Is it Better to Commit Injustice or to Suffer It?
“Polus: So you’d rather want to suffer what’s unjust than do it? Socrates: For my part, I wouldn’t want either, but if it had to be one or the other, I would choose suffering over doing what’s unjust”
In Plato’s Crito, a few days after having been sentenced to death by the Athenian court for impiety and corruption of the youth, Socrates receives a visit in prison from one of his friends and disciples, Crito, while he is awaiting his execution. Crito proposes that he escape from prison with the help of accomplices and money, thus avoiding the death penalty. Socrates is then faced with a dilemma: should he escape and thereby commit an injustice by refusing to serve the sentence passed against him? Or should he renounce escape and thus accept an unjust punishment? We then learn, in the continuation of the dialogue, that Socrates refuses Crito’s proposal and therefore chooses to suffer the injustice inflicted upon him by the Athenian justice system.
But is he right to make this choice? Is it better to commit injustice or to suffer it? If you ask someone whether they would prefer to have their wallet stolen or to steal someone else’s, with no constraints or consequences, it would be uncommon for them to choose the first option. Indeed, committing injustice involves self-mastery and the absence of external constraints. Suppose I commit an injustice without acting with full awareness of my act. This would mean that I am not acting freely: I am the victim of external conditions that compel me to act in this way. One could not truly say, then, that I am committing an injustice. We can therefore assert that the choice to commit injustice implies that the individual is responsible for it, that it results from a voluntary and conscious decision, and thus that it is generally of their own free will that human beings would commit injustice rather than suffer it.
However, human beings tend not to do willingly what goes against their material interest. Consequently, it would be out of material self-interest that the person you question would commit an injustice by stealing someone else’s wallet. Nevertheless, some people prefer to act according to moral principles rather than in pursuit of their material interest.
Since we are asking whether it is better to commit injustice or to suffer it, it is necessary to compare the value of these two possibilities. By choosing their personal interest, an individual assigns a subjective value—linked to their own advantage—that makes committing injustice seem preferable. However, if morality is defined as “doing good,” then committing injustice would necessarily be bad, whereas suffering it would not be. Consequently, the objective value, or moral value, of suffering injustice would be higher than that of committing it.
If the question arises at all, it is because it suggests a paradox between personal interest and morality. To answer the problem, it is therefore necessary to determine which criterion—objective or subjective—is best suited to determining the comparative value of the two choices.
We shall see that, from the point of view of material self-interest, committing injustice may appear preferable, but that from the standpoint of moral duty as a principle of action, it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it. We will ultimately argue that, within an individual’s personal interest, moral conscience is just as important as material interest, and that the comparative value of the two choices depends on the circumstances.
From the point of view of an individual’s material self-interest—that is, what guides their choices with the aim of preserving personal comfort and maximizing advantages—it may seem paradoxical to claim that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it.
In our societies, we observe that many individuals commit injustices without even being forced to choose between suffering and committing them. According to figures from the French Ministry of the Interior, the police and national gendarmerie recorded 212,000 burglaries in 2025. One may therefore wonder what can explain this phenomenon.
When one suffers an injustice, one is subjected to something undesired, against one’s will, and thus by definition contrary to one’s material interest. When one is, for example, the victim of theft, there is a real material loss, which can cause significant harm: if a very large sum of money were stolen from me, I might struggle to pay my rent the following month. Suffering injustice can therefore endanger an individual’s survival and disadvantage them from a material point of view; it is likely to cause suffering.
Conversely, it is precisely because injustice is committed freely and consciously that it can, in some cases, appear advantageous to the person who commits it. Certain injustices may provide material gain to their perpetrator: a thief who successfully robs a bank without being caught gains a large sum of money, which may allow them, at least in appearance, to access a life of wealth and comfort. From a strictly material perspective, committing injustice thus allows one to obtain a concrete advantage.
