law, which is nonetheless a real undertaking for being silent. Here again the basis of Socrates' argument is perfectly sound. However much the notion of tacit agreement or consent may have been overworked and overstretched by later political theorists, and by politicians trying to put rebellious youth in its place, the natural citizen of a state does not fail to have, or avoid having, the obligations which the naturalized citizen of it has, merely because it is false of the former, although true of the latter, that there was a time t at which he formally undertook the obligations, and that he undertook them by declaring that he did. It is tempting to add that Socrates, in juxtaposing but not treating as synonyms syntheke and homologia (52D-E), was recognising the difference between mutual promises (those for which a consideration is received) and gratuitous promises (those without consideration). Some legal systems (e.g., England) recognize only the first as promises and as eligible for legal enforcement, other systems (e.g., Scotland) recognize both; in morality we recognize both. Unfortunately, so little indication is given in the Crito of the difference supposed between syntheke and homologia, and Plato was always, as an author, so far from being a precise technician in his choice of words, that we run the risk of ascribing to Socrates a distinction which he had never thought of.

While Socrates in effect maintained that a man ought always to perform his duty as a citizen, and always to fulfil his obligation as a contracting party, to obey the law (subject to the qualification, previously discussed, of his right to attempt to convince the law that it was in some area and in some respect wrong), that was not, for him, the end of the line. While it appears that he would have regarded the propositions that a man ought to perform his duties, and that he ought to fulfil his obligations, as necessary (thereby excluding exceptions) and as nontautologous, he did not think that no reason could be given in support of them. What he would be doing, if he allowed the escape plan to go on and render the court's verdict and sentence ineffective, would be for his part to destroy the laws and the whole city (50B). A man ought to obey the law: he has both a duty and an obligation to do so; and a challenge to either is to be met by pointing out the socially destructive consequences of disobedience.

It may be questioned whether either of Socrates' theses is tenable: (I) that a man should always obey the law; (2) that he should always obey because the consequences of disobedience are, or would be, socially destructive. The weakness in (2) has to be shown first, because, although, even if (2) is false, (1) might still be true, the possibility of (1) being false is thereby opened up. As long as it is accepted as true that the consequences of any disobedience to law are socially destructive, it provides a strong inducement to retain (1).

First, it should be noticed that Socrates is using a "What would happen if … ?" argument. And we have to distinguish more clearly than he appears to do the question what would happen if he, as a single private individual, flouted the court's decision in his particular case, from the question what would happen if court decisions were always flouted by private individuals. We can allow that universal flouting of court decisions would sooner or later destroy the whole legal system; this is to justify the requirement of wholesale obedience by appeal to the socially destructive consequences of wholesale disobedience. But the harmful consequences of a single act of disobedience by a single individual would, unless his example triggered off wider disobedience, be negligible. So, the answer to the question "What would happen if… ?", more specifically "What would happen by way of harm to the state and its laws if… ?", asked of a single act of disobedience, as asked of a single broken promise, would almost always be "Nothing." For the "What would happen i f. ?" question to have the effect of showing that conduct, which would be wrong in the wholesale case (because it would be socially destructive), would be wrong in the single case (although it would not be socially destructive), it has to be combined with a principle of fairness or justice; if a practice of everyone behaving in a certain way is justified by the social need for it, then it is not fair to the rest for anyone to gain an advantage for himself by making an exception of himself when his doing so will not imperil the practice. Disutility is the argument against destroying the practice, or against exceptions to it which will imperil it; the argument against exceptions which will not imperil the practice has to be the unfairness of exempting oneself from a practice which is socially useful or even indispensable.

If the only argument against general disobedience were of the kind produced by Socrates, namely that it has socially destructive effects, we have to ask how far it is true that it does. There are six possibilities of some or all people disobeying some or all of the laws:

1. Some people disobey some laws.
2. All people disobey some laws.
3. Some laws are disobeyed by all people.
4. All laws are disobeyed by some people.
5. Some people disobey all laws.
6. All people disobey all laws.

(The other mathematically possible cases are, in fact, identical with i. and vi. respectively.) i. almost certainly is true of every society, and probably ii. (there is nobody of whom it is true that there is no law which he ever disobeys) is also, but neither by itself has been enough to ruin any society. In the case of iii. (there are some laws of which it is true that nobody obeys them), if the laws in question are bad ones, the consequences of universal disobedience could be, although they are not necessarily, good; the same consideration, in a weaker form, applies to i. and ii. Similarly with iv.: although it may not be a good thing if it is the case that there is no law which is not disobeyed by someone, it is not in itself disastrous. v. could be true without its being much more than a nuisance, if the number of consistent violators were small enough for the officers of the law to be able to cope with them easily. Indeed, over all the cases i.-v., whether the disobedience imperilled the law and the state would depend on the extensiveness of the "some." This is not to say that in all these cases disobedience is right, or even all right, but it is to say that in plenty of instances falling under them it could not be maintained that disobedience was wrong for Socrates' reason, viz., that such disobedience threatened the survival of the state. And it is not cynical to say that, even if it were never right for anyone to disobey any of the laws to which he was subject, it might nevertheless be a good thing if somebody occasionally did, so that the example of his conviction and sentence might discourage other potential lawbreakers.

In fact, the only case to which the argument of social disaster clearly applies is vi. Some would regard even that as questionable, asking us to imagine a through-and-through evil legal system, the destruction of which we ought to hasten as fast as we can by systematic disobedience. But against that it can be objected that a 100 per cent pernicious legal system could not exist, for it could not meet one of the necessary conditions of being a legal system, viz., that of actually regulating men's conduct. Individual laws, even wide areas of a body of law, can be pernicious, but a whole system could not be.

It might be suggested that in 50B Socrates is using a quite different line of argument from the one here criticised, and be maintaining that a state cannot survive in which anyone is free to take the law into his own hands, i.e., to decide for himself when to obey or to disobey a law, and to decide with impunity. It is far from clear that that is what he does mean; but, even if it is, it is again incomplete without the fairness principle. Granted that it is true that a state could hardly survive the practice of everybody pleasing himself when to disobey the law, this has no bearing on the individual case (given that there is no risk of its generating the practice) except through the principle of fairness.

When Socrates' thesis (1), that a man should always obey the law, is separated from thesis (2), which gave the final reason for it, and which has been shown to be untenable, it itself appears less plausible. There are, of course, reasons both of utility and of fairness both why a man should obey the law, and why he should obey a particular law. But it follows from that that it cannot be true that a man should always, and in whatever circumstances, obey the law, or a particular law. If the case for obedience rests on fairness and utility, it must be conceivable that fairness and utility would, in certain circumstances be served by disobedience. Not only is it conceivable, it is actual: the American Revolution against English colonial rule will do as an example. And, if fairness and utility can lie at all on the side of disobedience, it is conceivable that they should outweigh the claims of obedience. We may be thankful to live in a society in which duty to disobey the law appears very rarely and in very extreme circumstances, but we should remember that we live in a society which owes its origin precisely to some men seeing that as their duty and following it.