Defence of Plato Socrates and Crito

cheeta52 · 01-20-2008, 01:30 PM

Has any on read this text? If so please post some thoughts... Its a great read with some really extraordinary ideas that date back to greek times but defiantly apply to todays world.... This could be quite a discussion...

NotConvinced · 01-20-2008, 08:19 PM

"Socrates takes the position that requiting injustice by retaliation or warding off evil by evil is always wrong, and is just as wrong as committing injustice in the first place." - Wiki

Does seem to make much sense to me....that we shouldn't have considered murdering Hitler if we had the chance.

If the only way to stop a major evil is with a lesser evil, why not do it?

I'd say that at the end of Socrates' life though I'd hardly expect him to do anything other then what he did, to validate his philosophy.

to_hobbes · 02-24-2008, 09:35 AM

I am a bit rusty on classic philosophy, but I think this dialog of Plato is beginnings of the debate between the categorical imperative of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and the utilitarian ethics of "do what will do the most good for the most people".

Actually, most ethicists (and I agree) don't like utilitarian ethics. For example, would it be ethical to kill Hitler? Well, once we knew what he was doing, and well after the fact, then maybe it would be ethical. But at the time he was actually carrying out his evil plans, few people outside of his regime knew just what he was doing, and so no one had the justification to kill him.

Further, what if by some incredibly small chance, Hitler changed his mind and decided to put a halt to his evil plans. What if he were the only one capable of doing it? What if killing him would have ensured some other even more extreme and effective Nazi leader would have taken his place and killed even more people than Hitler ever could have? If this were the situation, history books would have instead said, "if only Hitler hadn't died, so many people could have been saved, but at the time, no one knew of his sudden change of heart..." whatever.

It's hypothetical of course, but it shows why utilitarian ethics doesn't work, at least not as cut and dried as it appears to be on the surface.

The same goes for any bad guy, Saddam, Osama, or whoever. Sure it is incredibly unlikely that they will ever change their minds, and they deserve justice for what they have done. However, justice to the evil, and trying to prevent evil, are two separate ethical issues. Socrates said don't do evil for the sake of correcting evil, and for the most part I agree.

**Skepticologist** · 02-24-2008, 10:31 AM

I guess I fit the definition of utilitarian (or at least situational) ethicist to a degree because I really don't think I'd have had a problem with killing Hitler, at least once it was apparent that his push for world domination was serious and that it would cost millions of lives to stop.

At the same time, I recognize the slippery slope someone steps onto by justifying an action in one situation which would clearly be unjustified in another, e.g. taking another human life.

Still, I think there's a point somewhere between killing someone just because you don't like them for some reason, and killing someone to prevent the deaths and suffering of millions of people, where it becomes justifiable.

To take another historical example, it appears to me the U.S. got it backward when we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, taking out tens of thousands of innocent civilians in order to avoid a few thousand casualties among our own troops had it been necessary to invade the Japanese mainland.

Jasen777 · 02-24-2008, 06:16 PM

The bombs "saved" Japanese lives also. Had Japan fought on lots of them would have died from starvation, and sustained conventional bombing by the U.S. would have killed more than the 2 nukes (which was already the case with the American fire-bombing of Japanese cities). Just a history note, I don't wish to debate the ethics of it.