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CarolineFerrisWhiteFirstPaper 11 - 09 Jul 2010 - Main.CarolineFerrisWhite
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| | | The Law Binds Us Together; the Law Splits Us in Two
Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law..., evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of disparate selves bound together through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one thinker's dream of the law. Each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but. | |
<
< | Criminal law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. Yet most people would agree that the law has some deterrent force, and is one of many factors taken into account in strategic criminal action. This broken system doesn't just affect our actions, however; it also imposes a strict division on the world. One isn't "kind of" guilty; one is a criminal, or one is not. There is no middle ground. From a procedural perspective, this makes sense, but to view the world in black and white is to ignore a crucial complexity. | >
> | Criminal law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. Yet it does divide the world into two camps: those that have committed crimes (and been caught) and those that haven't. The fear of getting caught, most people would agree, carries some deterrent force, and is one of many factors taken into account in strategic criminal action. | | | Criminal Calculus
Crimes of passion aside, doing something "wrong," whether stealing a cookie from the cookie jar or millions of dollars from corporate shareholders, involves a cost-benefit analysis. How likely am I to get caught? What do I stand to gain? Does the combined pull of these two forces outweigh the punishment if I am found out? Are there negative consequences even if I am not found out? These questions are inherently personal, and those asked by one person may be never even be considered by another. | | | So why did Gil kill himself? Was it an extreme result of the gap between his personal morality and that contained by the law? Perhaps Gil never believed he was doing anything wrong, and when faced with the imposition of the state's version of "right" and "wrong," death seemed like a logical solution. Or maybe Gil misunderstood himself. In evaluating the costs and benefits of his crime, he may have thought he was smart enough to avoid getting caught. He may also have miscalculated as to his own capacity for withstanding the opprobrium of detection. Or maybe his interests did not extend beyond himself, so he committed a crime to get rich, and then killed himself when he no longer stood to gain. | |
<
< | We can only speculate as to Gil's motivations. Perhaps every person who commits a crime weaves a complex web of justifications, denial, self-interest, and recklessness. Upon getting caught, this web that once sustained an identity and concealed a crime falls apart and sends the criminal flailing. I have never seen an ego more exposed, a person more broken than a criminal at sentencing. I can understand an unwillingness to endure that experience. I can also understand how someone who had grappled with depression might choose suicide instead. | >
> | We can only speculate as to Gil's motivations. Perhaps every person who commits a crime weaves a complex web of justifications, denial, self-interest, and recklessness. Upon getting caught, this web that once sustained an identity and concealed a crime falls apart and sends the criminal flailing. I have never seen an ego laid so bare or a person more broken than a criminal at sentencing. I can understand an unwillingness to endure that experience. I can also understand how someone who had grappled with depression might choose suicide instead. | | | Conclusion | |
<
< | Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." A winning homage to the rule of law, but can we really speak of "bad" and "good" men with any confidence? Would that the world were so easily sorted and parsed. That reductive binary is appealing, but it eliminates a complexity that, if grappled with, might permit a more empathic approach to understanding crimes and those who commit them. | >
> | Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." A winning homage to the rule of law, but can we really speak of "bad" and "good" men with any confidence? Would that the world were so easily sorted and parsed.
