 Today we're looking at the dialogue, the credo, and this is different than the apology, although it's very closely connected with it, right? You notice there's some narrative continuity, what happened in the apology that we talked about last class, Socrates, what happened still. He doesn't get killed in that one. He's on his way, though, isn't he? Yeah. He's on trial. He makes a couple speeches. They're not speeches that are actually going to get him off because he kind of pokes at the people that are charging him, and they sentence him to death. Now normally in the ancient world, you'd be sentenced, and then you'd be killed not long afterwards. There's a gap for Socrates because there's a religious festival going on. We don't have to look at the details of that very much. If you've heard of Theseus and the Minotaur, it had to do with a religious festival that was set around that, and they'd send a ship out, and after the ship came back, then they could execute people again. So they're waiting to execute him. He's sitting in a cell. He's got lots of free time, and it wasn't too bad for him. He's reading books and making friends with the jailers, and just sort of going about his day the way he normally does. People come and visit him, and Credo comes, and Credo has been coming. If you looked at the dialogue a couple times, you realize Credo's been coming during each day at a certain time of the day. He's showing up early this day, and he's showing up early because he's got a breakout of jail plans. So that's where this takes off. Socrates could get away. Credo is rich. Credo's a foreigner. Credo has bribed the guards. He's arranged for transportation. He's talked things over with people that he's actually got to... He poses a couple different places. You could go to Thessaly. You could go here. You've got friends over here. Because Socrates did, in fact, have a lot of friends. So Credo is putting forth a real proposal for him. Credo's done everything that needs to be done for this. Why is he doing this? Well, you know, when you read the apology, did you feel Socrates deserved a die? No? Did anyone feel he deserved a die? If you look at the forum in Euler, you notice that I started sort of a devil's advocate kind of thing. I've started some threads, why that guy Socrates deserves a die. And I invite you to respond to it. That can be class participation for those who don't like to talk in class too much. Or those who actually do talk in class and enjoy stirring things up, that you can do that as well. Yeah, most of you don't think he deserves a die. Credo didn't think he deserved a die either. A lot of people didn't think so. They considered it to be what they talk about in this as an unjust verdict. We have that in our society, right? Some people get sentenced who don't actually deserve to get sentenced. I don't know what the actual proportions are. I can tell you that when I worked in a prison, and actually I taught philosophy and religious studies in a maximum security prison, and I got to know some of the guys very well, because I was teaching the same classes over and over and over again, and they weren't going anywhere. They weren't transferring to other places, other schools. They were taking classes with me and one other philosophy professor. And we talk about all sorts of things, including their cases. And most of the people in our prisons actually are guilty of something. There are some cases. If you talk to prisoners, you find out that there's a lot fewer cases than we often think of as pure travesties of justice where a person is innocent and doesn't deserve it at all. Socrates looks like he doesn't deserve to die, though. I mean, he made a case that he was doing a good thing for the city. Did any of you find that idea convincing that he was doing something useful? Yeah, a few of you. You were going to say something? No, I think it's more true to himself and just kind of teach people the morals that there's no such thing as wisdom. You know, like, humble about it, and talk about it. Yeah. Because that's wisdom that you really don't. Those are all things that he was teaching you right. Do you think that that served any purpose in society? Did it make people better? Or, I mean, was he really corrupting people? I mean, they were going to kill him because they thought he was corrupting the young. That was the charges. So the core question that we're going to look at today that Socrates says, okay, let's think about this, is Credo's plan? Should he do it? We're going to look at the arguments for that. We're going to look at some of the basic ideas underlying that. Before that though, I want to talk about a few interesting features of this text. It is connected to the apology, right? The youth referral, by the way, that you're reading for next class, that's also connected in time. That's right before he goes in the law court. So he has one big discussion, then he goes in, gives a speech, then he loses his case, goes to jail, and then the day before he dies, two days before he dies, he talks with Credo. Then there's another dialogue which we're not going to read called the Phaedo, which is his last day, the day that he dies, which concludes with him dying, drinking hemlock and being poisoned. Do you guys see any sort of inconsistency with what went on in the apology? In this dialogue, Socrates, is he going to leave? Why not? Yeah, you're right about all those same things, the right thing, the just thing to do. He doesn't want to be inconsistent with himself, and it would also be