Socrates and Obedience to the Law

In Plato’s “The Trial and Death of Socrates,” it is proven that Socrates would agree with Creon from Sophocles’ “Antigone” that “individuals have a duty to obey the law, whether the commands are trivial, or right or wrong” (Line 667). Socrates firmly believes that due to the nature of a state’s laws, all men have an obligation to follow them, no matter the legitimacy or reasoning. Even when he appears to contradict himself, we are shown how he never truly goes against his beliefs, as they are grounded in a clear understanding of faith and justice.

Socrates’ main argument for the obedience to the laws of a state are centered around his comparison of these laws to other authority figures, namely, a parent or master. According to Socrates, the laws and the city brought him to birth by uniting his father and mother through marriage, and then contributed in raising him, providing “the nurture of babies and the education that [he] too received” (Plato 51). Therefore, because the laws of Athens have acted equally important in his upbringing, adopting a similar role as that of his parents, he is equally the city’s offspring as he is his mother or father’s.

Socrates then explains that just as no one should think themselves equal to their master or father, neither should anyone believe this in regards to the laws of the city in which they reside: “You were not on equal footing with your father as regards the right, nor with your master if you had one, so as to retaliate for anything they did to you, to revile them if they reviled you, to beat them if they beat you” (Plato 51). He explains that if the laws try to destroy him, he has no right to try to destroy them in return, which, as he describes to Crito, is exactly what would happen if he fled the city and ignored the verdict laid out for him: “or do you think it possible for a city not to be destroyed if the verdicts of its courts have no force but are nullified and set at to be bought by private individuals?” (Plato 50) We see that Socrates believes that no matter what the laws of a state might try to do to its citizens, they do not have the right to retaliate since they cannot justifiably consider themselves equal to these laws.

There are moments in Plato’s dialogues where Socrates appears to contradict himself. In “Apology,” as he defends himself in front of the jury, he states, “Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy” (Plato 32). This tells us that he would actively disobey the law if it prevent him from practicing philosophy.