The criminal justice system doesn't just affect our actions; it also imposes a strict division on the world. One isn't "kind of" guilty; once the jury has returned its verdict, one's actions are criminal or they are not. There is no middle ground. From a procedural perspective, this makes sense, but this view of the world isn't limited to the halls of justice. It is tempting to embrace the reductive simplicity of "guilty" or "not guilty;" we want the law to punish the bad and protect the good. That notion is appealing, but it eliminates a complexity that, if grappled with, might permit a more empathic approach to understanding crimes and those who commit them. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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CarolineFerrisWhiteFirstPaper 10 - 08 Jul 2010 - Main.CarolineFerrisWhite
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| | | The Law Binds Us Together; the Law Splits Us in Two
Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law..., evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of disparate selves bound together through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one thinker's dream of the law. Each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but. | |
<
< | Criminal law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. Yet most people would agree that the law has some deterrent force, and is one of many factors taken into account in strategic criminal action. How can a broken system still have such an effect? | >
> | Criminal law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. Yet most people would agree that the law has some deterrent force, and is one of many factors taken into account in strategic criminal action. This broken system doesn't just affect our actions, however; it also imposes a strict division on the world. One isn't "kind of" guilty; one is a criminal, or one is not. There is no middle ground. From a procedural perspective, this makes sense, but to view the world in black and white is to ignore a crucial complexity. | | | Criminal Calculus
Crimes of passion aside, doing something "wrong," whether stealing a cookie from the cookie jar or millions of dollars from corporate shareholders, involves a cost-benefit analysis. How likely am I to get caught? What do I stand to gain? Does the combined pull of these two forces outweigh the punishment if I am found out? Are there negative consequences even if I am not found out? These questions are inherently personal, and those asked by one person may be never even be considered by another. | | | In the early morning hours of October 26, 2009, Gil Cornblum jumped off a bridge. This was not his first attempt at suicide, but it was his last. Suicide is an unknowable tragedy, the world's brief and brutal glimpse at private, unplumbable depths. We can grasp (and often cling to) the how; what can we know of the why? We know, according to his wife, that Gil had struggled with depression for his whole life. We also know that Gil was under investigation for a 14-year streak of insider trading, allegedly conducted while an attorney at big name law firms in the US and Canada. His first two suicide attempts were made after the investigation began; his last was reportedly on the eve of a settlement in the criminal investigation.
Gil killed himself after he got caught. It would be facile and tidy to conclude that he killed himself because he got caught. It would be stupid to conclude they were not connected. | |
<
< | So why did Gil kill himself? Was it an extreme result of the gap created by the distancing of personal morality from that contained by the law? Perhaps Gil never believed he was doing anything wrong, and when faced with the imposition of the state's version of "right" and "wrong" death seemed like the more logical solution. Or maybe Gil misunderstood himself. In evaluating the costs and benefits of his crime, he may have thought he was smart enough to avoid getting caught. He may also have miscalculated as to his own capacity for withstanding the opprobrium of detection. Or maybe his interests did not extend beyond himself, so he committed a crime to get rich, and then killed himself when he no longer stood to gain. | >
> | So why did Gil kill himself? Was it an extreme result of the gap between his personal morality and that contained by the law? Perhaps Gil never believed he was doing anything wrong, and when faced with the imposition of the state's version of "right" and "wrong," death seemed like a logical solution. Or maybe Gil misunderstood himself. In evaluating the costs and benefits of his crime, he may have thought he was smart enough to avoid getting caught. He may also have miscalculated as to his own capacity for withstanding the opprobrium of detection. Or maybe his interests did not extend beyond himself, so he committed a crime to get rich, and then killed himself when he no longer stood to gain. | | | | |
<
< | INSERT YOUR ORIGINAL THOUGHTS ON THE MATTER. | >
> | We can only speculate as to Gil's motivations. Perhaps every person who commits a crime weaves a complex web of justifications, denial, self-interest, and recklessness. Upon getting caught, this web that once sustained an identity and concealed a crime falls apart and sends the criminal flailing. I have never seen an ego more exposed, a person more broken than a criminal at sentencing. I can understand an unwillingness to endure that experience. I can also understand how someone who had grappled with depression might choose suicide instead. | | | Conclusion | |
<
< | Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." But bad men and good men don't relate to the law in the same way. A good man (and a naive one) sees in the law a reflection of what he sees within; a bad man sees a mechanism for enforcement of an arbitrary rule that can potentially be sidestepped. Gil knew what he was doing was "wrong:" hence the secrecy and subterfuge. But he didn't know it was wrong until it was too late. | | | \ No newline at end of file | |
>
> | Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." A winning homage to the rule of law, but can we really speak of "bad" and "good" men with any confidence? Would that the world were so easily sorted and parsed. That reductive binary is appealing, but it eliminates a complexity that, if grappled with, might permit a more empathic approach to understanding crimes and those who commit them. |
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CarolineFerrisWhiteFirstPaper 9 - 07 Jul 2010 - Main.CarolineFerrisWhite
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Split Selves: Morality and the Law | |
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< | -- By CarolineFerrisWhite - 17 Feb 2010 | | | The Law Binds Us Together; the Law Splits Us in Two
Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law..., evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of disparate selves bound together through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one thinker's dream of the law. Each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but. | |
<
< | Criminal law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. We can debate the values of the criminal justice system: deterrence, retribution, order. What costs have we incurred in locating morality outside of ourselves, rather than within,
Where's the "rather
than-ness"? Surely there are few of us who believe that our personal
morality has been entirely deferred to the criminal law, let alone to
the criminal justice system. It's merely another, weak and barely
reliable, form of social control.