breaking the laws. Now, is this consistent with the guy who said, you can put me to death if you want, but I'm never going to stop doing philosophy? Some people, you know, when they first read this, they say, you know, in the apology, this guy was saying, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, you're not going to stop me. In this one, he's saying, I'm going to go along with what the state says. So is there a contradiction there? Well, he knows what he's doing, he's not illegal in the first place. They're just saying that it is. That's a good point. Yeah, so there isn't a contradiction. No, he's just saying to himself. Okay, yeah, that's something to keep in mind is, yeah, go ahead. I think he just kind of realizes that no matter what you know, he thinks he's right, he knows he's right, he's not going to get his point across, so he kind of just has to go with whatever happens. In the apology you're thinking, yeah? Yeah. Yeah, there are Plato scholars who think exactly along the lines that you've laid out that Socrates thought he wasn't going to get a fair trial period, so he was making sort of what do they call that, a bully pulpit. He was using it as an opportunity to say what he wanted to say one last time and get it through. Maybe even stick it to them a little bit. We do get, there's another theme that's in there, we get to see Socrates put to the test. There's another thing to say all sorts of things about morality and justice and what's right and wrong and how important it is to stand up for what's true. It's a whole different thing when you put to the test, isn't it? Have any of you ever experienced situations of temptation where some moral stand that you were taking, you found it was difficult to maintain? You had to do something that was painful. Well, this is really painful, he's going to die, so what he's dying for better be pretty valuable. Just being true to yourself in some sense, I don't know if that's worth dying for. Being true to yourself along the lines of something that matters, maybe that's worth dying for. What's going on? You brought up the laws. Notice that he actually makes the laws talk. What do you think is going on with that? This is something that people have read the dialogue and been fascinated or confused or entertained by it. Why do you think he did that? If you have any views about it, if you don't, maybe you do by the time we get through this. I'll just let that question kind of set. Another thing to think about that's going to come up this semester over and over again is this question of what do you actually owe to your society? Especially if your society isn't perfect, it isn't doing things the way you ought to be. There's something that we call cool disobedience. Have you guys heard this term before? Probably in high school, right? Who do you associate it with? Gandhi. Yeah, Gandhi's a great example. Who did Gandhi influence that you put it to work here in the United States? Martin Luther King. Anybody before Gandhi that you could think of in America that gets tied in with this? This is kind of trivia, but... Henry David Thoreau, many of you have read him. You had to read him in English lit maybe, or not English lit, American lit, an English class. They all talk about this idea of civil disobedience. They end up taking a different stance than Socrates does here in the credo. Martin Luther King had followed Socrates' lines and said, well, the laws are the laws, and I benefited by them, so I really don't have any right to transgress them. Then would he have marched? Would all those other people have marched with them? They took a different stand, or at least what appears to be a different stand when we first look at it, right? I mean, Martin Luther King also made a distinction between just laws and unjust laws. Just laws, you have to follow. Unjust laws, it's actually wrong to follow them. And that's a letter from a Birmingham jail, which you probably read in high school again. Yeah? No? You should read it. It's important to read. Martin Luther King is not basing his stuff on Socrates in the credo. Basing it on other philosophical texts. Because Socrates is taking a stance that says, well, you owe something to society. You owe something to the state. You can go out there and be a gadfly, but if the state decides it wants to crush the gadfly, then you should go along with that. So we'll look at that theme a little bit more. Let's look now at the actual text. Credo comes in, and what does he say? You know, first they back and forth about, you know, I've been reading ASAP, and the bodus coming, and all that sort of stuff. But when they really get to the meat of it, Credo says, hey, I've got an escape plan for you. Let's do it. You know, here's all the ins and outs of it. Socrates says, let's think about this. Credo is going to make some appeals. He's going to bring up some goods, some values, some things that are going to be lost if Socrates doesn't leave. So what are the goods at stake here? Obviously, it's life, right? This is life. What else? What does Credo worried about? He says to have Socrates to us and lose his kids. Yeah, that's a good concern, isn't it? Socrates has a responsibility to educate his kids. You know, and this is in a Iron Age society, which did not have a social welfare system, where if you, you know, Socrates was in the free class of citizens who had property, but you could very easily leave that class, your kids could become slaves through going into debt or stuff like that. If you didn't have somebody strong