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Compare And Contrast Plato's Letter From Birmingham Jail

1026 Words5 Pages

This paper seeks to compare and contrast Plato’s Crito and Martin Luther King Jr. letter from Birmingham Jail. Both Socrates and King make a case from similar perspective, though separated through a vast amount of years, both are unjustly arrested and charged with seemingly ridiculous sentences; awaiting trial in prison, and they are presented with a choice to flee incarceration or to stay and accept their fate. Their argument, in my option is over whether it is moral or not to disobey the law, despite the fact that it is unjust.
In “The Crito” Plato documents a conversation between Crito and Socrates. Socrates is imprisoned for impiety and corrupting the youth by causing them to doubt or disregard the wisdom of their elders. Socrates friend …show more content…

Preserving the value of laws was critical to Socrates, for he believed that if he broke this one law it would cause harm to the rest of the laws. His actions would then result in the downfall of the judicial system and government. One analogy that really allows clarity for this is that Laws are like money; the value of which is not their actual worth, but the worth given to them by the people. We believe that money is valuable even though its physical worth is essentially nonexistent. Laws only have meaning because the people within society give them meaning. It is these people who give them meaning by obeying them and seeing the value in …show more content…

He says that society must, protect the robbed and punish the robber. He also brings up the example that what Adolf Hitler did in Germany was legal at the time. Just because it was legal, did not make it right. He continues in his essay explaining how disturbed he is over how the church is dealing with the issue. Martin Luther King Jr., makes an even stronger case as to what a person should and should not tolerate from their nation. King was in the midst of extreme injustice placed upon black citizens of America, coming not only from white citizens but from the government itself. When his letter was written, it was impossible for King to respond to the laws of the nation in a just and responsible manner, as the very nation he lived in was poisoned with corruption, racism, and violence towards

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