A proposed outline for moral judgements to those whom we claim to love

With my Math + God conversation cerebrally derailed, I digress to a topic that has been on my mind for quite some time.

Here is the question: How ought we to judge our fellow people if not by their previous actions?

Here's the problem: If we judge people by their previous actions, are we not condemning them to repeat the sins that they have already committed?

Here's what I mean: As a person looking out for my own interests, I certainly don't want to get screwed over by others. So there's definitely a pragmatic function to judging other people, especially those who are close to me. The next logic question is simple to formulate, but difficult to answer; what parameters ought I to use in judging others, particularly those whom I have deep relationships with?

If I judge someone by what they have previously done, expecting them to repeat old mistakes, I deny them the benefit of changing old behavior.

If I don't judge someone by what they have previously done, I make myself vulnerable to incurring emotional harm as a result of them intentionally or inadvertently repeating their mistakes.

How can we know if someone has truly changed? Does Hume's for apply even here; ought we to not take for granted that one's future actions will resemble one's previous actions? Or are human beings different than ontological/cosmological challenges?


To be frank, I think the expectations are in the eyes of the beholder. I can chose to accept or reject someone's history, heinous as it might be, and that will only affect my conception of our relationship if I choose to believe that 'future deeds resembles old ones.'

Upon further reflection, it seems that the situation would have a significant stake in this debate. What I mean but this is that if one particular predicament drove me to steal, that does not necessarily mean I am a chronic thief. Even if I have stolen my whole love (say, because I have been poor and hungry), perhaps I shall not steal once I have money whereby I can legitimately purchase bread. Are you, as someone who is emotionally involved with me, ready to label me a thief for life because I have stolen before? When do I earn the benefit of the doubt?

How long must one not steal in order to escape his perceived nature as a thief? Does resisting the urge to steal, even if you have stolen on previous occasions, cease your characterization as a 'thief'?

How can religion preach forgiveness when it is so quick to call us sinners? How can spiritual rehabilitation be truly possible if we are unable to escape our transgressions against each other?

I cannot definitely answer a single one of these questions, but, in what follows, I will do my best to try, and to be ethically consistent.

An abbreviated code of ethical judgments
1. Those who we are emotionally involved with ought not to be judged by us for sole actions in the distant past.
1.1 Actions done habitually, such as compulsive gambling, infidelity, or drinking, may not be easy to forgive, but forgiveness is essential to maintaining relationships.

2. Actions are temporal; so to should judgments be. There is always an opportunity to change actions, and so there ought always be the opportunity to change judgments.
2.1 We are entitled to act poorly and justly throughout our lives. This is part of our design. We are therefore obliged to be judged appropriately by our actions, but not absolutely.

3. It is unfair to keep the judgments of those who are emotionally close to you to yourself. Part of being in a relationship of any depth means communication, especially communicating the terms and conditions by which you stand to be judged.

4. The sinner/forgiveness paradox is an outdated model which is no longer effective. We are neither sinners nor are we saints. We are people. Judgment is the new guilt. Fairness the court. And apathy the executioner.

5. Rehabilitation from previous actions is possible but can only be done when judgments rendered against you are weakened with the potential of forgiveness.
5.1 If you are wronged by someone you love and what to make amends, YOU must foster a sense of forgiveness to them if you expect any change in their behavior. To not do so is to be unfair.

6. Moral judgments are not absolute; the above rules are guidelines that have come to me with my life experience. Every individual is entitled to form his own which have no more or less legitimacy than mine.
6.1 The key here is that we outline something that others who love us and who we love can rely upon. There is nothing more hapless and deprecating than being judged in ways which are unknown to you, by standards you've never heard, and with expectations impossible for you to meet.

My 2 cents.


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Twitter

What has the world come to my friends? Where will it go next?

