Insanity Defense

I'm not at all confident that yesterday's post ended up saying what I set out to say, so I want to try to clarify it a little, if possible.

Perhaps the main fault of the Sophists' definitions of justice (diakosynē) as "the advantage of the powerful" or "everyone guarding against everyone" is that both suppose that justice (and by extension any ethical imperative) varies according to incidental factors such as social status or political role.

We certainly see this type of thinking in contemporary culture. The very existence of theories of business ethics makes this clear, as it assumes that my ethical imperatives or obligations as a business owner or manager are different from those I must meet purely as a human being. Plato, Hans-Georg Gadamer and I all reject this approach, as Gadamer states succinctly in one of the passages I quoted yesterday: "Justice does not exist when each person watches the other and guards against him, but when each watches himself and guards the right and just being of his inner constitution."

To put it as plainly as I can, my ethical obligations don't change just because my social or political status does. But our society widely assumes just the opposite: There are different ethical standards for different kinds or classes of people. If I accumulate great wealth, if I buy or open a business, if I'm elected to political office, if I achieve a position of leadership in a church or other religious or social movement, a whole new set of rules is assumed to apply to my behavior. And these new rules invariably seem to be formulated in terms of how much I can get away with in my new position.

I don't think this is right. I believe Plato is quite right to argue that the real basis of all ethics, and thus the only firm foundation for a society, is each person knowing right from wrong and persistently trying to live in accordance with this knowledge. And I'm convinced that we all know "on some level" what really is right or wrong, even when we're bending over backwards mentally to find some rationalization for doing what's wrong. As I said before, some things are always wrong. Moreover, we know they're wrong: murder, rape, theft, dishonesty, failure to keep promises, cowardice, scapegoating, etc. etc. etc. What's to debate?

We all know from watching "Law and Order" that the legal definition of insanity is the inability to tell right from wrong. Today, there are armies of lawyers, advertisers,political consultants and other clever people - Sophists, in other words - who labor to convince us that up is down, white is black, day is night and, yes, wrong is right. To the extent that our society accepts their arguments and adjusts its laws and social norms to incorporate them, our society is legally insane. No wonder, then, that so many people look at what's going on around us and conclude that the inmates have taken over the asylum.