The Role Of Freedom In Plato's Crito

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While freedom is a wonderful thing, there are other things in this world that can be more important than freedom. During the first third of Christianity and Culture in Dialogue, we read many stories about what other communities besides our own love and what binds them together.. While we have read several texts from many authors, the first author’s was the one that I found the most compelling when talking about what communities love. In Plato’s Crito, Socrates is in jail for corrupting the youth and for not believing in the proper gods. While he is there, his friend comes to offer him a plan of escape to avoid being executed. Everything was set, the life he would soon lead was planned, and the guards were already paid for his escape. However …show more content…

Socrates, counters with “Then should not the good ones be honored and not the bad ones?”(CR 41). In America’s sense of love and what binds them together, without justice everyone’s opinions and prerogatives would be acceptable and freedom would be king. If someone felt it was write to take something from another person because they wanted it, they would have the freedom to do so because that is there opinion. What would be considered right and wrong is a matter of opinion. With complete freedom and freedom alone, we could murder one another’s families, steal and pillage. Soon after, he argues “So then is the body livable for us after it is bad and ruined?” (CR 42). At the worst in this means collapse of society, we cannot truly live in a society after it is ruined and in dismay. With the chaos of complete freedom, it would be hard to imagine thriving or even existing. As is said before, in complete freedom, someone can take whatever they please from another, they can pillage and hurt others. If we see society as a body, if everyone is in dismay because their families have been stolen from or hurt, we could not possibly live in such a society. If we ruin one others things and qualities of living by breaking doors and windows of stores and homes, no one can survive there as it is “bad and ruined” (CR 42). In Socrates’ world, only the opinions and actions of the just would be honored. We would be free to go about whatever we please as long as it was just. Nothing just would include murder or crime, and society would be fine at the bear

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