Kathryn Rucker

GSI: Kuan Hwa

October 8^th, 2016

Apology: No Intent, No Corruption

The focus of this Précis is Plato’s work, “Apology”, when Socrates begins his defense against his second class of accusers lead by Meletus. The passage begins with Socrates listing the crimes that are being brought against him: “That Socrates is a doer of evil and corrupter of the youth, and he does not believe in the gods of the state, and has other divinities of his own.” In this passage, Socrates seeks to disprove the argument that he is a “doer of evil and corrupter of the youth” by defining what “improvement” means to the youths of the society in comparison to the “intended” evil and corruption that he is being accused of.

Socrates begins his argument by saying that in order for him to be considered a corruptor of youth, then first there must be someone out there who is tasked with improving the youth. By questioning Meletus, Socrates discovers that it is not just the laws that “improve” the youth, but the fact that they are up held by all of the judges, the audience, the senators, members of the citizen assembly and every Athenian, except for himself (Socrates). In this case, Socrates and Meletus agree that the meaning of the word “improve” means to guide the youths of society into following a particular set of ethics. Through questioning, Socrates finds that the issue that Meletus has is that he believes that Socrates is the sole person responsible for “corrupting” the youths, which means that Socrates is leading them away from improving themselves and providing a benefit to society.

Plato, through Socrates, shifts the conversation from the issue of youth corruption, to the role that the individual plays in influencing the society that they are a part of, and the power of one person to have a positive or a negative impact. This is the first part of this defense, when Socrates compares the role of “improver” to that of a horse trainer, a single individual who specializes in teaching horses, is able to have a large impact on training so many horses. Socrates says, “Happy indeed would be the condition of youth if they had one corrupter only, and all the rest of the world were their improvers.” This points out how unlikely it is that there are so many people qualified to improve the youths within a society, when even horse trainers are specialized in that which they teach. However, Socrates continues with the line of logic and says that based on what Meletus has claimed, all of the people in Athens society are qualified to train the youths except Socrates. And if this is the case, then the youths of Athens are perfectly fine for there are plenty of people there to correct any corruptions.

The second part of Socrates’ defense for this passage is an analysis of what it means to “intend” to corrupt the youths of the society. For Meletus and the law, intent is when a person willingly chooses to disobey the ethical rules set forth by the society and this would result in a guilty verdict from the court. To prove that corruption is not what he intended, Socrates gets Meletus to agree that good citizens treat their neighbors well and the bad ones in turn treat others poorly. Socrates says, “if a man with whom I have to live is corrupted by me, I am very likely to be harmed by him, and yet I corrupt him, and intentionally, too; - that is what you are saying” In this case, the man Socrates is referring to is analogous for society and if Socrates were to corrupt this man (society), then the man (society) might try to harm him back. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense for Socrates to intentionally cause corruption within the society because it would only harm himself because he is a part of that society. Socrates says, “But either I do not corrupt them, or I corrupt them unintentionally, so that on either view of the case you lie.” Ultimately, this lack of intent is what Socrates tries to prove because if his corruption of the youths was an accident and something he did without knowing, then Athenian law cannot find him guilty.

 Even in the event that Socrates did corrupt the youths of society, then he claims that he should simply be retaught how to be a better member of society since he did not mean to cause the harm. This is how Socrates is able to show how Meletus’ claims that Socrates intended to corrupt people do not make sense based on the facts he has provided and therefore it is actually Meletus who is lying to the people. Socrates finishes his argument with a point that it is actually Maletus who is a liar, a person who misleads and is corrupt, and is the real person that the society should be concerned about.