Each one of us has been accused of something in our lives that we didn’t do. And to be sent to prison for that crime would be very hard to except. If you were sent to jail for something you felt was right, and just, and had the chance to escape and not be caught again, would you? That is that is the dilemma Socrates had to face. He had the chance and the means yet he chose not to escape. Did he do the right thing by not escaping from jail?
Socrates was a man who believed that is was immoral for him to escape his sentence because he had accepted the ruling of the courts. And for him to escape he would be sending the wrong message to his peers. He would be telling them that all of his ideals and believes really had no meaning to him and that all this his search for the truth was just a big lie. Socrates's argument proceeds from the statement of a perfectly general moral principle to its application in his particular case: * One ought never to do wrong (even in response to the evil committed by another). * But it is always wrong to disobey the state. * Hence, one ought never to disobey the state.
And since avoiding the sentence of death handed down by the Athenian jury would be an action in disobedience the state, it follows Socrates ought not to escape.
The argument is a valid one, so we are committed to accepting its conclusion if we believe that its premises are true. The general commitment to act rightly is fundamental to a moral life, and it does seem clear that Socrates's escape would be a case of disobedience. But what about the second premise, the claim that it is always wrong for an individual to disobey the state? Surely that deserves further examination. In fact, Socrates pictures the laws of Athens proposing two independent lines of argument in favor of this claim:
First, the state is to us as a parent is to a child, and since it is