QuestionsMust we always obey the law?The Laws of the Crito: do not escape, even when wrongly condemned
Must we always obey the law?Obey

The Laws of the Crito: do not escape, even when wrongly condemned

The Laws of Athens speak to Socrates

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

Socrates must not escape: he must accept the sentence, even an unjust one.

Why

Staying in the city means committing to obey or convince it; escaping would be one more injustice, and wrong is not answered with wrong.

The same idea through history
Socrates390 BCPlato, Crito: the Laws of Athens, personified, answer Socrates, who hesitates to escape from prison on the eve of his execution (399 BC). This is the version presented here. The Laws speak, not Socrates: we know Socrates' own thought only through Plato.
Thomas Hobbes1651Leviathan: obedience rests on the covenant by which each person authorised the sovereign. The same idea of a commitment, without the staging of the speaking Laws.David Hume1748Of the Original Contract: Hume cites the Crito as the only passage in antiquity where obedience is founded on a promise, and denies that staying in one's country amounts to consent.
In short

"The Laws of the Crito: do not escape, even when wrongly condemned" is an argument by Socrates (Plato, Crito, 49a-54d (Socrates according to Plato), 390 BC) on the question "Must we always obey the law?" (answer: obey). Its claim: Socrates must not escape: he must accept the sentence, even an unjust one. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Plato, Crito, 49a-54d (Socrates according to Plato)
Valid with an implicit premise

In 399 BC Socrates, condemned to death by an Athenian court he thinks unjust, waits for his execution in prison. His friend Crito has prepared everything for an escape. Socrates refuses, and Plato has him imagine the Laws of Athens coming to speak to him. Their speech is the founding text of the question 'must we obey the law even when it treats us badly?'. The Laws do not say the sentence is just: they say that escaping would be one more injustice. The P1 to P5 → C form is our reconstruction.

P1One must never act unjustly, not even in answer to an injustice suffered: one does not repay wrong with wrong, whatever one has suffered.
P2Whoever stays in the city, knowing its laws and its way of judging, when he could leave, commits himself by that very fact to do what it orders or to convince it that it is wrong. Escaping would break that commitment.
P3Escaping against a court's decision means destroying the force of judgments, and so destroying, as far as one can, the laws and the city that brought us into the world, raised and educated us.
P4 · implicit premiseBreaking a just commitment, or harming those to whom one owes one's life and education, when they have not wronged you, is an injustice.
P5It is not the Laws that wronged Socrates, but men, the judges.
Therefore Socrates must not escape: he must accept the sentence, even an unjust one.

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 P4, the computer finds a case where escaping is a broken commitment and a harm to the laws, without being an injustice: for instance if the commitment was not just, or if the laws had wronged first. The Laws of the Crito claim that this is not the case here (P5), but it has to be posited.
The argument is valid. Escaping means breaking a commitment (P2) and harming the laws (P3). By P4 that is an injustice when the laws have done no wrong (P5). And by P1 one must never act unjustly. The strength of the argument is P1: even an injustice suffered does not allow one to commit one. Its weak point is P2: everything depends on what 'staying' means.
Analogy. A football player who thinks the referee made a mistake. He can protest, appeal, argue. But if he walks off the pitch with the ball under his arm, he ruins the match for everyone. He accepted the rules when he stepped onto the field.

Objections

3

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

David Hume 1748 · attacks premise 2

Staying in one's country is not consenting. We cannot seriously say that a poor peasant or craftsman has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners and lives from day to day on his small wages. It would be like saying that a man carried aboard a ship in his sleep consents to the captain's authority by staying, when he would have to leap into the ocean and die to leave.

Socrate replies
see the argument
T
The Laws (Plato's character) 390 BC · The Laws' reply, according to Plato (for Socrates' own case)
The Laws argue that Socrates is a special case: he almost never left Athens, he had his children there, and at his trial he could have proposed exile as his penalty, which would have meant doing with their consent what he now does without it. So he had a choice, and he refused it.
The debate goes on (our summary) The reply holds for Socrates, who had the means and freedom of an educated citizen. It does not settle the case of Hume's peasant. Hume himself notes that the Crito is the only passage in antiquity he knows where obedience is based on a promise (end of his essay). Defenders of a duty to obey therefore look for bases other than consent: fairness (Rawls) or utility (Hume himself).
Where the debate stands (our summary)The Laws reply for Socrates' case (he chose to stay and could have proposed exile). Hume speaks of the ordinary citizen, who chooses nothing. The basic disagreement remains: is staying in one's country a sign of consent when leaving costs almost everything?
Socrates (Plato's character) 399 BC · attacks the conclusion

In the Apology, Socrates tells his judges that he will obey the god rather than them, even if they order him to stop philosophising. And under the regime of the Thirty he refused the order to arrest Leon of Salamis to have him put to death: he simply went home, at the risk of death. So Socrates has already disobeyed orders of the city. Does the Crito contradict itself?

Socrate replies
Socrates (Plato's character) 399 BC · Socrates according to Plato: he refuses to commit the injustice, but accepts the risk
Facing the Thirty, Socrates says he showed by his deeds that he cares nothing for death, but cares with all his might not to do anything unjust or unholy: he goes home and might have been put to death for it, had the regime not fallen.
The debate goes on (our summary) Many readers conclude that the two texts are compatible: the Crito forbids escaping the penalty (one persuades or obeys), it does not order committing a crime on command. Socrates refuses to do wrong but accepts what happens to him afterwards. This reading, which prepares the civil disobedience of Thoreau and King, is not shared by all: some see a real tension (our summary of the scholarly debate).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Socrates refuses the Thirty's unjust order but accepts the sentence of the democratic city. On a common reading the difference lies between committing an injustice and undergoing a penalty. The basic disagreement remains: where does the duty to obey unjust orders stop?
Thomas Aquinas 1270 · attacks premise 5

An unjust law does not bind in conscience, except perhaps to avoid scandal or disorder. It is an act of violence rather than a law. An objection drawn from his thought (Aquinas does not comment on the Crito): one must distinguish just laws from unjust ones, whereas the Laws of the Crito ask us to obey even an unjust sentence, unless one manages to convince the city.

a defender replies
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1270, after the author's death (-399).
John Rawls defender of the argument · 1971
Rawls defends a duty to obey even an unjust law, but a limited one: if the constitution is reasonably just, we have a natural duty to support just institutions, and so to obey laws that are not perfectly just, as long as the injustice does not exceed certain limits. For most citizens, this duty does not rest on consent or a promise.
The debate goes on (our summary) Rawls thus agrees with Socrates on the conclusion (obeying imperfect laws) but not on the ground (no promise). He also recognises, in §§55-59, that civil disobedience can be justified when the injustice is serious and clear: on that point Aquinas and Rawls come closer.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Aquinas says an unjust law does not bind in conscience, except to avoid scandal. Rawls maintains a duty to obey unjust laws in a reasonably just constitution, but he too admits exceptions. The basic disagreement remains: at what degree of injustice does the obligation end?