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Our Vertigo

Some people have asked me about my thesis, so I figured we'd take a short hiatus from the Math/God conversation. Here is the conclusion of my thesis, which is entitled 'The Philosophy of Character Vertigo: An Essay on Choice, Anxiety, Freedom, and the Self.' The final chapter, Our Vertigo, details my conclusions in the thesis and references, but does not rely upon, the literature I used. Even if you are unfamiliar, you can still appreciate my attempt to answer the question, "How do characters in literature relate to us real people here-in-the-world?" Enjoy!


"Characters in literature have meaning for us in real life. Literature, as an artistic form, is humanity's best creative attempt to understand its existence. Vertigo, as I have demonstrated in my analysis of the protagonists’ choices and the authors’ intentions, is a powerful metaphor with which to describe the fundamental anxiety that we all feel in every choice we make. Character vertigo, thus, is a new literary model that expands our philosophical insights about literature, a paradigm indebted to fundamental ideas in existential philosophy. While I am hesitant to assert that my model implies a purely existentialist analysis of a literary work (as the model does not necessarily liken the character’s outlook to an existential philosophy), it is certainly a creative, useful mode for understanding essences, selves, and ultimately the deepest anxiety in the subject it deconstructs.

Essences, as mentioned in the introduction and in chapter 2, are the key themes and conflicts addressed in any Bildungsroman. This is not the same as Sartre’s notion of essence; he believes that essence is a meaningless concept that does significantly less ontological explanatory work than existence (this is what he means when he asserts in Existentialism as a Humanism that ‘existence precedes essence’). My conception of essence is more like a combination of recurring symbolism, character conflict, and moral significance. Therefore, character vertigo relies upon finding a character’s essence and extrapolating it into a more substantial interpretation of his self.

When we look at Tereza’s essence, therefore, we factor in her recurring nightmares, her failed relationship with her husband, and her personal conception of morality, with a particular interest in how these events affect her self. When we look at Horner’s essence, we are interested in his constant reference to the Laocoön bust, his arguments with Morgan, and his reflections about his physical paralysis. Looking at Antoine Roquentin’s essence, we examined his recurring nausea, his discussions with the Self-Taught-Man, and his opinions about existence. Essences, therefore, are descriptive accounts of a character’s change through the various events that happen in their narrative lives. But we need not limit essences to characters in fiction; in the previous chapter I attempted several conjectural arguments as to how we might identify essences in authorial intent. What is the essence of Kundera’s intention in writing The Unbearable Lightness of Being? It was the archetype of an artist, living in exile, yearning for a place he could no longer return to. I need not re-iterate each individual claim about our authors’ essences here; suffice to say, we may speak of essences beyond a mere literary phenomena.

Also paramount in the instantiation of the character vertigo model is an understanding about the self. As I articulated in the introduction, the self is related to essence, though they are not the same. We need the self in order to track changes in our constitution. If we had no basis, no static self with which to compare, we would not have any conception of being continuous and complex beings . The self is an abstract construct, a being-for-itself, that allows an individual to connect his current body and mind to previous iterations of the same body and mind. Therefore, if our self may be regarded as a type of ubiquitous common denominator, essences can be thought of as the process of dividing. Only in finding essences – conflicts, moral theories, and anxieties – can we locate the self, itself a type of indivisible ontological essence. That said, the self also defies definition; we cannot say that Tereza’s self is her fidelity, nor can we say that Horner’s self is a lack of morality. These are descriptions of essences. The best description of the self that I can offer is a non-semantic consciousness that exists only for facilitating individual change, which it achieves through the integration an individual’s evolving qualities and static qualities, simplified into a consistent self-referential story. Perhaps this definition needs some further unpacking.