guiding the house, bringing the kids up right, who knows what would happen to the kids? It's not like the state was going to take charge of them. Social services or whatever, whatever they call it here in New York would come in. So that's a real concern. So if Socrates allows himself to die, he's not going to be able to do that. What else? What are other values, other concerns that come up? Yeah? And then Credo talks about, like, a broken down upon him because he has a lot to see with him. We'll call that reputation. And he talks about something that he's going to have to endure, when he loses his reputation, shame. That's a powerful motivator, isn't it? Nobody wants to be ashamed. You can get people to put up with a lot of things that are painful or that hurt their interests if you don't shame them. But if you do shame them, that sometimes hurts people worse than any other thing. Think about bullying, for example. This is sort of a digression. You have these cases where these kids are bullied, especially through electronic media. And then what do they do? Why does it become an issue? They complain. The school says, ah, don't do that anymore. That's not how it goes. What do they do that really gets everybody's attention? They kill themselves. Yeah. They choose death over shame. Because shame is that strong of a social motivator, even in our day. They're not really acting like Socrates. They're maybe making a misguided decision. But it's one that's understandable, isn't it? What else? What are some other values? It doesn't want to look like a bad guy who prefers money to his friends. Is there anything else that he thinks is going to be lost? You're getting a good list here. What's the first thing he says? I'm going to lose, he doesn't say my reputation. I'm going to lose somebody that I can't replace. It's hard to be friends with a death person. Why would he lose his good reputation if he refused to escape? Credo's worried about his own reputation. So I should probably clarify. This is Credo's loss. This is also Credo's loss. This is Socrates' loss. That's a good question. There is one thing that's like that. Again, you're not going to catch this the first time that you read the text. This is why we have these sessions. Why I talk about reading the text multiple times. Credo says, Socrates, you're taking the easy way out. So it's not just Credo whose reputation is up for debate. It's also Socrates. You're taking the easy way out by letting them kill you. Sounds a little strange that way. What's his reasoning? You're not consistently following the path that you've actually laid out, the path of goodness, the path of virtue, the path of courage. You should be courageous and leave the city. Take a chance. Come live in Thessaly. You shouldn't let those enemies of yours win. If you do, there's something wrong with you, Socrates. That's what Credo is saying if you're reading between the lines. Actually, this is kind of a digression too. Credo, we don't know this from this dialogue. We know this from another dialogue. He's a really emotional guy. So you can just picture Credo there kind of shaking and expostulating with Socrates. Credo has to be let away crying when Socrates actually does die, whereas the other real people stick around. There's kind of a mistaken attitude on Credo's part. Socrates is quite happy. What's the mistake? If you had to just identify one thing that's wrong with Credo's reasoning, one main thing that ties it together, what is Socrates criticizing for? You're thinking of the wrong thing here. I'll give you a hint. Who should Credo be listening to or thinking about how they would see things? Yourself? Well, Credo doesn't actually know. And Socrates himself in this one is kind of humble. He doesn't claim that he himself knows. Let me change the question. Who shouldn't he be listening to? There's a sort of catchphrase in there. Who gets it wrong? Who thinks that these things are all really important? Credo does, but he's getting that from somebody or from some group of people. Society? Yeah, we would call it society. In the Credo it's called the many. The sort of mass of people that you just sort of pick and they're not necessarily people who thought things through. As a matter of fact, they're probably going along with whatever happens to be popular at the time. Think about the way mobs behave. You don't look at mobs for moral guidance, right? The mobs do things. Think about the way many people can be persuaded by easy emotional appeals. And actually, quite frankly, people don't like to think very long and hard about things. These things right here are values. They are good. But are they the real good? Are they what's truly valuable for somebody like Socrates? Credo's too concerned about what the many think. And there's sort of a common temptation that Credo is exemplifying. I know I've fallen prey to this temptation myself. I suspect that many of you have probably fallen prey to it as well. You know what's right and what's wrong. But there's this tendency to say, you know, in this case, the rules don't apply. In this case, I've got to look at other goods that have to be served. Now, you know, across the board, it still applies, for instance, what's, you know, shouldn't be mean to people, right? But maybe there's times you should be mean to people. Let's take one that is probably easy to relate to. You shouldn't lose your temper and swear at people. Should you? Can we all agree that you shouldn't do that? Does anybody think that that's a good thing to do? That you ought