Escape from the Long Arm of the Law - Essay Example

?Escape from the Long Arm of the Law Hardly a matter of philosophical or moral reasoning, the relationship between the law and those governed by that law is of grave importance today. With the U.S. government authorizing “enhanced” surveillance techniques and “enhanced” interrogation procedures, the time has come to consider whether one's response to the state deserves its own form of “enhancement.” In considering this question, I will explore three figures: the Socrates of Plato's Crito, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Albert Camus. While Socrates felt duty bound to die in service of the state and fulfillment of his sentence, I believe the other two figures would react far differently were they shuttled back in time and forced to join Socrates in his cell. Plato wrote first, by a significant margin, and so it makes sense to begin the analysis with his rather famous dialog. The dialog finds Plato's mentor and narrative mouthpiece imprisoned and awaiting execution, a result of the trial in which he was found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens. Crito, a friend of Socrates, has come to prison to visit the condemned man and to advocate that Socrates escape from jail. Socrates will have none of it, and instead engages Crito in one of Socrates' famous dialogs, all in an effort to prove that Socrates can not flee the punishment of Athens in a way that does not do serious injustice. To justify his claims, Socrates introduces the character of the Laws, voice of the legal charter of Athens. The Laws ask Socrates to stay where he is, to avoid even thinking about escape, since doing so would invite the utter ruination of Athens as a whole: “Do you imagine,” the Laws inquire, “that a city can continue to exist and not be turned upside down, if the legal judgments which are pronounced in it have no force but are nullified and destroyed by private persons” (Plato 50a-b)? If anyone could simply escape their punishment whenever it didn't suit their own desires, they would be bending laws past their breaking point, since punishment would never have any meaning. Socrates concludes that such a stance is unacceptable. To explain his position to Crito, who is obviously predisposed to the opposite position, Socrates offers a couple of analogies, each of which highlight Socrates's subordinate relationship to the Laws. The law, he contends, is like a father or a master, and Socrates is the child or the slave—in either instance, neither the child nor the slave have the legal right to retaliate against the parent or master simply because they did not like their treatment in one particular instance. In a similar fashion, Socrates benefited from the laws regarding marriage and childrearing, and he cannot simply pick and choose such that he gains all the benefits but suffers none of the consequences. It helps his claim that the Laws have been personified, thus making a set of very diverse laws seem as if they were crafted together and objectively (which seems unlikely) and Socrates clearly believes that because one cannot separate out the Laws one wants to obey from the Laws one does not, then one must submit to the force of law in general. This is true even if the law ultimately produces an unfair, or even unjust outcome. The price of that one small injustice does not justify committing a graver injustice by disobeying. I believe that the logical result of the Platonic view is nothing less than authoritarianism. There exists little wiggle room in Plato's formulation; the law commands and the citizen obeys. Socrates argues that the greater injustice comes from violating the laws, but what is the threshold at which such a statement can be made? If the state orders the infanticide of second or third-born children because of concerns over population density, or if the federal government declares that cancer patients can only take marijuana if it comes in a pharmaceutical company's pill form rather than an inexpensive and more effective joint, does one really have to just shrug their shoulders and obey? The answer is, of course, no, and with the 20th century and its horrors behind us, and the 21st century in front of us, we can hardly afford to affirm Plato's proposition and simply trust the “Law.” Much more favorable is the stance of Martin Luther King, Jr., who, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” contends that some laws are just while others are unjust and that in the latter instance, it is the duty of individuals to resist those laws, nonviolently. Indeed, King in that letter is responding much to the situation I outlined above, where a number of laws are being arrayed in authoritarian fashion to serve a partisan or prejudiced outcome—racism in the American south. Arrested for peaceful protests on the pretense of “parading without a permit,” King is being punished for doing little more than exercising his constitutional rights. Plato would have him work to change the law or leave, but as King notes (drawing on 2 and a half millennia of history unavailable to Plato), “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed” (par 13). In these circumstances, “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all'” (par 15). King's account is far more nuanced than the one given by Plato, where all laws are so intricately linked that challenging one risks unraveling the entire legal structure. We can only conclude, then, that King would resist his sentence, perhaps through escape, perhaps through some other mechanism. Socrates would obviously not approve, as his dismissal of disobedience is rather total. And no doubt King would find Plato's acceptance of death troubling, not so much because of the punishment, but because of Plato's reasoning for doing so, since in that world of thinking no form of resistance to injustice is possible. In the end, King's view seems both more sound and more sensible. Albert Camus would likewise object to his punishment and attempt escape, though his reasons are slightly different than King's. Whereas King seems to be reacting to the unjustness of the laws that merit imprisonment and/or eventual execution (be it in Birmingham or for corrupting the youth of Athens), Camus's larger objection comes to the ultimate sentence: death. Camus's objection to capital punishment is so strong, so universal, that I cannot imagine he would ever consent to sit in prison and gleefully accept his fate. As he puts it in his concluding remark: “There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or insocial customs until death is outlawed” (Camus, p. 234). Unlike Socrates, who thought one duty-bound to oblige the law, Camus suggests that real law is defined by its opposition to such base, “natural” instincts toward death and vengeance: “Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature. If murder is in the nature of man, the law is not intended to imitate or reproduce that nature. It is intended to correct it” (p. 198). As such, I believe Camus would find any law enabling a criminal sentence of death to be unworthy of being called a law at all, and it would then no longer be a question of resisting an unjust or biased law. Instead, resistance, escape, and release from one's sentence is merely the logical response to an illegal state action. References: Camus, A. “Reflection on the Guillotine.” Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. 175-234. King, M.L. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” . Plato. The Last Days of Socrates. London: Penguin Classics, 1993. Read More