Everyone at some point in their lives has asked someone for advice, namely a friend or family member. Many times an individual tends to ask for more than one person's advice in order to get a different perspective concerning the same matter. Which advice is best? Whose advice out of the many should one listen to? Socrates addresses these same questions in Plato's dialogue The Crito. In the middle of a Socratic dialogue, he asks Crito, "should a man professionally engaged in physical training pay attention to the praise and blame and opinion of any man, or to those of one man only, namely a doctor or trainer"(47b). This question is indicative of Socrates belief that one should listen to the "expert" that knows best rather than the majority. Socrates argues that following popular belief instead of the moral experts will "ruin" life and thus make it "not worth living".
English: The School of Athens (detail). Fresco, St...
Portrait of Socrates. Marble, Roman artwork (1st c...
The "obscene" medieval depiction of Socrates and P...From this premise, I plan to show that Socrates argument is flawed as he leaves too many questions unanswered and his belief relies much too heavily on assumption. In addition, Socrates argument relies on a false premise, my argument reads as follows:
Socrates suggests that if there are moral "experts", we should listen to them. This is a flawed statement since there is no such thing. Morality as a whole differs from opinion to opinion and person-to-person, what is "right" and moral to one person isn't necessarily "right" and moral to another. For instance, the tragedy of 9-11, Americans view as a horrible, blatantly wrong, inexplicable cowardly act. However, in the eyes of the Muslim assailants they were not doing anything wrong and it was in their "morals" to do such a thing and not be punished. Therefore, there could not be an "expert" on "morality" since morality...