Posted: September 16th, 2017

Socrates got into trouble with the elders of Athens because it was thought that Socrates didn’t believe in the gods worshiped and

Socrates got into trouble with the elders of Athens because it was thought that Socrates didn’t believe in the gods worshiped and adored by most Greeks.

He was also

accused of corrupting the youth who listened to him in the Academy. Professor Kreeft’s view is that Socrates was more religious and more spiritually-minded than his

accusers could ever have imagined. Socrates was a lover of wisdom, and he devoted his life to that cause. Without ever writing anything down for us to examine, his

listeners and students give us a glimpse into what it was like to be around Socrates. And in some ways, we still revere him by mimicking his questioning methods. To

make the point, we need only sit in a courtroom or a college classroom. Attorneys in the modern,

American legal system and many college professors use the Socratic

Method as a tool to teach or to draw information out. Socrates would slowly strip away what was useless to eventually find out what was useful or the truth. He did

this by asking questions and then answering student questions with another question. Finding truth, as in finding wisdom, was and is a journey, not necessarily a

destination in and of itself. Socrates, like modern attorneys and professor, wanted to excite learning within the minds of those they influenced. In the courtroom,

the

attorney tries to excite the truth from witnesses and the jury. Aristotle provides us with another dichotomy. And these elements of an argument are still practiced

today. The Greeks called a dispute about facts a dialectic. If there was no clearly discerned truth, adversaries would try their hardest to argue logically. The burden

of truth was dependent on the winner of the argument, but even the winner could be draw into an argument with someone else and could lose.

Some arguments were always

dialectical. However, when the facts were incontrovertible, when it was clear what outcome was obvious, that form of argument was apodictic. The facts were

incontestable and logically certain. We see from these two forms of argument two important legal terms still in effect today: substantive law and procedural law.

Substantive law is like the arguable dialectical form explained by Aristotle. Procedural law is mechanical and is largely apodictic, where truth is easily determined

by the statute. We will find later that procedural law and administrative law are very similar, as we look at modern rules for the administrative law process. Gesell

and Lawrence, in Aviation and the Law, make the following observation of the nature of law as seen through the eyes of Thomas Hobbes. Arguably, the nature of human

beings is sociability and rationality. To bring up the nature of law is to resume arguments posited by the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates and Plato, but

especially Aristotle. The arguments are disputes about the nature of law and morality, and about the relationship of the two. Morality in this case meaning ‘virtue,’

with virtue generally being interpreted as ‘mastery.’ The opposite, immoral, does not necessarily mean sinful, as in the breaking of God’s laws. But it does imply a

violation of the norms of society

Aristotle focused on three kinds of justice: (1) distributive justice; (2) corrective justice; and (3) justice in exchange. Distributive justice describes a legal

environment where there is equality between and among equals. There is equal allocation among equals. After the American War of Independence, the federalists in

government practiced this type of justice;

but it was not afforded to those “unequal:” a matter discussed in the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers. To see an

example of inequality, visit the history of the Bill of Rights and those Constitutional amendments that followed. For example, why did it take so long to extend

equality to women? When the slaves were freed at the close of the American Civil War, it still took some time before they too were declared “equal.”

Corrective justice

is a concept much older than Aristotle, but a concept very much part of our modern legal system. It is equality between punishment and crime. To be fair, any citizen

who violated a statute should expect to receive the same punishment for the same crime. We know that this is not always followed in our American legal system. Some

persons seem to be exempt from punishment for crimes they commit, because of their status.