to be doing that? That you're not living life fully if you're not doing that? There are some people who think that. You can tell because of the way they live their life. They get mad and swear at people a lot. Now, when do we get mad and swear at people? Just when we think they're doing something wrong. Yeah, exactly. If they hurt us, but we think that we actually had a coming, we may get a little mad, but we don't get mad like when we think that they're doing something really wrong to us. And if it's not right for us to get mad and swear at people, it's not right across the board. But there's this tendency to say, well, you did something to me first, so I get to do this in this case and that's okay for me. Credo's doing something like that. It's okay to break the laws if the laws don't turn out the way you want them to. If the verdict doesn't play out the way you want, then you should resort to other things. What does that do to a society if too many people start doing that? Let's say with the legal system. If too many people start saying, I'll accept the court verdict provided it goes my way, but if it doesn't, I'm going to find some way to undermine it. Can a society work like that? Rules have to be honored by at least most people, or else things break down. So Credo is a little bit mistaken. Socrates says, we have to think about, is this the right thing to do? Are we going to look at what the many say? No, we have to look at what somebody else would say. He says, we need to know whether this is the right thing to do in this situation, but also in other situations. Who is Socrates going to be persuaded by? It's not going to be persuaded by Credo or the many. Does that mean that he's just stubborn? I take my stand here and nobody will convince me otherwise. Is that a rational way to behave? No? So if it's not the many, because they don't really know what they're talking about, and they make all sorts of goofy decisions and believe all sorts of things one day and then all sorts of other things the next day, who should he get his verdict from? Who should he look to? That would be an interesting thing. He doesn't in this case. If he were to do that, then that would be sort of pushing the problem upstairs to God. And some people do do that. Socrates is notable in part for not doing that. And you might say that one of the ways to divide philosophy apart from another discipline called theology. They don't teach theology classes here, do they? Because it's a private school, but it's not a Catholic school. With theology, you look to God, and then you try to figure out what God is actually saying and make some sense of it. We're going to look at that a little bit with the youth of next class. What Socrates is doing, he thinks that the answer is within us, if we look close enough, or within him, within the human mind. He wants to get his information, he wants to get his advice from somebody who actually does know, somebody who actually is wise. And notice, he's not claiming himself to be wise in this dialogue. He's just claiming to have certain principles that he thinks are right, and unless somebody can prove those principles don't hold, he's going to stick with them. So who do we want? We want the person who knows about good and evil and what should be done. Now, what I'd like you to do, just for a minute or so, think to yourself about some case in your life where you relied on, you had to make a decision about something right and wrong. You made the wrong decision. And the reason that you did so is because you looked at what everybody else thought about it, or the way everybody else felt for how people might look at you if you didn't make the decision that you did. And it seemed okay at the time, but then you realized later it wasn't the right thing to do. Maybe you had some bad consequences, or maybe you felt remorse about it afterwards. Think about that for a minute. A lot of this stuff makes more sense when you apply it within the context of your own life. All of you can relate to that, right? Have you all had an experience like that? At least one in your lifetime? Even if it's something as trivial as picking on some kid, because all the other kids were picking on that kid, or stealing candy because your peer group said, we're going in to steal candy today when hanging out with us. You got to steal candy. I remember doing that when I was in second grade. I was so nervous, too. I was hanging out with the third graders. And to be cool and hang with the third graders, you had to do the things that the third graders were doing. And they were in shoplifting at the time. Shoplifting candy, which is pretty small of it. It's very, very years of robbing stores. Yeah, well, things have changed since I was a kid. I mean, we lived way out in the country, and we had this, now we call it a convenience store, right? They had like a candy aisle. And one of the kids went to the front and bought some things we had in a bag. And then he walked back by us, and then we were supposed to take the candy and put it in the bag. And it was a fiasco, because what are we doing? We're dropping it in. It's really noisy, and the clerk is over there looking at us. And I was just thinking to myself, oh, god, we're going to get caught. We're going to get caught. My parents are going to kill me. We didn't get caught. And, you know, the candy, there's actually an expression. There's no food so sweet as food that you've stolen. It was pretty sweet. But, you know, think about it. You think about it later on. Is that the