Given the fact that the self resists definition as a concrete object, we must understand it as an abstract premise. The self, a construct in consciousness, need not be weighed down by the confines of language or objective meaning; to define the self with words or in relation to other established concepts is to unnecessarily limit its definition. Therefore, I determine the self to be non-semantic. Secondly, the self arises from an anxiety of individual consistency; the self is the answer to the paradox of how I am constantly changing whilst remaining myself. Therefore, it exists (or at least we invent it) to facilitate changes in our essences, and other archetypes we become during the course of our lives. In this sense, the self integrates new essential experiences with old ones – this, I believe, as a process which the subject is consciousness of. Additionally, the self gives order to potentially meaningless existence; the self inspires an individual to regard his life as more than a random amalgamation of causes and effects. The self forces us to acknowledge the totality of our lives into a meaningful story about change, conflict, and the freedom of choice (and hence it is self-referential). We invent the self every time we think of our lives as more than a series of deterministic biology, chemistry, or physics. One identifies the self when he understands that he is the protagonist in the story of his own life. The birth of the self, and its presence in every conscious being, helps us make the final transition in the character vertigo model. How does character vertigo relate to real life?

If instantiating the self means acknowledging life as a story, than analyzing the self is analyzing the protagonist in that story. When we analyze the protagonist in a narrative, we imagine his self in an effort to create his hypothetical consciousness. It is not the author, then, which creates consciousness for the characters, it is the reader who, every time he makes a mental projection of the character, offers a real-life consciousness to an abstract, hypothetical being. Consciousness, therefore, according to my description, does not exist exclusively in the physical world; we do not need a body to necessarily postulate consciousness . And because literature is a theoretical realm in which any logical possibility can be explored, than the story of a character’s life – insofar as he resembles us – is analogous to the story of our own.

Why does it make sense to speak of a character’s intention? How can we regard characters as autonomous? How can we put forth moral responsibility and offer moral judgments as to a character’s decisions and choices? Why do we sometimes feel more connected to literary characters than people in the real world? The answer to all these questions is that we fundamentally regard characters as we do people; they are our best analogue for understanding ourselves. We first notice that a character participates in certain essential archetypes, instances which are familiar to us and so we begin to identify with them. We then see these essences as facilitating an inner-conflict with the self. When we conceive of a character as having a self, we
unconsciously project his consciousness through our own mind. When we become aware of this process, we regard the character as our counterpart, a similar being that we can learn from by observing. When we analyze this process, in the guise of existential claims about human anxiety and angst, we create a new story altogether, a story of character vertigo that traces the development of the individual (whether theoretical or real) from his birth to the brink of the precipice. In understanding this story about the other, we can better understand ourselves, identify our own precipices, and choose to jump (or not).

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Math and God [Part 1]

Did we discover math, or did we invent it? Was it there without us, before us, or is it our own creation, only possible with the growth of the human brain?

It’s a huge question – I realize – but the significance, once we realize the ramifications of either claim, are startling. This will be a 2 part series. Today, I will discuss the first possibility.

Let’s say we discovered math. That is to say that quantities, functions, and co-ordinates exist independently of humanity and have consequences, therefore, beyond humanity.

The universe, therefore, is not random, but a menagerie of co-mingled mathematical expressions and dangling formulas we just might not yet have access to. Math – and I don’t mean word, I mean the concept – has always been and will continue to be in the world.

It may have taken us millions of years of evolution to recognize it as such, but since we did, it has helped us to reasonably expect that events happen probabilistically, that quantities may be combined, divided, and multiplied.

We have learned that theoretical speculations can have logical, expectable, feasible premises behind them. This is good. We like to be right. And we like when it’s not just us making ourselves be right. (We like that too, just a little bit less).

This line of rhetoric makes a lot of sense, at least to me. Much of the math we have just seems to work with the world. (Of course there is also a ton of math that doesn’t work at all with the world, but seems to work just fine with itself). When we add marbles in front of our eyes, or on paper, we get the same answer. Yet, unfortunately for our logical expectations of consistency, empirically demonstrating that Math works in front of our eyes does not serve as good proof that Math was indeed discovered – that is, there before our eyes/minds could see it. In short, just because this A is a B, it does not mean that all As are Bs and certainly not that A → B. Remember Hume’s fork?

