Virtue Surplus

[rowyn]

That's a term ceruleanst used when I was talking about the protagonist in Ghost several weeks ago, to describe the concept that "enough good deeds will offset a certain amount of evil ones".

I don't think many people subscribe to this idea at any kind of extreme. No one's going to say "Well, you saved 50 people from certain death during a disaster last month, so it's okay that you murdered that one guy today for cutting you off in traffic".

Yet it's still an interesting idea, in some ways. It reminds me of various other sayings, like "the ends justify the means" or "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one". Or an Ursula LeGuin short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas".

Usually, people accept a certain amount of negative consequences in return for desirable things. One could assign a portion of the blame for the deaths from every airplane crash to the Wright Brothers, or hold Henry Ford partly responsible for the tens of thousands who die in car accidents each year. But we don't look at airplanes or cars in terms of the damage they do: we look at them for their benefits instead. And those benefits can be measured not just in convenience, but in human lives, too. Famine in the modern world is not a matter of food production, but of transportation: improving technology in this area has helped tremendously.

It's easier to forgive unintended consequences, though. Plane crashes and car accidents aren't an essential part of faster transportation: indeed, people make changes to them all the time to make them safer. Which is one of the benefits of the drive and ambition of modern society: we're never satisfied.

But it would be different if the negative consequences were not unintended, or if they wasn't even an apparent connection. Rapists aren't the price we pay to have an effective military, and to say that they are is an insult to every man in uniform. The two don't go hand in hand .... necessarily.

But what if it happens that they do? What do you do with someone who is mostly good, who has done great things that few could match -- but who's also done something terrible?

At what point does the hero become a villain? Which flaws can you overlook? Is it okay if the firefighter who's rescued hundreds of people from burning buildings cheats on his wife? What if he beats his children? Maybe he's a chronic shoplifter. Maybe he got a co-worker killed once, by accident, and then covered up his part so he wouldn't get blamed or lose his career. Does the good that he's done make the evils more forgiveable, or less?

What if the events really are correlated? What if that cop really did need to torture his captive in order to find the location of the bomb that would otheriwse kill hundreds?

Or is that a hypothetical case that never matches reality? Does evil ultimately beget evil, even if the intentions were good, so that truly no good comes out of a sinister act?

Sometimes when I think about all the horrible things we hear about people in power, the way no presidential candidate can escape attacks upon his character, and I wonder if they're all true. If that's the way everyone would look if they were put under a microscope to be viewed by 300 million prying eyes. All those flaws, amplified and expounded on and presented in the worst possible light. How would I look, under such scrutiny?

Is the problem with stories that they only present a tiny portion of the whole? We ascribe such weight to the things we know, but in every person we judge, there's a lifetime of experience we do not know.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I don't have any answers, only more questions.

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Civilization is a peace treaty.

"I'm not going to kill you, and in return, you're not going to kill me. All these other people aren't going to kill each other either, and now we all aren't going to kill each other, and can live happily and safely."

Someone who doesn't sign on to the treaty is uncivilized, but not a bad person per se. That doesn't mean a civilization can stand to have them around -- they'll ruin everything, because the default assumption is that all humans in a civilized area are civilized. That's what makes it a civilized area.

So, there's two ways to deal with it, either of which could work:
(a) They signed implicitly on by entering the civilized area (or just by existing as a human being), so if they break the treaty, imprison them.
(b) They're wild and dangerous animals (because they're not civilized) that must be exterminated or kept in the wilderness. Or maybe they're useful, so we'll let them hang around as long as they're kept under the control of their handlers.

The second makes it easier to accept the existance of morally repugnant but useful or necessary people. But either of them give an answer to the dilemma -- civilization, law, morality, etc. isn't a fixed absolute handed down from god that must be adhered to rigidly. It's a framework that was set up to make the world a comfortable place to live. If an exception, or a class of exceptions, makes things better, then it's in our power to change it.

This doesn't mean that there's no fixed optimal morality, but we have no way of knowing what it is a priori, and presumably or at least hopefully changes to our morality to make things better locally would lead us towards the optimal state.

[rowyn]

Someone who doesn't sign on to the treaty is uncivilized, but not a bad person per se.

What does make someone a "bad person"?

It's a framework that was set up to make the world a comfortable place to live. If an exception, or a class of exceptions, makes things better, then it's in our power to change it.

That makes sense, and it's generally the way I view morality: the set of rules which maximizes the potential for individual and collective happiness/comfort. It's actually why I reject traditional sexual morality (ie, no sex before or outside of marriage, no divorce). I think that model used to maximize individual happiness, but I don't think it does in modern society for a variety of reasons. (Contraception, longer lifespans, decreasing importance of reproduction, ability to prevent or cure STDs, etc.)

But I'm struggling with how to identify exceptions, especially exceptions in the grey area. And there are two distinct classes of possible exceptions -- correlated and uncorrelated. Basically "monsters who can only fight monsters because they are monsters" and "monsters with important redeeming qualities that are not apparently connected to the reasons they do horrible things."

They're both problematic, but for different reasons.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

What does make someone a "bad person"?

Inefficiency? }:P Just kidding.

A bad person is someone who makes the world a worse place. Usually, it doesn't really count if they're not doing it on purpose -- then they're just being foolish, or wrong, or insane.

It's easier to be bad if people think you're civilized, because they hold you to a much higher standard and put themselves more at risk of being hurt by you, but that doesn't mean uncivilized people couldn't be bad too. Per capita, it's probably more likely.

"monsters with important redeeming qualities that are not apparently connected to the reasons they do horrible things."

This class could be more easily replaced by someone with the important redeeming qualities who wasn't also a monster, so there's less need to keep them around from a practical standpoint. But it might still be worthwhile -- you just have to make sure that they're kept under control. Exiled instead of executed, maybe.

If they're going to do the same horrible things again later, you can't just charge it to their account and forgive them. You have to take steps to prevent it to avoid being culpable. If you think you might need them later, you can avoid steps that would prevent getting their help later.

If the things aren't *that* horrible, well, maybe you *can* charge it to their account. Like, if they're a thief, you can pay off the people they stole from and literally, you know, charge them. c.c So the dilemma is only when they break things that you can't fix.

[rowyn]

Yes, that makes sense.

There's a personal aspect to it that I find difficult, too. Which is, even if society doesn't *need* someone, that's not the same as saying they're worthless. If I've got a choice between an honest cop and one on the take from a drug dealer, I'm obviously going to prefer the honest cop. Yet the corrupt one might be doing some real good in the world, too. That he's corrupt in one area doesn't (necessarily) mean he's not a good father, or husband, or that he won't stop other crimes or hasn't risked his life to save people.

Society doesn't need people like him, in the 'can't get the good without the bad' sense. Throwing him into exile or death may be a net benefit to civilization. And yet to do so ignores the good in his life.

But this is, perhaps, one reason we have punishment. Not just as a preventative and a deterrent, but as a form of acknowledgement. "We know you did this bad thing. We are going to punish you for it. There, now you've been punished, don't do it again and we'll consider it even." Maybe half the point of punishment is just to be able to say that the wrongs have been addressed, so that we don't need to keep trying to answer the unanswerable.