right thing to do? No. Did the fact that my older compatriots said, hey, everybody's doing this. Does that make it a good thing to do? And I can think of, for myself, a lot of big things along the way that I've done where, rather foolishly, I listened to people that I shouldn't have listened to. And then you, you know, reap the fruits. All of you can think of something like that, right? In your life. Who could you have gone to? You know, Socrates doesn't tell you in this dialogue who actually does know. He gives you some characteristics of the person that that would know. And we're going to talk about that in a moment. I'd like to just, we'll actually do a little, you know, dialogue back and forth about that. I'm going to get to that. But keep this in the back of your head as we're going through the rest of this. Who would have known in the situation that you found yourself what the right thing to do was? Who would have given you the good advice? I'm going to skip over how the many actually go wrong. What's really key here in this discussion about, you know, who knows and who doesn't know? Whenever we find ourselves in a tough situation like Socrates is in, we have to actually ask ourselves what is to be done? That question that he asks in the text. Because we don't always know. That's what we call practical reasoning. The part of philosophy that's called ethics, you guys are later on down the line going to take a higher level ethics class when you're juniors and seniors. Hopefully you're going to learn some things about ethics before you get to be juniors and seniors so you can make some quite ethical decisions on the way, right? That is all concerned with what ought to be done. What should we be doing? What shouldn't we be doing? In this case, you know, it's a particular problem should Socrates leave and break the rules of the city. Socrates says that a good life is to be valued. Not just these things. Not just life by itself, but a good life. And there's a lot of different ways to answer the question what is the good life, which is a question of ethics again. Ethics is not just about right and wrong, what you should do and what you shouldn't do. It's also about what kind of life you think is good for human beings to live. You know, I think all of you want to be successful, right? You're all planning to have careers. That's part of why you're in college. That would be a component of the good life for you, wouldn't it? Would that be the only thing you require for the good life to have a career? There are some people, I talked about this earlier today in my ethics class, who see the good life precisely in terms of work and just work. Maybe some of you know some people. Are they getting the whole picture? What goes wrong in those sort of cases? I mean, they're pursuing a real good, a genuine good. They do it a little bit too much. There's no balance. Okay, that's a good place to start with. There's no balance. So if we've got, when we have a balance, you have some sort of thing in the middle, and then you have two sides. Work over here. What's on the other side that should be there? Yeah. We play, I guess. I'll work and no play makes Jack it all. You're next. I was going to say family. Yeah, usually people who are what we call workaholics, their family lives suffer, they have higher rates of divorce, their kids later on say, you weren't ever there for me. How are you going to say family? That's probably one of the greatest damages that takes place. They also don't develop, you know, when we play, we develop other aspects of ourselves. And you know, if you're a workaholic, you also won't be enjoying some other goods. You won't be developing yourself, right? They've made some sort of mistake with respect to what the good life is. Socrates thinks that the good life, he says, is a life that's just and honorable. That's what makes life good for him, fundamentally. So if he has to choose between being just and educating his kids, he's going to take being just, doing the right thing. There are plenty of people who would be perfectly fine with doing the wrong thing so long as it helps your kids, right? Again, you probably know people who have done that. My mom would actually, she was very hard on us as kids, but she had no problem about lying to people so long as it opened up opportunities for us. I thought that was a little weird, myself. But you know people like that, right? Socrates thinks that if it can't be a just life, it's almost worse than not living, just and honorable. That's what he wants to be. So that's what's motivating him. The other thing is how is he finding all these things out? The reasoning. And this is not something that's talked about in the dialogue, but this is going to be a theme with us over the semester. When we use this word reason, we have a couple of different meanings for this, right? Why are you here? You have a reason to be here because you're taking the class for credits. That's one sense of the term reason. But you are also, you are a human being and because you're a human being, you are a reasoning being. You are a rational being. That's why, you know, we have classrooms and we talk about these sorts of things. Dogs, you know, get trained. Dogs teach each other in classrooms, give each other grades, tell each other how they ought to progress, they ought to be, you know, reading this text or something like that. No, we do that. We reason about things. We reason about things on all different levels. Sometimes we do it poorly and sometimes we do it well, but