In fact, it is this shortcoming that leads me away from attempting any proof that Math can be existent independent of humanity. Sure we coined the word ‘math’, but we also coined the words ‘sky’, ‘earth’, and ‘dinosaur’ – surely this doesn’t mean that these things didn’t exist before we categorized them as such.

So if math is independent of our conception of it, and if we have finally become smart enough to hit the tip of the ice berg in discovering one of the mysterious ways in which the universe operates, should we be asking what this means?

If Math was discovered by us, not intentionally invented by us, does it not mean that it was intentionally imposed upon us? If Math, as a discovery, includes the potential explanation to all of the inner-workings of the universe’s celestial bodies – from big to small – and our current intelligence is enough to help us see the possibilities of how far we could take this concept but falls short of completely comprehending it in the first place, what then, I would ask anyone, besides a bunch of archaic and unsubstantial mythologies is the substantive different between our word for ‘math’ and our word for ‘God.’

Surely a religious person would not claim that God was invented, but rather God was discovered. God was always there, waiting to be found, until ‘I’ (whomever claims to have done so) found God. Similarly, Math, if discovered, has always been there, ruling, shaping, changing the nature of things, and keeping constant rules of order and existence until we discovered it, and then realized that we could use it to create our own theoretical, hypothetical words based on rules and constraints of our own construction.

So then, I conclude, with no mathematical certainty, but only a philosophical intuition as my guide that “Math = God” is a true statement, and the only way to disprove it would be to show me how the creative power and potential that Math yields does not function in a similar capacity to the expectation we have of the all powerful creator.

I bet if you told a mathematician that he was doing God’s work, he’d look at you cross-eyed. On the other hand, maybe not.

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“There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”
-The Bard


Rothbury... here I come.

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The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

-Salvador Dali

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"Man is a messenger who forgot the message"
-Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Forking Hume

Today I find myself wrestling with Hume's fork - a wonderfully cogent skeptical argument that suggests there can be no certainty in our statements about the world. Hume dichotomizes all propositions into two types; first there are statements about ideas, which are analytic in nature, and knowable through logic and deduction. Kant would later dub these statements (such as "1+1 = 2" or "all men are mortal") a priori, or knowledge that can be known in absolute certainty without empirical (worldly) experience.

The second kinds of statements are statements about the world, such as "the sun rises in the east" or "gravity makes rocks fall to the earth." These types of statements are synthetic, a posteriori propositions. A posteriori knowledge comes from empirical data - as we watch the sun continuously rise in the east, or rocks fall to the ground, we come to see the truth in these statements to the extent which they square with our future expectations of the world.

Future expectations, in this case, are the key to understanding why Hume was such a skeptic. In order for us to claim that "every rock dropped will hit the earth" we, of course, need the premise "every rock I've ever dropped has hit the earth." We also need another premise, one Hume is not willing to grant us, and rightfully so.

Hume argues that, implicit in all synthetic a posteriori claims, is a premise that the future always resembles the past. Ironically, we come to realize empirically that this isn't true, and therefore if I can't say with any certainty that the future will resemble the past, I have no good reason for expecting the rock to fall to the ground the next time I drop it. If you were to rebuff me and say "Gravity will always pull the rocks down", I could just as easily say to you "and how do you know that gravity will act the same in the future as it has in the past."

Ultimately, Hume forces us to realize that intrinsic to any of our expectations that we claim to know about the world is a degree of hopeless faith which ostensibly says "I believe that I know X because I have faith that all previous occurrences of X will resemble all future occurrences of X." How ridiculous, in this sense, it is to say that you know that the rock in your hand, when dropped, will fall to the ground, because you believe that this rock, and all rocks that have been dropped and will be dropped, act the same? Surely this is not now we want to go about claiming to "know" things...

So I'm left with a logical argument that makes perfect sense but with consequences that make me very unhappy. According to Hume, statements about ideas (a priori), may be certain, though they cannot truly pertain to the world. This is because we cannot be completely certain about anything in the world, and hence, if we are certain that "a triangle has three sides", we can also be certain that this tells us nothing about the world.

