[1.3.1.2.] The Implied Contract Argument.

 

After he has begun to lay out the Social Benefits Argument, Socrates hints at a second, related argument:

 

SOCRATES: ... Shall we say, ‘Yes: the state is guilty of an injustice against me, you see, by passing a faulty judgement at my trial’? Is this to be our answer, or what?

                CRITO: What you have said, certainly, Socrates.

SOCRATES: Then what if the Laws say, ‘Was there provision for this in the agreement between you and us, Socrates? Or did you undertake to abide by whatever judgements the State pronounced?’ (pp.17-18)

 

This indicates that Socrates takes himself to have (at some point) made an agreement with the state that he would obey its laws.

 

Later in the Crito Socrates expands this idea into a full-blown argument. It is given in Crito immediately after the Social Benefits argument (at 51e ff). It is not in the excerpt from Crito included in your textbook.

 

[See handout given in today’s class for the relevant passage.]

 

One way of expressing the argument in standard form is as follows:

 

The Implied Contract Argument

1.       Socrates was familiar with Athens’ laws and chose to continue to live there.

2.       When one is familiar with the laws of a state and chooses to continue to live there, he or she enters into an implied contract to obey those laws.

3.       Therefore, Socrates has entered into an implied contract to obey Athens’ laws. (1,2)

4.       Having entered into the contract, an individual should either abide by the laws or convince the state that they are unjust [this is because (4a) anything else would be an unjust violation of the contract].

5.       Socrates has not convinced Athens that his conviction is unjust.

6.       Therefore, Socrates should abide by the laws of Athens (and not escape). (3, 4, 5)

 

It is this argument that places Socrates in the social contract tradition along with Hobbes. His assumption is that laws are morally justified, and that citizens are morally obligated to obey the law, because of an implied (or in Hobbes’ case, a hypothetical) agreement between them and the state.

 

DISCUSSION: Is it valid or strong? Does it have true premises?

 

Recall that it is possible for an unsound argument to have a true conclusion. So even if you can show that the argument fails, that will not be enough to show that Socrates’ conclusion is wrong: it might still have been the case that he should not have attempted to escape.

 

Many people believe that Socrates’ conclusion was wrong, that having been unjustly convicted, he would not have been doing anything morally wrong by escaping. This raises a fundamental question: what is the relationship between law and morality?

 

Suppose that, in general, we should obey the law. This is not necessarily to say that we should always obey the law, but only that in general, obeying the law is the right thing to do. We might ask: why is this so? why do we have an obligation to obey?

 

We have seen some possible answers to this question:

·         Hobbes: the obligation to obey the law comes from the fact that, were we in a state of nature, we would all agree to turn over all our rights to a government; that hypothetical agreement means that it is always wrong to disobey the law.

·         Plato/Socrates: the obligation to obey the law comes from an implied agreement we make when we choose to remain in a society, and from the debt of gratitude that we owe the government; given these things, it is always wrong to disobey the law.

 

But there is another possibility:

 

·         We have an obligation to obey the law when the law reflects, or matches up with, morality. For example, stealing someone’s bicycle for no reason other than you want it is immoral. The law prohibits this sort of theft, and so the reason that you should obey the law is that the law simply reflects what it is moral for you to do anyway. But when the law stops doing this—when the law requires that you do something immoral, when the law and morality “come apart”—then it is no longer your moral obligation to obey the law.

 

This answer assumes that there is a standard of morality above and beyond the law. We will return to this idea in future lectures.

 

 

 

Stopping point for Friday January 19. No new reading for next time, but by Wednesday you will need to read pp.19-22, a short excerpt from John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, about civil disobedience.