that's part of, that's what makes us distinctively human. One of the definitions for human being that came up early in philosophy is the rational animal. So Socrates thinks that this is part of what makes us most human, being rational, following reason. Not just following our desires, but following reason. What reason tells us is the right thing to do. And he's going to follow it up. Here's where it gets really interesting. Reason itself, the rational life, is a good thing. So you can put that into the balance. You know, when you're doing practical reasoning, a lot of what you're doing is weighing. Does this side weigh more? Well, then I should do this action. Does this side weigh more than I should do this action? For Socrates, one of the things that's really heavy, that's pushing down the scale, is being rational, being consistent, sticking with what he had said before. Now, he has sort of a standard to appeal to. The wise man. And what is the wise man wise about? Here's where I want to introduce another theme that you're going to see come up throughout the semester as well. We call these moral values. And they're instantiated. They take certain forms. We can debate about them. We, in fact, do debate about them. The next dialogue that we're going to read, we're going to see not only do we debate about them, we get angry at each other about them. What do we get angry at each other about? What do we debate about when it comes to moral things? You could say abortion or euthanasia. Those are topics. What is the real general thing? We don't ask ourselves abortion. Yes or no. We say, is abortion right or just? We can also ask whether things are good or bad. Maybe just and good might be the same thing in some cases. But maybe they're not in some cases. All of you are healthy, I think, right? I hope so. Being healthy is good. Being sick is bad. It's not that you become an unjust person by being unhealthy. But it's not good for you to be unhealthy, is it? Socrates says that the person we want to look to, the wise person, is somebody who knows about the just and the unjust, the good and the bad. And then he uses some other terms. Can you remember what those terms were? He uses kind of a formula. He says, the just and the unjust, the good and the bad, and he changes, or at least the translator, changes the terms that he uses. Yes. Is the wise the unwise? The wise is the one who actually knows about this. The unwise is the one who is all mixed up about it. They think that they've got the right thing, but they've got a wrong viewpoint on it. Yeah. Say again? Well, we could change this to evil if we wanted to. And that's good. The Greek terms are pretty malleable. You can make them fit things. He uses another thing that we wouldn't normally think of as moral. But in terms of what we call aesthetic, how things appear to us. He uses terms like this. Oh, that's the wrong side. The fair. Or the foul. Everything on this side is bad. Everything on this side is good, right? He doesn't mean fair in the sense of, you know, each person gets a candy bar, and you don't take anything more than what you do or do or anything like that, or everyone follows the rules. He means fair as in beautiful. Another way of translating this is beautiful, ugly. Another way of translating it is noble, base, and another way that he does it in this is honorable. Why do you think that's important for somebody to know about? Isn't that kind of weird? I mean, for somebody to be a good ethics guide, sure, they ought to be able to tell you what's right and wrong. They ought to know that. They ought to know what's good and what's bad. Why should they know things about, you know, like what's noble and what's base? You know, we don't use terms like that. We talk about people as being, you know, like a decent person or, you know, a repugnant or a stand-up guy or a punk, you know. We have all sorts of terms for these sorts of things. Those are more in this category than in the category of the just or the unjust. You know what's lying behind this idea? Goodness is attractive and evil is in some way discordant or ugly. And it might appear beautiful from this side or noble from this side, but then you take a walk around it and you see that it's not. With any of these things, you can distinguish between what's apparently that and what's really that. And the person who knows, who is wise, would know about all these sorts of things. How do you think they find out about that? Well, for Socrates, he was through reasoning. Not just listening to the crowd, not just accepting things for, you know, face value, but actually thinking about them. That's how he got himself in trouble. Going around looking for the person who could meet these criteria. So when he was going around all these politicians, isn't this the sort of stuff that politicians ought to be knowledgeable about? What's really just and unjust? If they turned out not to be so, that's why they got angry. So that's the kind of person that he's looking for. That person doesn't show up in this dialogue. So you have to ask yourself, you know, here's a good place for us to actually sort of pause. Think back to the mistake that you made. Who should you have listened to? Is there somebody who would have been knowledgeable, or at least more knowledgeable, than where you were at the time about what was just and unjust, what was good or bad, what was honorable or dishonorable? Who could you think of? Probably not an ethics professor, right? Who in your life would you? I know, you know, I have some