QuestionsWhat makes something right?Better to suffer injustice than to commit it
What makes something right?Virtue

Better to suffer injustice than to commit it

The paradox of suffered injustice

Socrates c. 470 BC · c. 399 BCI know that I know nothing.
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What it claims

It is better to suffer injustice than to commit it.

Why

Doing an injustice is a worse evil for the one who does it than for the one who suffers it.

In short

"Better to suffer injustice than to commit it" is an argument by Socrates (Plato, Apology, 28b, 30c-d (Socrates according to Plato)) on the question "What makes something right?" (answer: virtue). Its claim: It is better to suffer injustice than to commit it. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Plato, Apology, 28b, 30c-d (Socrates according to Plato)
Valid with an implicit premise

In the Apology, Socrates warns his judges: by wrongly condemning him, they will harm themselves more than him. This is Plato's version. Filing: we place it under "Virtue", because what matters here is the state of the agent (becoming unjust), not the consequences of the act. The same idea is developed in the Gorgias and the Crito, which are not yet in our corpus; here we stick to the Apology. The P1, P2, P3 → C form is our reconstruction.

P1A good man cannot be truly harmed by a worse man: he can be sentenced to death, exile or loss of his rights, but for Socrates these are not great evils.
P2Committing an injustice is a far greater evil for the one who commits it: by putting an innocent to death, the accusers do themselves a much greater harm.
P3 · implicit premiseWhen choosing, the only thing to consider is whether one acts justly or unjustly. If one of the two evils is not really an evil and the other is, one must prefer the first.
Therefore it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a case where suffering does no harm, committing does, and yet one would be right to commit the injustice (for instance because self-interest prevails). The two premises alone are not enough.
The argument is valid: if suffering injustice does not truly harm (P1) and committing it harms the one who commits it (P2), then, by P3, it is better to suffer it. The strength of the argument lies in P1, which changes the meaning of "evil": only what damages the soul is a real evil. Many refuse this shift. And Socrates speaks here for himself, before judges who can sentence him to death.
Analogy. Two children: one has his snack stolen, the other steals his friend's. The first has lost a snack. The second has become someone who steals. For Socrates, the second has lost far more.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Thrasymachus (Plato, Republic, book I) 375 BC · attacks premise 2

Thrasymachus, a sophist, maintains the opposite: if people blame injustice, it is because they fear suffering it, not committing it. Injustice, pushed far enough, is stronger, freer, more profitable than justice. Committing injustice does no harm to the one who commits it.

Socrate replies
Socrate Socrates (according to Plato, Republic I)
Socrates concludes, after his discussion with Thrasymachus, that the just man lives well and is therefore happy, and that the unjust man is unhappy. It is therefore not true that injustice is more profitable than justice.
The debate goes on (our summary) Socrates himself judges his victory incomplete: at the end of book I, he admits he does not know what justice is and therefore does not know whether it makes one happy. The rest of the Republic (books II to IX) tries to build the proof. The argument of book I rests on the idea that justice is the virtue of the soul, which Thrasymachus granted only reluctantly.
Machiavelli (The Prince, XV) 1532 · attacks premise 1

How one lives is so far from how one ought to live that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done sooner effects his ruin than his preservation. A man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil. For Machiavelli, losing power, exile or death are real evils, and the goodness that leads to them is a mistake (our summary of his position).

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1532, after the author's death (-399).
The debate goes on (our summary) Machiavelli writes almost two thousand years after Socrates, and cannot be answered by him. What Socrates says in the Apology (28b) goes the other way: a man of worth should not calculate his chances of living or dying, only look at whether what he does is just or unjust. It does not refute Machiavelli, it shows that the two men are not talking about the same thing: one counts survival, the other the state of the soul.
Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, VII, 13) 335 BC · attacks premise 1

To say that a good man stays happy on the rack, or in the greatest misfortunes, is nonsense. Happiness also requires bodily goods, external goods and some luck: what one suffers can therefore truly harm, even a just man.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in -335, after the author's death (-399).
The debate goes on (our summary) Aristotle writes after Socrates' death and does not name him here. The disagreement is about the word "harm": for Aristotle, misfortune damages a good life; for the Socrates of the Apology, only what makes the soul unjust is a real evil. The Stoics would later take up Socrates' position.