Thursday's Thought for the Week: 24 Feb 2011

One of my favourite quotes of all time, and one that strikes me as being both extraordinarily deep and truthful without being particularly vague or cloudy is one of the so-called Socratic paradoxes, that no one does evil knowingly, which I believe is from The Apology by Plato. It might at first seem a strange thing to suggest, because it would seem on first inspection that people quite regularly do the wrong thing, and when they do so they are rarely in anything other than a perfectly conscious state of being with a complete awareness of their actions. To suggest therefore that the statement is obviously incorrect on these grounds is premature, however, for it manages to completely miss the point (indeed, anybody who has taken a philosophy class will see students claiming that an argument is obviously wrong and are perplexed at how anyone can disagree when they themselves are the ones to have missed the point through misinterpreting the argument, but I digress). The point is something I consider to be rather self-evident, in fact, and something few people would take umbrage with, and is that when a person does the wrong thing, they are not intending to do something wrong, because to them and by their own system of judgement it would extremely illogical to do anything "wrong".

Perhaps I should explain more. Let's say that a person is hungry and steals a loaf of bread. In the eyes of the law they have done the wrong thing and it is unlikely that the perpetrator will be ignorant of that fact, but by the same token that person would also not be ignorant of their hunger and their need for food and, having weighed their obligation to the law against their survival instincts, went with stealing the bread. Whether they did in fact weigh the situation correctly is irrelevant; to the person in question, their actions were justified and so right. Another example: take the case of a man who kills his wife in a crime of passion. There certainly couldn't be said to be much weighing up of options and consequences in this example, but rather a straight-forward, momentary acquiescence to murderous rage. Certainly the man knows that on the whole it isn't a great idea to murder his wife, but at this point he is acting on his emotions alone. Why? Because he has learned through his life that his emotions are important and he needn't restrain himself from acting on them, supposing they are strong enough to warrant it. This is not a conscious matter, but a subconscious one. The man is aware of what he is doing, but he does not act knowingly because the rational part of his brain has gone on a momentary holiday, and logical notions of right and wrong have gone with it.

Keep this idea in mind for the moment, because I'm going to take you on a slight detour. Let's put aside philosophical notions of "right", "wrong", "good" and "evil" for now and look from a strictly legal standpoint. Consider a child who commits what would be considered a crime if performed by an adult. Perhaps the child is only five, but through a series of inactions causes a person's death; it would seem bizarre to say the least to charge the child with criminal negligence. Why is this so? Because five year olds are stupid? Perhaps... but what if it were a thirteen year old? To some extent at least, a child of the age of thirteen has sufficient understanding of the law to know that, say, stealing is wrong. Regardless, in this country as in most others, a thirteen year old would not be tried as an adult for theft (if at all). Why is this so? It's not a trick question, the answer is quite simple: minors are understood to lack sufficient responsibility to be held accountable for legal indiscretions. They are too young, too inexperienced, too naive, too innocent, too ignorant to know better. It would be as wrong to charge a young child with a crime as it would be to charge a dog (and would make as much sense too).

This notion can be cautiously extended to ethics. Just as children are ignorant of the law at a young age, so too are they ignorant of right and wrong, at least to some extent. This seems an uncontroversial point on the face of it, just as I think it is uncontroversial that ethics is a hazy and not yet fully understood subject, which is the reason why it seems so hard to agree on anything. But if our collective understanding of ethics is somewhat fuzzy, and a person could be forgiven for not having all the answers (none of us do, after all), then could they not be said to be ignorant, to some degree, of what is "truly" right and wrong? The connection here to the Socratic paradox should be evident now. What is actually the fact, or even if there is such a thing when it comes to morality, is understood by very few people, and even they disagree! In the face of such uncertainty, the natural response is to do what comes naturally; the person knows no better after all.

So if we can allow that people can in varying degrees be ignorant of right and wrong (and just about all consistent ethical systems will disagree on what right and wrong are) then it does not seem unreasonable to my eyes to extend the legal/ethical analogy from children to all people, supposing their ignorance is sufficient that they not be aware of what have done wrong. This may seem peculiar at first, but only if we imagine that everybody instinctively knows right from wrong, an absurd claim made an absurd number of times. That the law should need exist at all is strong evidence to the contrary. The beauty, in fact, of this humble proposal is that it can be executed by a person of any ethical system. If someone does wrong, don't chastise them, don't look down on them with disgust, don't expect them to do better next time. Instead, recognise that they act out of ignorance, forgive them for doing wrong unknowingly, and if possible try to help them learn. Regular practice will ease the ire you feel for those who act against you, which is sure to keep you humble, for the more often you force yourself to recognise the ignorance in others, the more likely you are to see it in yourself.