grandparents I wouldn't go to. But on the outside, he wouldn't have been a good guy to bring it wrong. He did terrible things, and didn't, you know, unbrand about it. Now his wife, his long-suffering wife, his second long-suffering wife actually, she was a very good, you know, moral voice. I could go to her. Did you have people like that in your life? Who do you have now? Again, you know, most likely it's not going to be your ethics professor, or your internal philosophy professor. Who do you go to to find out when you have to figure out what's right and wrong? Because you're not, you know, a genius at this level. My parents? Yeah, and if your parents actually truly, you know, do know, Socrates would say, perfect, you found them. Somebody like this is a solid goal. Yeah. Even when you're a kid, you could have just asked yourself, so you didn't really need to ask anybody. Yeah. You need to do a thing about it. Yeah, and you know, Socrates seems to think that something along those lines, deep in our heart of hearts, we actually, you know, could figure it out. But it's buried under a lot of stuff. There's one problem with that too. There are, and Plato doesn't think about this, there are some people that we nowadays term as sociopaths. Sociopaths lack a sense of conscience. That's why they're so dangerous, and that's why they don't respond to treatment, because they don't care. They're only interested in certain goods, like power and pleasure and things like that. They'll do anything that it takes to get it. We're going to look at that a little bit more when we look at Republic Book 1. I'd like you to keep thinking about that, this notion of who should you go to? That's, you know, there are certain big ideas that when the semester's over, and actually when you've left Maris, I would really, really like you to carry with you. I don't expect that you're going to remember most of what we actually cover in class, because people don't. That's what you have your notes for, things like that. There are certain issues, certain basic ideas that I'd really like you to have as part of your toolkit when you leave here. And one of those is this notion of who should I place my trust in? Who should I be getting my understanding of the moral values from? Because that's a project that you, each one of you is an individual, as a developing human being, as one who's actually early in your development. All of you are around, you know, 18, 19 maybe? This is something that you should, you know, think very carefully about, because you don't want to be 40 years old and realizing that you made the wrong decisions with this. What else is important about this dialogue? Socrates, he brings up the laws, right? What do the laws say to him? What is Socrates saying to himself and to Credo and putting it in the mouth of the Athenian laws? They're pretty hard on him, aren't they? I mean, you could have set up the dialogue like this, the law is saying, Socrates, don't break us. Socrates says, screw you, I'm breaking you. He didn't. The laws make arguments, they give you reasons why he should stay around and obey. What are those reasons? Can you remember any of them? Yeah. They, like, educated him and they, like, raised him? Yeah. They provided, they not only educated and raised him, they provided the very framework in which that could happen, in which his parents could marry. That sounds like something that, you know, you ought to repay somebody for. Anything else? Yeah. Can you remember the parents, like, like, a slave of the law? Yeah. Yeah, now, in the ancient world, the laws compare themselves to mothers and fathers. In the ancient world, things were quite a bit different in the relationship between children and parents than they are for most of us. Parents were, had a much higher status compared to their children. And there wasn't a lot of, you know, democracy in the household, or, you know, what do you think, little Johnny, you know, about this or that? It was the parents decided, because they're the ones who made you, and some parents will actually say, I made you and I can unmake you, you know, or things like that. The laws are sort of like super parents. They made the parents. So, you know, Socrates, yeah, the laws are saying he's like a slave. What else? There's something that we brought up earlier. They say, what are you doing? Are you going by an act of yours to overturn us? The laws in the whole state? Do you imagine a state can subsist and not be overthrown in which the decisions of law have no power, but are set aside and overthrown by individuals? Socrates does the wrong thing in this case. It has repercussions for the society, doesn't it? We just talked about this a little bit. Could a society last if everyone says, well, I'll accept the laws so long as it turns out in my favor as soon as it doesn't, I'm going to break them. Can you have a society like that? Can you even play a game like that? Let's say we're playing, what do you want to play? Baseball, football, hockey, anything. Let's say chess, right? Do you ever play chess with somebody who cheats? It's very hard to cheat at chess. How would you do it? You'd have to break a rule. You'd have to, like, say, well, you know, my pawn can actually move like a queen. There's not much of a game if people do that. And, you know, you won't be able to play. Sooner or later, you can't tell anything apart. The laws also say, what was our agreement with you? When you entered into the courtroom, what were you agreeing to? Were you to abide by the sentence of the state? If