QuestionsMust we always obey the law?Antigone: the unwritten laws against the king's edict
Must we always obey the law?Conscience first

Antigone: the unwritten laws against the king's edict

Antigone and the unwritten laws

Sophocle c. 496 BC · c. 406 BCAthenian tragic poet: his plays (Antigone, Oedipus the King) stage the limits of the human condition.
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What it claims

Antigone must bury her brother despite Creon's edict, and accept dying for it.

Why

The unwritten laws of the gods are for all time, and a mortal's edict is not strong enough to override them.

The same idea through history
Sophocle441 BCAntigone, the tragedy: the version presented here. A character speaks, not Sophocles. The play also gives Creon's arguments, and Creon's fall at the end.
Aristotle330 BCRhetoric, I, 13 (1373b) and I, 15 (1375a-b): Aristotle cites Antigone's words as an example of someone who, before a court, appeals to a 'common' or natural law against the written law.
Thomas Aquinas1270Summa Theologiae, I-II, q.96, a.4: a human law that contradicts divine law must not be observed in any way ('we ought to obey God rather than men'). See Aquinas's argument on the unjust law.
In short

"Antigone: the unwritten laws against the king's edict" is an argument by Sophocle (Sophocles, Antigone, ll. 441-470 (c. 441 BC), 441 BC) on the question "Must we always obey the law?" (answer: conscience first). Its claim: Antigone must bury her brother despite Creon's edict, and accept dying for it. 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.

Sophocles, Antigone, ll. 441-470 (c. 441 BC)
Valid with an implicit premise

Thebes, after a civil war. King Creon has forbidden the burial of Polynices, Antigone's brother, who fought against the city. Antigone buries him anyway. Arrested, she explains to Creon why. Her answer (ll. 450 and following) became the model of the appeal to a law higher than the law of the state. Note: it is a theatre character who speaks; Sophocles also gives voice to Creon and to his son Haemon, and the play has no simple verdict. The P1 to P4 → C form is our reconstruction.

P1There are unwritten laws, given by the gods, that hold for everyone: their life is not of today or yesterday, but for all time, and no one knows when they first appeared.
P2An edict proclaimed by a mortal does not have enough force to override these unwritten and unfailing laws of the gods.
P3Giving one's brother the funeral rites belongs to these laws: Hades craves these rites, and Antigone says she was not born to join in hate but in love.
P4 · implicit premiseWhen a human edict orders the opposite of a higher law and that law commands us to do something, it is the higher law that must be obeyed.
Therefore Antigone must bury her brother despite Creon's edict, and accept dying for 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 P4, the computer finds a case where the edict is weaker than the gods' law, burial belongs to that law, and yet Antigone is not bound to follow it: for instance if she could avoid the conflict another way, or if the price were too high. One must posit that the higher law prevails whatever it costs.
The argument is valid. If unwritten laws exist (P1), if the edict is too weak to override them (P2) and if burial belongs to them (P3), then by P4 they must be followed. Its strength is to show that the king's law is not the last authority. Its weak points are P1 and P3: who says what the gods command, and why does burial belong to their law? Creon does not believe it.
Analogy. A nurse is ordered by a superior not to treat a wounded enemy. She says: 'My profession requires me to treat anyone who is wounded, and that does not depend on any order.' She disobeys, and knows she will be punished.

Objections

3

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

C
Creon (Sophocles's character) 441 BC · attacks premise 2

Creon tells his son: whomever the city has appointed must be obeyed in small matters and great, in just matters and in their opposite. There is no evil worse than the absence of a ruler (anarchy): it destroys cities, overturns homes, puts armies to flight. For Creon, letting each person disobey whenever he judges an order unjust opens the door to this disorder (our summary of this last idea).

Sophocle replies
H
Haemon (Sophocles's character) 441 BC · Haemon, Creon's son, answers his father
Haemon answers his father that it is no city that belongs to one man.
The debate goes on (our summary) Creon calls Haemon a child and dismisses him. The play goes on: Tiresias announces disaster, and Creon gives way too late. Sophocles does not say Creon is wrong about everything: the Athenian audience knew the dangers of civil war. The play leaves open the question of who judges what the gods want (our reading).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Creon: obedience to the leader the city has appointed is the condition of order. Haemon: a city that belongs to one man is not a city, and the citizens' opinion counts. The basic disagreement remains: who decides what is right when authority and conscience contradict each other?
I
Ismene (Sophocles's character) 441 BC · attacks the conclusion

Ismene, Antigone's sister, refuses to help her. We are women, she says, not made to fight against men, and we are ruled by those stronger than ourselves: we must obey in this and in things more painful still. She will ask the dead for pardon, since she is forced, and obey those in authority: doing more than that makes no sense.

Sophocle replies
A
Antigone (Sophocles's character) 441 BC · Antigone answers Ismene, in the scene
Antigone refuses her help, even a late one, and says she will bury her brother: it will be fine for her to die doing so. She adds that she must please those below longer than those here.
The debate goes on (our summary) The two sisters do not quarrel about the value of the gods' law, but about what one can reasonably demand of oneself. Ismene does not say the edict is just: she says she is too weak to resist it. This point, costly disobedience that is not demanded of everyone, will come back with Thoreau and King (our summary).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Ismene: one obeys those in power when one is weak. Antigone: one follows the gods' law whatever it costs. The basic disagreement remains: does a higher law oblige everyone to disobey, or only those who are able to?
Hegel 1807 · attacks premise 4

For Hegel, Antigone and Creon are each right and each wrong. Antigone defends the divine law of the family, Creon the human law of the city. Each is locked into one side of ethical life and ignores the other. The conflict therefore opposes not a just law to an unjust one, but two legitimate duties (our summary of his reading).

Sophocle replies
No reply possible: objection raised in 1807, after the author's death (-406).
Judith Butler 2000
Butler discusses Hegel's reading and disputes that Antigone stands only for the family against the state. Antigone speaks, and speaks in public, claiming her act in the very language of the power she defies. Her own family (she is the daughter of Oedipus and of Jocasta, Oedipus's own mother) does not fit the model of the family Hegel makes her carry either.
The debate goes on (our summary) Hegel does not claim that Creon must be obeyed: he says the tragedy comes from the collision of two rights that reason has not yet reconciled. What he takes from Antigone is the position of having justice alone on her side (our summary).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Hegel: two rights clash, each partial. Butler: Antigone does not stand only for the family, her act is also public speech. The basic disagreement remains: does someone who disobeys the law in the name of a higher law have all of justice on their side?