Abstract

Before we take up the arguments directly, there is one general point about Socrates' position that he considered essential to everything he said in the Crito. Also, he thought that this point was easily missed. He calls it his "starting point." It is that "we ought neither to requite wrong with wrong nor to do evil to anyone, no matter what he may have done to us." And Socrates warns Crito not to accept this position too quickly or without full consideration, "for I know that there are few who believe or ever will believe this". Yet this moral principle is so essential to his arguments that "those who believe this, and those who do not, have no common ground of discussion, but they must necessarily, in view of their opinions, despise one another". This position, never to harm others in any circumstance, is "the starting point of our discussion...".