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Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Division
In a post that I wrote some time ago (and am too lazy to locate), I wrote about the idea of dividing people into three types: those who would do right regardless of what you do to them, those who would do wrong regardless of what you do for them, and a middle group that will do right or wrong depending on which of the first two groups has more sway in the society. This middle group is by far the largest.
Let's give names to these divisions: the good, the bad, and, assuming the good have more sway, the decent.
We might expect that both the good and the bad share something in common with the decent, which is the middle group, but not with each other. I believe, however, that even the good and the bad have something in common that they do not share with the decent. Let me work through the three possible pairings.
The good and the decent: This pairing is fairly obvious. Both groups generally make positive contributions to the well-being of society.
The decent and the bad: This one is less clear, but I would assert that the decent are selfish in a way similar to the bad. The difference is mainly one of calculation. As Glaucon argues in Plato's Republic, many people do right, not because they intrinsically want to, but because they think it prudent to restrict their own desires if others are willing to do the same. They are then engaged in a social contract, with the bottom line being their own well-being. The bad are also selfish, but they have calculated differently, so are unwilling to practice self-restraint.
The good and the bad: This is the least intuitive of all, but I think there is an important similarity here. The truly good follow social convention mainly so as to not upset the social contract of the decent, not because they value social convention itself. In other words, the good, like the bad, are perfectly comfortable making themselves the arbiters of moral worth. Furthermore, if it seems important enough, the good are quite willing to put social convention aside to do the right thing. In this way they resemble the lawlessness of the bad.
Because of these connections, it is always possible for a member of one group to resemble a member of another. What we have then is not so much a continuum, as I described earlier, but a triangle where each side of the triangle represents a unique connection between two groups.
Eddie 9:29 PM
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