His short answer is that no one is an island unto himself. Our ethical choices, such as whether to suffer wrong rather than to do wrong, all have social consequences. If we live in a society in which people consistently do evil to themselves (like the crack addict) and to one another, eventually we end up with no society at all. A society that has fallen into this position, as he believed Athens had, is sick, in Plato’s sense almost literally so. It desperately needs a doctor to restore it to spiritual health.