and placing it in an unreliable and often unpredictable system that nonetheless binds us all?
Criminal Calculus
Crimes of passion aside, doing something "wrong," whether stealing a cookie from the cookie jar or millions of dollars from corporate shareholders, involves a cost-benefit analysis. How likely am I to get caught? What do I stand to gain? Does the combined pull of these two forces outweigh the punishment if I am found out? In the cookie jar scenario, the calculation is nearly instantaneous: Mom is outside + those cookies are delicious > probable scolding, possible timeout. If I steal the cookie successfully, I will likely not feel remorse. Why would I? I have not engaged in an internal debate about right and wrong; I have not pummeled my conscience into submission. Rather, I have chosen to go for the cookie jar, and unless I am caught, I win.
But this is the thinking of an impulsive child, and has very little to do with the supposed thought process of mature people. And, despite all the love we have for simplifications, stealing from the cookie jar isn't stealing and what causes real people to commit real crimes is substantially more complicated.
Getting Caught Makes a Wrong Real
But what if Mom walks in the kitchen and catches me? I'll feel terrible: I hate getting yelled at. My remorse comes not from within, but from an externally located rule of law--Mom's law--and the consequences of its application. The goal in raising a self-correcting child is to get that child to internalize the moral code of the parent, so good behavior comes from within rather than from a fear of getting caught.
That's one way of
understanding the situation: morality and the way we are raised are
two working parts of a system of hegemony, designed to make us
internalize the demands of power, so that we never challenge power
externally, and our "good behavior" comes from within. This view is
widespread and I think it's disgusting. We should be trying to raise
children who are free, not internalizing voices representing others'
power, but understanding their own varying personalities in order to
behave self-expressively and with empathy, consistently, in all social
relationships.
The Costs of Externalizing Our Conscience
Many things can go wrong in this process, and often do. We do not all emerge with a clarion conscience and a moral compass that point due north. Additionally, the thought process (assuming there is a conscious one) that transpires before committing a crime is far more complicated than the one I've outlined. But the law, in binding us all, takes on the role of the punitive parent, and creates a lapse in time between act and remorse. This remorse is something other than regret for the crime committed; it's also dismay at being caught. Getting caught completes the crime. Once the world knows and punishment looms, the actor is forced to recognize his actions and bear the consequences. The costs of this can be devastating.
But also not, depending
on the personality structures of the individual who has been
"apprehended." You're talking about what happens to a particular
type of person raised a particular way under contingent circumstances
with certain characteristics. At that point, making it sound as
though you're observing a general social principle is a little
misleading.
A Case Study?
In the early morning hours of October 26, 2009, Gil Cornblum jumped off a bridge. This was not his first attempt at suicide, but it was his last. Suicide is an unknowable tragedy, the world's brief and brutal glimpse at private, unplumbable depths. We can grasp (and often cling to) the how; what can we know of the why? We know, according to his wife, that Gil had struggled with depression for his whole life. We also know that Gil was under investigation for a 14-year streak of insider trading, allegedly conducted while an attorney at big name law firms in the US and Canada. His first two suicide attempts were made after the investigation began; his last was reportedly on the eve of a settlement in the criminal investigation.