This immediate material interest that every human being possesses therefore encourages them to seek to avoid suffering rather than endure it, which makes the choice to commit injustice rather than suffer it rational in light of such interest. Individuals often reason in terms of gains and losses: they evaluate what they risk losing if they suffer injustice and what they can gain if they commit it, and they choose the action that provides the greatest benefit or the least disadvantage. From this perspective, avoiding pain and maximizing material comfort become priority criteria that justify acting unjustly from a strictly personal standpoint. It is therefore because it is in their material interest that human beings tend to commit injustices, which explains why they would generally prefer to steal someone else’s wallet rather than have their own stolen.
If we adopt the standpoint of moral duty, it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it. Morality, as conceived by Aristotle, can be defined as doing good; it is a superior principle that, by definition, commands over all others. There are two dominant conceptions of morality: consequentialist morality on the one hand, and intentionalist morality on the other.
The former, defended by philosophers such as Benjamin Constant, holds that intention does not matter; what makes an action moral are the consequences that result from it. Thus, Benjamin Constant affirms the existence of a right to lie for humanitarian reasons, since every right implies a duty and since “no man has a right to the truth that harms others.” In this case, the outcome of both possibilities would be injustice. Thus, committing injustice or suffering it would have the same objective value from a consequentialist moral standpoint, which would not allow us to decide between them.
However, why would Socrates prefer to suffer injustice rather than commit it? He relies on intentionalist morality, which holds that consequences do not matter; it is intention that determines whether an action is moral. This is the morality defended in Christianity, with the existence of the Last Judgment and the weighing of souls. But how can we know whether an intention is good or bad?
To answer this question, we may consider the thought experiment of the “categorical imperative,” proposed by Kant in 1785 in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which can be summarized by the following formula: “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become, through your will, a universal law of nature.” In such a framework, there would be no supposed right to lie for humanitarian reasons, because if lying were elevated to a law of nature, good would not be achieved: a society in which lying were accepted as a general principle would render all promises void, all speech suspect, and all relations of trust impossible, thereby destroying the very conditions of social life, which would be at least harmful to human beings. This definition of morality also challenges Benjamin Constant’s reasoning and, consequently, consequentialist morality.
Indeed, it holds that human beings do not control the consequences of their actions and should therefore not act by calculating what might produce the best results; for an action to be morally good, one must follow the categorical imperative and ensure that one’s intention conforms to the moral law.
Morality is therefore absolute and universal, and doing good does not depend on circumstances; it is thus objective. By analogy, it is evident, through Kant’s thought experiment, that committing injustice would be immoral. Regardless of the conditions, regardless of whether one suffers the worst injustice, one must not yield to circumstances; therefore, one must not commit injustice. Thus, from the standpoint of moral duty, it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it.
This is precisely why Socrates prefers to suffer injustice rather than commit it. In the Crito, Socrates refuses to escape because “one must not repay injustice with injustice […] since one must never be unjust.” Having established that escaping from prison would be an injustice, he refuses to do so, even though he is about to die and suffer an injustice. Socrates therefore does not act according to circumstances, nor in the hope of better consequences, nor even in pursuit of his immediate material interest; he refuses to commit injustice and fulfills his moral duty.
To persuade Crito, Socrates also asks the following rhetorical question: “If you act in this way, will life still be worth living?” Here, he claims that living after having committed injustice is worse than dying, because he would lose his virtue of justice, and the shame he would inflict upon himself would, in his view, be worse than death. No matter the injustice committed, what we may call moral conscience is, for him, so important that it is better to suffer death than to commit injustice; it stands as an inviolable principle that must never be transgressed.
If moral duty were to apply to all human beings, it is in fact often violated. However, it would be erroneous to conclude that human beings are devoid of morality and sunk in the deepest selfishness. Indeed, even if personal interest appears to motivate human action, one may suppose that moral conscience is one of its components and also governs action. Moral conscience can be defined as the awareness through which an individual recognizes what is just or unjust in their action—that is, they are conscious of whether or not they are acting morally. Endowed with such moral conscience, individuals will tend to want to act morally and justly, and to avoid acting immorally and unjustly. This explains why some individuals feel varying degrees of shame when they commit an injustice, depending on how aware they are of the immorality of their act.
