An absolute..........................

Socrates' great gift to society was that he brought morals from the shifty atmosphere of quasidivine bargains, frauds, and compromises into the blazing daylight of ordinary honorable transactions between men and women striving to be honest.  To Socrates, morality was an absolute or it was nothing.  If an act was unjust, it was always and everywhere so and must never be done.  Whatever the provocation, a man or woman must never act unjustly.

-Paul Johnson,  Socrates:  A Man For Our Times