On the flip side, if we cannot be certain of statements about the world; we cannot use our ideas and analytics in matters of fact. Abstract relationships, therefore, cannot be consistently used to express or evaluate material objects/process. What does this mean for physics and applied math? Does this invalidate the very strength of empirical science?

Or does this, once and for all, settle the argument that philosophers are truly useless to the world, just as much as the world is useless to philosophers? I'll leave the conclusions up to you... suffice to say, Hume forked us good.

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the anti-job

I find it very interesting how some people, when asked what they do for a living, answer that they work 9 to 5 as if somehow 9 to 5 is, itself, a job. Now, more than ever, I understand this condition and wonder if we can define what we do by how long we do it. It seems, on one level, to substantively destroy the content of what we are doing by substituting a contentless catch-all to answer relatively harmless question. On another level, if we define our lives by what we do with the time that we've got, it makes sense to answer the question "what do you do" with a response of "how long."Or maybe I'm giving the 9 to 5 idiom far too much credit. People also may answer this question with "where" (I work in an office) or "who" (I work for Microsoft). Perhaps this answers, too, speak volumes about how a person confronts their finitude. I wish I had further observations to offer on what the "where", "who", or "what" answer to the question mean, but until I have one of those reponses myself, I feel unqualified to merely speculate.

Until then, I'll just say that I work 9 to 5, and deal with the consequences. Frustrating? You bet.
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Socrates has his cake and eats it too!

Reconciling Conflicted Senses of Justice in Crito and Apology

In his famous self-defense, Apology, Socrates faces rather inauspicious circumstances. Accused of corrupting Athens’ youth and disobeying the law of the Gods, Socrates muses at great length about his views on Justice, civil disobedience, and the role of the philosopher in society. Socrates hypothetically supposes that even if his Athenian jury decided to grant him amnesty from his present criminal charges with the caveat that he should never investigate or practice philosophy again, he would still reply: “I’ll obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I won’t give up practicing philosophy” However in Crito, a different dialogue which takes place in Socrates’ jail cell, he seemingly appeals to a different sense of justice. When provoked by his friend Crito to break out of jail and flee Athens, Socrates weighs the relative merits and faults of breaking the law, ultimately concluding that “one shouldn’t do injustice in return for injustice… as the majority of people think – seeing that one should never do injustice.”

How might Socrates in one breath bend to the will of society and in another seem resigned to follow his own moral compass? It is my contention that while these sentiments expressed by Socrates appear antithetical, they are in fact consistent when properly placed in Socrates’ larger philosophical approach to Justice and its differing application in a practical reality. The assertions expressed in both dialogues are therefore commonly derived from a universal conception of Justice as a Platonic form, rather than a mere expression of Socrates’ opinion, which clearly changes from one social context (a courtroom) to the next (a jail cell). Simply put, it is a mistake to remove these two quotes from their relative contexts as a proof of their inconsistency.

The Socrates we meet in Apology admonishes his audience for their failure to recognize the weakness in the allegations made against him. When it becomes clear to Socrates that reasonable arguments directed against his accusations and accusers are futile, he appeals to the Platonic form of Justice. The form of Justice is a thing in-itself (autos) which exists in a sort of “ultimate reality” – apart from the conventional reality of humanity. According to Plato’s theory of forms, these perfect entities (Justice, Virtue, Beauty etc…) serve as inspiration and motivation for humanity’s pragmatic ethical considerations. When men try to administer Justice, they instantiate their ideals from Justice and change it to fit a practical reality; justice of men, therefore, is not equal to Justice in form, though it should resemble it. Ergo, the justice of the Athenian court, according to Socrates’ deeply held belief in form, is not Justice per se, but rather a social interpretation of the form. Similarly, Socrates’ justice is also not perfect Justice. When there is a direct conflict between two different parties’ application of justice, from a common ideal Justice (as in Apology), it is clear that both applications cannot be consistently Just. Apology, therefore, becomes Socrates’ soapbox to expose the inconsistency and unjustness of his interlocutors’ claims against philosophy. When Socrates claims that he will “obey the God rather than you” he is being deliberately cryptic, whilst subtly making his point. Surely Socrates cannot profess to know ‘the God’ desires more than the Athenian counsel does.

