Both Socrates and Martin Luther King, Jr. died at the hands of injustice. Socrates refused to escape his unjust prison sentence and chose instead to drink poison in order to demonstrate his conviction that even if men choose to disobey social laws because of their conscience, they must be prepared out of moral duty to accept the penalty society has imposed for disobeying the law. Without such a make-up, society would become lawless and chaotic, “Although one may violate the laws of the land in order to satisfy the demands of his conscience, he has the moral obligation to accept the penalty for the violation of those laws that is imposed by the state. To do otherwise would mean a repudiation of the system of law and order that makes living in a civilized society possible” (Crito 1). Socrates, like Christ, never actually wrote anything but developed a strong following of supporters. One of them, Plato, wrote and it is through his works that we get our modern perspective of Socrates. He is portrayed as a man who, at all costs, followed the voice he heard commanding him to do what was right, a voice he believed to have been God. By following this voice, Socrates’ actions were what was right, regardless of any consequences to his own person.
In a quite similar way, Martin Luther King, Jr. also died from in an unjust manner at the hands of an assassin’s bullets. However, he died in reality because he followed his conscience as heavily as did Socrates without thought of safety or fear to his own person. Like Socrates, King, Jr. believed he was following the orders of a personal God, one whose aim it was to use King, Jr. as an instrument of achieving a higher level of social justice. King, Jr.’s method was one based on Christian values and the non-violent resistance philosophy of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Ghandi. Like Socrates, King, Jr. did not believe that unjust laws required man to obey them. However, he did...