you don't like the way things go in your state, Socrates, then why did you stick around for 70 years? If you think the laws are bad laws, why didn't you go off to Sparta? You keep talking, they say this in the dialogue. You keep saying that Sparta and Crete had better laws than us, because Socrates and Plato were actually sort of critics of democracy, Athens was a democracy. Sparta was, depending on how you want to see it, an oligarchy or an aristocracy. Not everybody got to vote, not everybody got to hold office. So, you know, if Socrates didn't like it, why didn't he go somewhere else? As a matter of fact, he liked it so much, the laws say, that you never left. The only time you ever left was to go on military service. Everybody else, you know, they go on vacation somewhere. You went on vacation here. What do they call it? A staycation, right? That's the new term for when you take off work and you just sit around the house and watch TV, play games, eat chips, and don't go into work. So, what do you think? Do the laws have a good case? Do they have a good case for Socrates? Yes or no? Yes? Why? Why do you think so? But I guess that's a good point, if you don't like the law so much, why do you stick around for so long? That's a pretty valid point. Yeah, it's a lot harder to emigrate these days. It used to be a lot easier. Like that. Any of you have other reasons for finding this convincing or do you think that the laws are wrong Socrates is making the wrong choice? Yeah. What do you think? All of you have an opinion, I know. People when they read this text, sometimes they're like, yeah, this is great. Sometimes they're like, this is absolute BS. I can't believe that. I go along with this fascist stuff. Those are two extreme positions. Let's put it a different way then. So, if Socrates, let's say Socrates does owe this to the state. What about you and the society that we live in? Who do you owe things to? All of you have debts. And I don't just mean you owe financial aid. Do you guys have loans? A lot of you? And if loans aren't paying it, then scholarships of some sort? Or mom and dad? If it's mom and dad, become Thanksgiving, if you're spouting stuff at the dinner table about how American society is fascist or is terrible or something like that, they'll remind you who's paying for your education. That you owe them something. And if you decide to not major in business as you originally planned to major in art history instead, you may get a call from mom or dad saying, I'm shelling out all this money for your education. You owe me. So there's that, but who else do you owe things to? Let's think about the fabric of society. All of you are healthy. All of you are relatively well-adjusted, I'm assuming. You didn't go through war. You weren't the victim of crime or stuff like that. Do you owe anybody for that? Yeah. Our country? Yeah. The country as a whole. We just had this big 9-11 thing. The 10-year anniversary. And the FBI was on high alert. Agents were called in for the entire weekend to work, double shifts and stuff like that. They had people on the bridges around here making sure there wasn't any funny business going on with that. Police presence was stepped up everywhere. It becomes much more visible. They actually put out some communiques because they didn't want people to get alarmed that some of the police would actually have automatic weapons. Which they did. Why did they have that? To protect us. Do we owe them anything? Yeah. Well, that's a good point. It's honorable, but it's a job. Yeah. When it comes to the military, I'm actually a vet myself. And my attitude when I hear people say, troops shouldn't be put in harm's way, is what do you think you signed up for? You take the money, you take the oath. You're probably going to be put in harm's way. It's the same with police or who else? Firefighters. Who else is on the front lines? You know, keeping you safe, the organs of society we call them. What about nurses and doctors? Nurses more than doctors, though. Nurses face, you know, the chance of getting all sorts of horrible diseases on a daily basis. If something goes wrong. We don't think of that as a huge risk and a firefighter or a police officer. But they're facing that. Do we owe them anything? What do you think? Could it just be their job? Do we owe them money? Maybe we owe them honor, you know, or respect. Our country provides all this stuff. What do we owe our country? At a minimum. What do you think you owe them? Texas. Well, yeah. It depends on how much you make. What you guys right now are fortunate, most of you I'm guessing, in that you're not making a lot of money because you'll see the more money you make, the bigger the bite gets very, very quickly. You don't have to make very much to be considered middle class anymore. So taxes. Let's say we go a little bit broader. That's providing support to the country. There are laws about taxes, right? You have to follow the laws. You have to follow all the other laws? Sure. What if you don't like the laws? What does the credo hold out as a possibility? The laws actually say this. So you can't break us. Just because you don't like us, we're even saying it. Oh, you're just playing with your pen, okay? What should you do if you don't like the laws? What do you have a duty to do? You can change laws. You could try to get into politics and change them to become one of the rulers. The credo, as a dialogue, doesn't actually have a law saying that. There's another way to change laws, though, and that's to do what? Go ahead.