If we place this quote in the context of Socrates’ defense of the theory of forms and his own personal interpretation of justice, it is revealed as a rhetorical move – rather than an ideological stance – made in hopes that his oppressors will see the volatile inaccuracy of the claims made against him. In short, Socrates is hoping that by appealing to the same rhetoric via he was accused (disobeying the Gods), he may get his enemies to see the validity of his position. The situation here is perhaps analogous to a child or adolescent fighting with his parents about his right to have autonomy or social freedom. The arguments offered appeal to the parents as people – much like Socrates’ “obey the God” argument appeals to the council as men of Virtue and Piety – yet the child finds difficulty breaking through the power relationship in order to get his voice heard. I believe that Socrates’ appeal to the divine is more a practical than ideological move.

Once the decision has been made, and Socrates is sentenced to death, we are offered a more ideological account of Socratic justice, one that is not inconsistent with his defense, but an extension of the theory of forms, factoring in a moral conscience. In Crito, Socrates starts with two premises: (1) “one should never do injustice” and (2) “one shouldn’t do injustice in return for injustice” . One could accuse Socrates, in Crito, of breaking his very premises; how does one end up in jail, other than by committing injustices? Ironically in this case, the only injustice that has been committed is the court’s unreasonable and excessive (albeit lawful) verdict. And although injustice should not be committed, and the verdict is certainly a grave injustice, Socrates’ view of Justice informs his moral conscience. Ultimately he reasons that he would not be justified in breaking out of prison, despite his undue punishment, because injustice does not correct instances of injustice. There is no fairness than can come out of two unfair acts. Or, more colloquially, two wrongs don’t make a right. Superficially, it appears, Socrates takes the ethical and judicial high ground as he reasons that ‘getting even’ is not only a practically undesirable move, it would also be clearly ‘disobeying the Gods’, a notion that he reasons in Apology to be of the utmost importance.

There are, however, multiple layers of meaning to Socrates’ decision to quell his civil disobedience after his hearing in the Athenian courts. At his defense trial, Socrates was clearly competing against his accusers and arbiters, a vast majority of the Athenian public. This notion temporarily changed Socrates’ relationship with the rest of society, removing him from the polis and placing him in contrast to it. This, of course, is the nature of any court of the public; in order to be measured objectively, Socrates must be separated from that which he is accused of corrupting/disobeying. Once the verdict was offered, however, Socrates resumes his role as part of the Athenian public, though his role has significantly changed (from lay philosopher to criminal) in the polis. In Crito, Socrates acts and thinks as a member of society, necessarily considering the ramifications of his actions beyond his own selfish ends. And, rather than becoming antagonistic to the Athenian society – which he insists that he loves so much – he embraces and re-enforces the power structure, even as it rejects his right to live. Socrates therefore recognizes that society is only at stasis when its laws (and therefore its punishments) hold authority or legitimacy among its people.

If Socrates were to escape, betraying and undermining Greek authority, he not only subdues his own personal values but endangers the very hierarchical fabrics which give the social structure credibility. And Socrates, certainly not one to commit hubris, is willing to give his life – at the hands of injustice – to preserve the social stability and legitimacy of the polis. He had his chance at a legally mandated defense and failed. Accepting the consequences, in this case, is not difficult for Socrates, because he values his membership to a society more than he values his own life. In some sense, the same form of Justice in Apology, now in the vein of social stability, informs Socrates to act against his personal interests. Indeed, Socrates’ concern for his fleeting life and physical body is footless in comparison to his respect and admiration of Justice and Virtue. In both Crito and Apology, his assertions and conclusions are consistent with these claims.

