Unjust laws have stared people in the face since time immemorial. The question, “Should we obey laws we know are unjust?” has been a subject of hot debate. Some people, like Socrates, argue that people have to obey unjust laws despite all personal objections and that it is, in fact, a moral duty.
Other people, like Martin Luther King Jr., assert that no one should have to obey unjust laws. King goes further and determines that civil disobedience — the act of disobeying certifiably unjust laws — is, in fact, a personal duty everyone has. Based on the argumentation of King, Socrates or both, do people have to follow unjust laws or not?
Socrates
In Crito, now in the public domain, Socrates awaits his execution in jail. His friend Crito urges him to escape prison, flee to another country, and save his own life. Crito has friends who have bribed the prison guards and are willing to share still more money with Socrates so he can take care of himself in exile. Socrates has children, too, who need their father or risk adversity. Crito, further, would miss Socrates dearly if he were executed. Worse still, he might be accused of being greedy and not saving his friend despite having the means to do so, even though it is Socrates who refuses to leave the prison, not Crito who refuses to save him. A mix of blessing and danger is there to tempt Socrates to waver and abandon his position. Hence, Crito states that this is the perfect opportunity to follow through with the escape plan and claims Socrates is treating his friends with little respect or care by not going along with it.
However, Socrates argues to Crito that he cannot escape prison. He is under a conditional agreement with Athens: that he can remain in the state by obeying all of the laws. He has violated this agreement by “corrupting the youth,” and therefore he is suffering "punishment" for his own actions. To escape prison would be equivalent to defaming the prison guards, lawmakers, and even his country. It would also impair his country’s power to enforce any kinds of laws, just or unjust, if they are so easily disobeyed by private individuals. The escape, he adds, would ruin his morals. Yes, Socrates knows the law was unjust, but he still serves his sentence out of respect to his authorities and a desire to live justly. On the contrary, Crito does not seem to think an unjust law is worthy of respect, not even toward the prison guards who did not directly make the law. Socrates prefers to remain in jail and then be executed, while Crito wishes Socrates would escape and preserve his life.
Martin Luther King Jr.
How would Martin Luther King Jr., who was also jailed for a law he saw as unjust, view Socrates’ situation? Well, his letter boldly states that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”; after all, communities and states are inextricably tied to each other. Socrates would agree that any injustice is a threat to justice, but King would not agree that Socrates had to obey an unjust law. He might consider that one bad thing happened in Athens and argue that it threatens justice in all of Greece; therefore, the whole world. Although Socrates does not know it, his obedience to Athens’ law is a threat to justice, which is something he holds very dear!
Next, King refers to St. Thomas Aquinas for the definition of an unjust law: “a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law” and “degrades human personality." The charge that Socrates “corrupted the youth” by not worshiping state gods gives the lawmakers egotistical “superiority” over him; a deep erosion of their moral character. Socrates’ personality is degraded, too, by his sense of false guilt and derivative insistence on following through with an agreement that stifles his beliefs. The laws of Greece, enforcing worship of state gods, are man-made and come nowhere close to eternal law. Socrates, a wise man who knows a great deal of morality, should consider that the law is petty and far from most religions’ moral standards. Therefore, he should know better than to obey any law that infringes on his right to freedom of worship. This is another big mistake King might see in Socrates’ argument.
With regard to unjust laws, King’s argument may be more convincing than that of Socrates. Unjust laws are man-made, infringe on people’s freedoms, and do not “square with eternal law," in the words of his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," meaning the standards of being fair and kind to others that most religions teach. Any law that does not “square with eternal law” was made up by lawmakers out of misguided adherence to man-made rules, or worse, their own attempts to boost their egos and feel superior to the general public. It may be a mixture of both, as man-made rules could possibly lead into a sense of superiority over others who recognize how shallow and stifling the rules are. A “false sense of superiority” washed over people who placed the humiliating “For Whites Only” signs on businesses and made “separate but equal” establishments, instead of treating all people fairly, in King’s day.
Similarly, Socrates would have seen the correlation between Greek gods and state greatness (the reason people were expected to worship state gods) as hollow or non-existent. For voicing his opinion and engaging in rational dialogue, he got charged with “corrupting the youth” by judges basking in “superiority.”
When the law is just, that is, aligned to the moral standards taught by most religions, then the people do have a duty to follow it. Most religions teach that people should be kind and fair to others, not rob people, or otherwise violate others’ rights, and that others’ rights should be protected. When the laws are against crimes such as robbery, theft, murder, and things that decidedly harm others, rather than limiting worship or free speech, the people do have a special duty to follow those laws. It is safe to argue that Socrates and King would agree that people are morally obligated to obey the law in this case.
Unjust Law in the 21st Century
The American government enforced bizarre COVID restrictions beginning around March 2020. People lost jobs and income as the government closed down “non-essential” businesses, and churches were also closed for the time being. Ironically, Black Lives Matter rioters were allowed to gather in public places to protest over George Floyd and even destroy property, while many churches were only allowed to have services through the internet. Citizens began to notice how absurd the rules were, so they started to distrust the mainstream media and organizations like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (for which Anthony Fauci, who had constantly changing rules, worked during 2020). The leaders simmered in tyranny, created a fear mentality in their citizens, and then exploited it for political purposes.
Challenges to mental health became more common because of the government closing down workplaces, and because of the added screen time from most school and work functions being done through video calls or remote learning. World leaders started to cooperate more through digital press conferences and apparently began to realize how badly they needed each other’s help. A fear mentality in those who watch the news became more common, particularly in America, due to news anchors using fear-laced language to describe the situation. People started questioning what the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations (UN), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other healthcare or news organizations said. They learned that these organizations are corrupt and need to be taken with a grain of salt. Social distancing rules prevented workers from shipping merchandise on ships, in trucks, or to warehouses for distribution in stores, causing a huge supply chain issue until later in 2022.
This suggested a pattern of evil for the future. Other countries may have had their own leaders who instilled a fear mentality among their citizens. They could have been engineering citizens to see COVID as a real crisis, instead of an invented hoax. There are reports of world leaders recognizing the "inter-relatedness" between countries and trying to establish cooperation with each other. Presumably, this was to remind their citizens that everyone was fighting COVID together, but it is easy to see world leaders working together to keep their citizens in line using totalitarian restrictions over an imagined illness. The supply chain issue hindered international trade, which stopped countries from trading together and negatively impacted their economies. A bad economy, besides an imagined illness, may be a corrupt leader’s attempt to keep his subjects in a perpetual state of fear.
Moral of the Story
COVID-era mandates were an unjust law, and the American public benefited more from King's approach to solving the related problems. People fought for their rights. During the early 2020s, the “pandemic” was portrayed as “the new normal.” It faded from the public conversation as a result of many people not giving in to mask and social distancing mandates.
