“Dear Crito,” Socrates answers, “your zeal is commendable, if it’s on the right track. But if not, the greater your enthusiasm, the worse your recommendation. So let’s consider whether to do this thing or not. I, you see, am not just now but always and forever committed to following none other of my ideas than the principle that seems to me to be most reasonable. I’m not able to abandon now, in my present circumstances, those very principles which I espoused formerly, but they seem pretty much the same to me as always, and I revere and honor them as I used to. And unless we can find some better ones at present, know that I won’t give in to you, not even if the power of the people is greater than at present to scare us like children with goblins, sending imprisonments and deaths and confiscations against us.”[18]
Socrates asks Crito to consider whether they should abandon the principles they have followed up until now because of the present danger. Most basically, they have distinguished between opinions that were worthy of consideration and those that were not, and between people who had good opinions and people who did not. Since you’re not facing death tomorrow, Socrates says to Crito (with more than a little irony), you need to take a detached view and tell me whether these principles still stand. Crito agrees. We should value good opinions, but ignore bad ones? Yes. Good opinions come from wise men, bad ones from foolish men? Yes. For instance, if you want advice about exercising, do you listen to random people, or rather to one individual, namely a physician or a trainer? One individual. So you fear the corrections and accept the praise of that one adviser? Yes.
Socrates goes on to make an analogy to cases of justice and injustice, right and wrong. Should we in these cases listen to the crowd, or should we seek someone who is expert in such matters? Surely we should listen to the expert.[19]
“Well, then,” Socrates continues, “if we wreck the part of us that’s improved by health and ruined by disease by following the opinions of non-experts, will life be worth living or not when it is damaged? —I’m referring to the body. … So is life worth living with the body defective and ruined?”
“Not at all.”
“But is life worth living with that part ruined which injustice harms and justice benefits? Or should we consider that part inferior to the body, whatever part of us it is that is concerned with injustice and justice?” He is referring to the soul.
“Not at all.”
“So it is superior?”
“Very much so.”
“We shall not, then, my good man, take heed to what the many will say to us, but what the expert on justice and injustice says, the one authority, and the truth itself. So first, you were wrong when you proposed that we should heed the opinion of the many concerning what is just, right, and good, and their opposites. ‘But,’ someone might object, ‘the many are able to put us to death!’”
“An excellent point he would be making, Socrates.” Crito is still absorbed with the outcome of the action rather than the moral question.
[18].Plato Crito 46a-c.
[19].Plato Crito 46c-47d.