Though it may be challenging to reconcile Socrates statements “I’ll obey the God rather than you” and “one must neither do injustice in return nor wrong any man, no matter what one has suffered at his hands” juxtaposed and out of context, we find that in-context both appeal to a higher conception of Justice, Virtue, and moral pragmatism. Socrates willingly admits that it is ambiguous exactly ‘what the Gods want’ in regards to his own case, but is quite certain that the Gods, praised by the Athenian public, want to maintain the rule, legitimacy, and consistency of Athenian law and social function. Though Socrates may positively believe that he was not unvirtuous in practicing philosophy, he realizes that he would be in the wrong – effectively disobeying the Gods – by undermining Athenian authority.

In this respect, Socrates is confronted with a moral wager between his personal convictions about philosophy and society’s need for ethos. In both Apology and Crito, he chooses the latter; his defense operates in the moral realm prescribed by society, extrapolating from the form of Justice, bestowing a right to defend oneself for the accused. Socrates uses this right to his full ability. Once the decision has been made, however, the same paradigm of Justice – one Socrates respects with unwavering devotion – informs a new pragmatic policy: all convicted criminals must serve their sentence. In Crito, Socrates admits that although he may be wronged by society, he cannot accept the paradigm of Justice as it benefits him (entitling him to a defense) and then reject it when it is detrimental to him (his death sentence thereafter). From this attitude about Justice in form – and its interaction with justice of men – we are given a profound, resplendent view of civil disobedience, and its intrinsic boundaries which are necessary to maintain social order.

Though the term ‘civil disobedience’ would not be coined for centuries, implicit in both Crito and Apology are Socrates’ views on when the individual may go against the will of society and when it is appropriate for him to obey society’s mandates, however difficult it may be. In one sense, civil disobedience is justified within reason; the individual’s need to express his personal moral convictions against societal norms is appropriate when done so in a manner consistent with the social order. In the case of the Apology, this takes the form of a conversational venue – the court – in which the individual is free to express his contempt for his society’s malapropos turpitude, and argue his motives honorable.

However, civil disobedience is not a plenipotentiary license to act out against social order, rebelling against it without temperance. Therefore, society’s need for consistency and authority does trump the individual’s thirst for moral sovereignty, even if the individual is ultimately wronged by a perversion of justice. In Crito, Socrates asserts that his continued participation and enthusiasm for Athenian society implies a social contract in which he consents to obey the laws which have benefited him throughout his entire life. The individual is entitled to remove himself from a particular community if he feels Justice has been misprized, yet if he continues to live in the community he may only be a mere social gadfly through legally prescribed means. Ultimately what evolves from this attitude is a democratic maxim which implores the individual to either persuade or obey the social order and established law of a society. Essentially, Socrates’ version of civil disobedience must be preformed selflessly, with a genuine desire to place society in a moment of aporia, hoping that they will see the execrable shortcomings in their interpretation of Justice. Civil disobedience is not a call to break down the very constructs which lend society its authority and legitimacy.

Of course, we can’t take Socrates literal words out of context to expose inconsistency because they aren’t his literal words. We must also be sensitive to Plato’s extremely subtle intimations; perhaps he implanted a blatant contradiction within Socrates’ language in order to indirectly suggest that there may be multiple justifications for persuading the law and times when it is appropriate to simply obey. Plato may also be exploring Socrates’ humanity; surely a man sentenced to death will have different arguments than a man pleading/arguing to save his life. Moreover, juxtaposing Crito and Apology yields interesting commentary about the hierarchy of values in our conventional reality. Surely the Platonic forms exists perfectly, incommensurable in regards to one another. Yet our conventional reality, especially in such circumstances of conflict, forces us to superimpose a hierarchy onto otherwise immeasurable values. In the case of Crito and Apology, we are confronted with a simple, albeit difficult question; what is more important, socially consistent authority or individually consistent morality? By the end of both dialogues, it becomes evident that Socrates paradoxically gets to have is cake and eat it too, as he both preserves his individual sense of morality while bending to the needs of social stasis.
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