Gil killed himself after he got caught. It would be facile and tidy to conclude that he killed himself because he got caught. Were we to assume a link between his alleged crime and his death, however, we would see an extreme result of the gap created by the distancing of personal morality from that contained by the law. Gil may have misunderstood himself. In evaluating the costs and benefits of his crime, he may have thought he was smart enough to avoid getting caught. He may also have miscalculated as to his own capacity for withstanding the opprobrium of detection: it's hard to imagine anyone incorporating suicide into a decision-making process and deciding to go forward with the act. My hypothesis is that Gil didn't do much thinking at all, or didn't know himself well enough to understand that he couldn't cope with his wrong made real, and therefore no benefit could possibly outweigh the cost.
But someone in his
position might have said to himself, I don't care whether I live or
die, so if this doesn't work and I don't get the life I want to live
I'll just kill myself, so there's no reason not to go ahead. Or
perhaps he always knew he was going to die by suicide, as some people
do, and the question was always just whether the time was
right.
But the things I most
want to know about have to do with this man's relationship to his
parents. Understanding the psychic environment he emerged from would
help frame some less general questions.
Had Gil's concept of wrong aligned with the legal one, however, he may have stayed his hand.
Once you're in the
conditional subjunctive, you might want to ask yourself whether you
are too far out on a limb. To have said he didn't think stealing was
wrong would have been an obvious oversimplification, and to say he
might not have done it if he really thought stealing was wrong is
not much of an announcement. So instead you use verb mood and tense
to create an aura of significance, with high diction standing in for
sense.
An internal sense of wrong creates immediate consequences.
I'm not sure this is
true, and it passes by pretty quickly given the work it is called
upon to deliver. My experience of people is that they are capable of
hiding an internal sense of wrong from themselves for an awfully long
time. Could you provide something here to make me a little less
skeptical? If this isn't right, your whole distinction between
morality "inside" and "outside" is kind of in
trouble....
When the punitive force is an external one, its actions can be long delayed. Future risk outweighed present desire, and so Gil spent his early mornings at Sullivan and Cromwell, "spleunking" for information on deals and mergers.
Conclusion
Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." But bad men and good men don't relate to the law in the same way. A good man (and a naive one) sees in the law a reflection of what he sees within; a bad man sees a mechanism for enforcement of an arbitrary rule that can potentially be sidestepped. Gil knew what he was doing was "wrong:" hence the secrecy and subterfuge. But he didn't know it was wrong until it was too late.
It's hard to believe
that you don't want to put scare quotes around "good" and "bad"
there. One might say simply that people who bring developed
capacities for empathy into all the personal and social relations
tend to see the rules as reflections of mutual respect for one
another's needs, while people who do not bring empathy to their
social relationships are likely to respond to the rules on the basis
of their own immediate or long-term interests and desires. People
radically unencumbered by empathy may be said to have narcissistic
personality disorder. They may behave sociopathically. Such people
will probably be called "bad." That word here seems to me to have a
meaning that is directly related to deficit: such people are bad at
living in social communities, which—as human beings are
biologically social—can be regarded as a form of "brokenness."
But we would then have to admit that if they are "bad," so are all
the others who are socially disabled.
But if it is their
actions that are "bad," those actions are performed also by people
who are not unencumbered by empathy. When we find harmful, injurious
deeds done to humans or some animals, and those deeds have been done
in a manner which specifically shows the absence of empathy, or the
offender shows no remorse indicative of empathy when "apprehended,"
we then tend to put the conduct in a category of special severity, or
"badness," and we either kill the person who did these deeds, or we
declare him socially dead and confine him forever where we cannot see
him and he cannot see us.
But most people who
"offend" commit all the same crimes and cause all the same horrors
without being incapable of empathy, and what they have are reasons,
justifications, feelings, conflicts, rages, and confusions. Social
control of all varieties is applied to us, and has its effects. Our
behavior is shaped by the world in which, as individuals, we live.