According to the model of homo oeconomicus theorized by the philosopher John Stuart Mill, human beings are rational in their choices and always weigh costs and benefits to some degree. This model can thus be likened to the common belief that it is better to commit injustice than to suffer it, as we initially saw. However, this model, which underlies all social sciences and especially economics, does not limit itself to material criteria deemed too simplistic: according to it, all individual choices can be explained by the model, even acts of generosity, since individuals derive satisfaction from their generosity that compensates for material loss. Thus, moral conscience would be included in the calculation in the same way as material gains. Everything then becomes a matter of proportionality: if moral interest outweighs material loss, the individual will favor what may appear to be a material loss.
Is it therefore better to commit injustice or to suffer it? Socrates refuses to commit injustice because he assigns infinitely greater importance to the conformity of his action with morality than to his material interest, but this is not the case, as this model suggests, for all individuals. In their subjective calculation of value, individuals integrate their moral conscience and thus an objective value. The choice they make therefore depends on the material cost and the moral cost of each option.
If we return to the wallet example, one could imagine that more individuals would be willing to steal a billionaire’s wallet than a beggar’s, since the loss caused to the billionaire would be smaller, which would ease the thief’s moral conscience, especially given the greater material gain. Conversely, being robbed by a billionaire would be all the more outrageous since the billionaire does not need the money. Stealing from a beggar, on the other hand, would be devastating for one’s moral conscience, since the loss inflicted would be far greater for the victim than the gain for oneself, such that, for some people, it would be preferable to have their wallet stolen by a beggar rather than to steal the beggar’s wallet. We put forward this hypothesis while being fully aware that not all individuals reason in this way; some assign greater importance to moral conscience than others, on a case-by-case basis, depending on the circumstances.
An individual following the homo oeconomicus model might prefer to slap someone—which amounts to committing an injustice—rather than be the victim of murder, since the shame felt after delivering a slap would be less costly than losing one’s life. Conversely, they would prefer to be slapped rather than kill someone, because the shame and remorse that would haunt them for the rest of their life after committing murder would cause greater harm than the pain of a slap. According to such a model, the question “is it better to commit injustice or to suffer it?” cannot receive a definitive answer, since the choice depends on the relationship between the moral cost and the material cost of the injustices involved.
We asked whether it is better to commit injustice or to suffer it by examining Socrates’ preference for suffering injustice. This question immediately revealed a tension between two evaluative criteria: the individual’s personal interest and the moral requirement of justice.
First, we showed that from the point of view of material self-interest, it may seem rational to prefer committing injustice rather than suffering it. Suffering injustice implies an imposed loss, often a source of suffering, whereas committing it can provide a concrete and immediate advantage. It thus appears rational, in this case, to prefer committing injustice to suffering it.
However, this logic is insufficient to account for moral exigency. Second, we established that from the standpoint of moral duty, it is instead better to suffer injustice than to commit it. Relying on intentionalist morality, we saw that the moral value of an action does not depend on its consequences but on the intention that motivates it and its conformity to universal principles. Committing injustice, even to avoid harm, remains immoral, whereas suffering it does not constitute a fault. From the perspective of morality, it is therefore always better to suffer injustice than to commit it.
Finally, we showed that this opposition between personal interest and moral duty is not necessarily absolute. Moral conscience itself can be integrated into the calculation an individual makes to determine which of the two options is preferable, just like material interest. Thus, depending on the weight assigned to moral loss or material loss, and depending on the circumstances, an individual may sometimes prefer to commit injustice and sometimes to suffer it.
Ultimately, the question “is it better to commit injustice or to suffer it?” does not admit a single, unequivocal answer. While morality demands that one suffer injustice rather than commit it, the decision each individual makes often depends on how they articulate their material interest and their moral conscience. This tension reveals the difficulty human beings face in reconciling moral demands with the material constraints and risks of existence.
Mathis Berthomieu
