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.

Wednesday's Quote of the Week: 23 Feb 2011

I'm currently instating a weekly instalment on the blog where on Wednesdays I give a particular quote of interest, and then the next day I follow up with a brief discussion on a topic which may or may not be related in any way. These are just musings of a sort, and aren't intended to be too rigorous. Hopefully I'll be able to do it on a weekly basis, but if I fail to keep up, I apologise in advance.

This week's quote is from 1 Corinthians 13.11:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 

For those of you who are unaware, that's the First Epistle to the Corinthians (a book of the New Testament), written by St. Paul the Apostle.

See you tomorrow!

The parable of the lost toy

Consider, if you will, this short tale adapted from/inspired by Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

A father takes his young son to the playground one fine weekend afternoon, as good fathers are wont to do. The boy has brought along with him his favourite toy to play with. After a round on the swings, the boy is let loose on the rest of the equipment while the father sits at a nearby bench to read the newspaper, making sure to glance up every couple of minutes to make sure everything is going fine, which it is, that is until he hears a gasp of horror and a terrible wailing. He looks up in a fright to see that the boy is weeping and running around the playground looking at the ground. After a frantic interrogation, he learns that the boy has lost his toy somewhere while he was running and climbing and playing as boys do.

The father helps look for the toy, but it is small, and has disappeared, much in the way that small toys do. Eventually the search is given up, though the boy is no less distressed. Does the father join him in his wailing and weeping? Does the father say, "Come here, and together we can mourn the loss."? No, he lays his arm around his son's shoulders and tells him that even though he is sad now, and that is to be expected, everything will be all right in the end. He knows this because he has lost many toys in his time, and in his age has acquired the wisdom to know that from time to time toys go missing, just as from time to time they break or are given up by their owners for whatever reason. It is one thing to provide comfort to those who need it, and another entirely to join in their passion, a passion founded as all are on an assumption you know to be untrue, that loss can be avoided and no separation is permanent.