Did some of Socrates’ friends formulate an escape plot, as related in the Crito? Xenophon accepts the reality of a plot.[39] One source accepts the plot, but attributes the conversation to Socrates’ follower Aeschines rather than to Crito.[40] It is likely several of Socrates’ friends thought it was their duty as friends to help him escape. It is possible that Socrates’ accusers did not want him to die, but proposed the death penalty as a gambit to get him to propose exile as a counter-penalty,[41] to get him out of the city without causing his death. The authorities might have turned a blind eye if the plot had been carried out. Plato’s dialogue recognizes the devotion of Socrates’ friends and tacitly defends them against the charge of not doing enough for the philosopher, without endorsing their project.
The Crito is a rich source of information about Socrates’ political views. But more important for now is its treatment of Socrates’ moral stance. Many interpreters of Socrates take him at his word when he says he knows little or nothing. Socrates desires to have a comprehensive insight into ethical questions, but he fails. On this interpretation, he is an advocate of the examined life without being able to point to any success on his own part in finding a satisfactory theory or basis for morality.[42]
Yet here we see just the opposite. Socrates is caught in a crisis that demands immediate action, one way or another. He is facing imminent death as the sacred galley rounds Cape Sunium. Crito presents him with an opportunity to escape his fate, with the arrangements already made and key personnel in place. What shall he do? Socrates listens patiently to a very conventional plea by Crito as to why he should, in the interest of himself, his friends, and his family, accept the opportunity to flee the clutches of his enemies. Socrates dismisses the grounds Crito adduces and turns the question into a moral one. The question is not, ‘What is in Socrates’ best interest?’, but rather, ‘What is the morally right thing for him to do?’
In most dialogues we see Socrates trying to arrive at a definition of a virtue. The discussion operates at a theoretical level, and typically results in a failure to arrive at the appropriate definition. If we had only dialogues of definition to go on, we would be justified in seeing Socrates as a failure in his quest for a system of moral knowledge. Nevertheless, we also see Socrates as a man of strong principles who takes a firm and unequivocal stand on certain issues, such as we see in the dedication to his mission that he expresses in his trial speech. Socrates makes strong and paradoxical claims—that no one can harm a good man, that he has never done anything wrong, that the unexamined life is not worth living, that it is never right to harm another. But he gives no argument for these views, suggesting at best a certain dogmatism or perhaps a religious fanaticism.
In the Crito we see otherwise. Moral principles that Socrates defends in other dialogues (see ch. 20.4*) appear in the Crito as the grounds for moral action.[43] Indeed, Socrates is willing to argue again at length for his principles here, but Crito concedes them after a short review, acknowledging that Socrates has consistently defended them in Crito’s presence.[44] Socrates’ principles provide the key premises for a deductive argument leading to a conclusion that tells him what he should do. The Crito embodies an ethical argument entailing an ethically obligatory action.
Having dismissed non-moral considerations as irrelevant, Socrates invokes what is for him a tried-and-true moral principle: that doing evil is always wrong. To harm another is to do evil; hence it is never right to harm another. He applies this corollary unerringly: we must never harm; to violate agreements is to harm; to break laws is to violate agreements; to flee legal punishment is to break laws; hence, one must not flee legal punishment. By the iron laws of logic, he arrives at a moral conclusion that he accepts as binding on him. In a situation of peril to his own life. Here Plato, at least, portrays Socrates as a moral paragon who practices what he preaches. Socrates is committed to living a moral life, even in the face of his imminent death.
Socrates uses a rigidly negative methodology, his practice of the elenchus, the art of refutation, to arrive at an inescapable conclusion. To be sure, the conclusion is a negative one: he must not escape from prison. But it has a positive counterpart: he must remain and take his legally allotted punishment. He invokes a moral principle, namely that one must never do evil, which has a corollary, namely that one must do no harm, to generate his conclusion. These tenets evidently constitute for him positive moral knowledge, and serve as moral imperatives for action, even in the most desperate of circumstances. They show him as a man of theory no less than of inquiry. They also show him as a man of action, even when he determines not to act: an autonomous agent engaged in moral deliberation resulting in moral action.
Whatever the limitations of Socrates’ philosophical methods and whatever the content of his elusive definitions, his reasoning can and does issue moral commands for immediate action or non-action. And these commands are predicated not on the agent’s advantage or welfare, but on binding moral principles. In the debate with Crito, the authority of the Laws of Athens was not political but moral and rational.
Behind the apparently dogmatic pronouncements of other dialogues, the Crito lets us glimpse a system of powerful moral reasoning based on a reliable theory. Socrates has a moral duty to pursue virtue through philosophy. He has a moral duty to involve his fellow citizens in his pursuit. He has a moral duty to defend his vocation in the public forum. And he has the moral duty to obey the sentence of the court. Socrates seems to have arrived at an ethics that transcends the realm of personal prudence in the name of an objective notion of right and duty.[45] Are his paradoxes then the manifestations of a hidden theory? Do they presuppose a rational code based on moral principles and applicable to the situations of daily life?
[39].Xenophon Apology 23.
[40].Diogenes Laertius 2.35, 2.60, 3.36. Idomeneus, a Peripatetic philosopher with ties to Epicurus, writing in the early third century BC, claims that Plato took a conversation of Aeschines and transferred it to Crito because of his hostility to the former. It is possible there was another dialogue on the prison scene featuring Aeschines.
[41].On the problems of exile as a counter-penalty, see ch. 24* n. 19*.
[42].Brickhouse and Smith 1994: 30-72; Benson 2000: 189-256.
[43].Cf. Friedländer 1964, 2.174: “whereas in the other [Socratic] dialogues … Socrates merely shows that [proposed definitions] will not do and lets the conversation end on a note of aporia, in the Crito he pulls the subjective will of the other up to the absolute standard to which he himself subscribes.”
[44i].Plato Crito 49a-b, d-e.
[45].See Graham 2017.