The Virtuous Life Theme Analysis

In Plato’s Crito, Socrates is visited in prison by his wealthy friend Crito shortly before his execution for corrupting the youth of Athens. Crito tries to convince Socrates to escape to another city, promising that he’ll use his wealth to assist him. Socrates refuses, challenging Crito to justify the morality of illegally fleeing Athens. Crito takes up that challenge by forcing Socrates to consider how his execution will reflect on those close to him. He claims that the public would assume that Socrates’s friends, including Crito, abandoned him to die without trying to save him. Socrates responds by arguing that obedience to the law is a more important principle than any of those for which Crito advocates: although the Athenian jury was wrong to condemn him, escaping illegally would mean betraying his obligations to his community as a citizen. In this sense, Crito and Socrates present two different accounts of the virtuous life. Crito defends an account of morality according to which living well means supporting one’s friends and family above all, rejecting the law when the law is unjust. Socrates, however, makes the case that virtue is measured by one’s consistency in sticking to one’s own principles and those of democratic community—even at the cost of one’s life.

Crito tries to convince Socrates to flee by reminding him of the people who depend on him. When he learns that Socrates intends to accept his death passively, he reproaches him for choosing “the easiest path, whereas one should choose the path a good and courageous man would choose, particularly when one claims throughout one’s life to care for virtue.” He likewise accuses him of “betraying [his] sons” by abandoning the work of raising them, adding that Socrates’s death would render his sons “orphans” (though their mother is still alive, Athenian women had very few legal rights). Finally, he asks Socrates to consider the possibility that the public will blame him and Socrates’ other friends for failing to save him out of “cowardice and unmanliness.” For this reason, he labels Socrates’ choice “not only evil, but shameful, both for you and for us.” All these arguments rely on the vocabulary of conventional morality (“cowardice and manliness” versus acting as a “good and courageous man”) to convince Socrates of the wrongness of his action, implying that Socrates’s obligation to relatives and friends outweighs his obligation to the laws and the state, and that he therefore must break the law.

Socrates counters by arguing that obedience to the law is a greater good than familiar piety. First, he points out that his death will leave his family in a better position than his exile: if he dies in Athens, he can count on his Athenian friends to look after his children, but if he took them with him in flight, they would be forced to live as “strangers” (xenoi) with limited political rights in their new community. In this way, he refuses to concede that dying willingly means sacrificing his family’s well-being. However, for him, the entire question is beside the point. Breaking the law, he says, implies that the law is worthless. Since a city cannot survive without its laws, breaking the law is morally equivalent to attempting to “destroy” Athens itself––a greater wrong than destroying a single family. Ultimately, he says, one’s country “is to be honored more than [one’s] mother, [one’s] father, and all [one’s] ancestors.” For that reason, even if dying did mean abandoning his family, escaping illegally would mean nothing less than betraying his entire community––a far greater crime.

This rebuttal relies on a fundamentally different conception of virtue than Crito’s. For Crito, virtue entails staying true to one’s loved ones at all costs. For Socrates, however, that definition relies on a conventional and dangerous morality. If one admits that the existence of the law is generally a good thing, he says, then one cannot reject its verdicts, even when wrongly condemned by the court. Even someone who has been wronged, he says, cannot “inflict wrong in return, as the majority believe, since one must never do wrong.” This argument directly contradicts Crito’s assertion that illegally escaping the city would be courageous. If illegality is as destructive as Socrates claims, then escaping would show the jury that they’d been right to condemn him for corrupting Athens’ youth, “for anyone who destroys the laws could easily be thought to corrupt the young and the ignorant.” From this perspective, breaking the law would simply compound the wrongs committed in Socrates’ situation rather than counteract them. For that reason, virtue is measured by one’s willingness to make principled sacrifices in support of the communal good rather than loyalty to one’s loved ones. Socrates warns himself: “do not value either your children or your life or anything else more than goodness.” This goodness––a more social, less personal form of goodness than the kind Crito defends––demands a total readiness to sacrifice.