On the Unjust Application of Just Law
At the end of Plato’s Crito, Socrates responds to his friend Crito, who argued that the Athenian Sage should escape his unjust imprisonment and flee Athens. Socrates’ counterargument involves a personification of the laws of Athens. He represents Lady Law as contending that, given the benefits she has provided for Socrates, he is obligated to obey her decision to sentence him with imprisonment and capital punishment. At the end of the dialogue, Socrates claims to have no reasonable response to this argument.
I find it strange that Socrates, a superlative dialectician, ends the dialectic here. Is there no reasonable reply to the case presented by Lady Law?
This reply comes to my mind:
There is a distinction between a law and its application. Let us suppose that an unjust law is no law at all. This is a plausible assumption. I add that an unjust application of a just law is no application of a just law at all.
Now, let us grant arguendo that the laws of Athens were just, including those that sanctioned imprisonment and capital punishment. It was thus open to Socrates to rejoin that although the laws of Athens were just, the application of those laws to Socrates’ case was unjust. Ignoble men had misapplied the laws. Socrates was innocent of the charges and hence did not deserve punishment. Since (a) an unjust application of a just law is no application of a just law at all, (b) punishing the innocent is morally wrong, and (c) one should not endorse that which is morally wrong, Socrates would have been warranted in accepting Crito’s offer to escape prison and travel to Thessaly, where he might have continued his philosophical project. Indeed, one might argue that Socrates was obligated to escape, since he ought not have endorsed the morally impermissible application of the law to his case. As Aristotle later put it when fleeing Athens for Chalcis, “I won’t allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy,” implying that the first sin was against Socrates.
Does Lady Law have a reasonable response?