Socrates and the King

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Socrates and the King

Socrates and Martin Luther King , Jr . are two renowned personalities in their own times . These two people had expressed their views on society which made great impacts on the people of their time and even of today Socrates ' views can be seen in the dialogue Crito , while Martin Luther King , Jr 's views are on an open letter he made popularly known as the Letter from Birmingham Jail

In the dialogue Crito

, Socrates is situated in jail waiting for his execution . He was accused of polluting the minds of the youth . At the break of dawn , Crito , a friend of Socrates , visited him . Crito went there , actually to help Socrates escape from prison . But to his surprise , Socrates looked ready for his punishment . Still Crito tried to persuade Socrates to escape but to no avail . He presented him with practical and ethical arguments about an escape but Socrates was able to refute them . The last argument fell on the justice of escaping from prison and evading punishment from the law . According to Socrates arguments , a person who chose to live in a certain society has implicitly agreed to abide by the laws of the society . By doing so , that person is bound to follow and accept laws that govern that society . In his situation , since it was the laws of Athens that imprisoned him , to escape from prison would be an act of disobedience to the laws of the society he had lived for seventy years . Thus , such act is unjust . Also he argued that if he escaped , he will become an outlaw and will not be ever accepted in other cities . Also , if he did what Crito is telling him to do , he said that he will be strongly punished in the underworld for the unjust deed (Crito : Plato

In Martin Luther King , Jr 's case , he was imprisoned for leading 53 African Americans in a protest rally without permit against the laws of segregation in Birmingham . Succeeding the protest was their arrest and a letter from the clergymen of Alabama calling to the African Americans to stop their protest rallies . As a response , King wrote an open letter to explain the need for the non-violent rallies that they were doing (Summary of the Letter from Birmingham Jail . In the letter , King differentiated just and unjust laws . According to him , unjust laws are laws that mortify the dignity of people . Such laws are the segregation laws that discriminates African Americans in the society they are living in . King stated that their protest rallies are acts to disobey an unjust segregation laws . He said that by doing so , what they did was only moral . In addition to these , King said that the protest rallies that took place were done to put tension in the peace that was present in the Birmingham society , because this peace was a biased peace against the African Americans...