Crito worries that “It will seem to many who are not well acquainted with me and you that when I was in a position to rescue you if I would expend a little money, I neglected to do so.  Yet what reputation could be more shameful than this, to be seen as valuing money more than friends? For people won’t believe that you yourself weren’t willing to get out of here if we provided the way.”

            Who cares what people think?, Socrates replies.  Those who are judicious will understand.  But the common people, Crito protests, as we can see in your case, can do the greatest evils by their opinions.

            “Would that the people could, Crito,” answers Socrates, “do the greatest evils, so that they would be able also to do the greatest goods, which would be wonderful.  But in fact they can do neither.  For they cannot make anyone either wise or foolish; they merely act on impulse.”[8] 

Crito and Socrates are already on different wavelengths.  Crito is concerned about his reputation: what will people think if I don’t rescue Socrates?  Yes, Crito will be violating the laws of Athens if he breaks Socrates out of jail, but he will be following a higher imperative, that of helping friends.  Presumably he is operating on the level of the popular maxim that we should help our friends and harm our enemies (see ch. 20.4*).  Socrates, on the other hand, is concerned with good and evil, which he characteristically does not associate with life and death, respectively, but with virtue and vice; and he sees virtue as arising from knowledge of good and evil.  The only way the common people (or anyone else) could do good or evil would be for them to make people wise and virtuous on the one hand, or foolish and vicious on the other.  Yet they have no idea about how to do that.  They think that death is the ultimate evil, and they follow their moods and whims, not their intelligence, in making judgments.  Here Socrates invokes his paradoxical view that virtue is knowledge.

[8].Plato Crito 44b-d.