We also acquire psychic self-states, personae, personalities, and
they live out their lives using our brains and our bodies within the
social matrix. The interactions among those self-states, those with
whom we have relationships, and the remainder of the social world
brings about events through which we are judged either "good" or
"bad." The judgment, however, captures the least of
it.
So the thing I was having the most trouble reconciling is your introduction with the Gil example. Your set-up seems to ask, why do people break the law? In your first draft, you concluded it was some sort of incomplete internalization of external legal codes. However, after reading through your thoughts in the Empathy and Law posts (and taking into account Eben’s comments), it seems you aren’t quite as committed to that interpretation after all.
Either way, I think the Gil example is where things get messy, because you use the example to explore why he committed suicide. With your first draft the answer was easier: he never fully internalized the law, thus when he got caught and had to answer to the law, he killed himself instead. But once you take into consideration other theories about why he committed the crime in the first place (Eben points out rationalization, in your other post you consider multiple selves, etc), then the answer to “Why suicide?” depends on which “Why break the law?” you select. And this is all complicated by the fact that there is no easy answer to why he broke the law; in fact it may be some weird hybrid, or some other idea I’ve missed entirely. Of course, though, it has to be your answer.
So I’ve done the rudest thing ever, and rewrote your paper so you now have 200 words to answer that question (you’ll also probably need a new conclusion, but since I don’t know what your conclusion will be, I left that for now). Hopefully what I wrote will streamline the process of getting there. IF, after you read it, I’ve missed the mark, let me know and I’ll take another look.
I have included this below the former draft (not in a brand new revision page) because I didn’t know how it’d be easiest to see the original, Eben’s comments, and my partial rewrite. If this is annoying, of course, feel free to paste it on top of what you had from before. In fact, send me an email and I'll be glad to do it while you are asleep in the past.
(Also, your writing style is far prettier than mine, and I realize that, in trying to mirror it, some of my rewrite reads a bit like a Victorian romance novel. I wasn’t trying to mock you; it was just the best I could do, and I have confidence that one wave of your magical CFW wand will result in a much smoother and more lyrical version of exactly what I was trying to say.)
Split Selves: Morality and the Law- Rewrite
The Law Binds Us Together; the Law Splits Us in Two
Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law… evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of disparate selves bound together through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one thinker's dream of the law. Each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but.
Criminal law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. Yet most people would agree that the law acts as a deterrent, or at least something to take into account in strategic criminal action. How can such a broken system still have such an effect? | >
> | Criminal law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. Yet most people would agree that the law has some deterrent force, and is one of many factors taken into account in strategic criminal action. How can a broken system still have such an effect? | | | Criminal Calculus | |
<
< | Crimes of passion aside, doing something "wrong," whether stealing a cookie from the cookie jar or millions of dollars from corporate shareholders, involves a cost-benefit analysis. How likely am I to get caught? What do I stand to gain? Does the combined pull of these two forces outweigh the punishment if I am found out? Are there negative consequences even if I am not found out? The questions are inherently personal, and those asked by one person may be never even be considered by another. | >
> | Crimes of passion aside, doing something "wrong," whether stealing a cookie from the cookie jar or millions of dollars from corporate shareholders, involves a cost-benefit analysis. How likely am I to get caught? What do I stand to gain? Does the combined pull of these two forces outweigh the punishment if I am found out? Are there negative consequences even if I am not found out? These questions are inherently personal, and those asked by one person may be never even be considered by another. | | | | |
<
< | Many things can go wrong in this process, and often do. We do not all emerge with a clarion conscience and a moral compass that point due north. Additionally, the thought process (assuming there is a conscious one) that transpires before committing a crime is far more complicated than the one I've outlined. But, with perhaps an exception for the truly sociopathic minority, the law, in binding us all, plays a part. And getting caught completes the crime. | >
> | Many things can go wrong in this process, and often do. We do not all emerge with a clarion conscience and a moral compass that point due north. Additionally, the thought process (assuming there is a conscious one) that transpires before committing a crime is far more complicated than the one I've outlined. But, with perhaps an exception for the truly sociopathic minority, the law, in binding us all, plays a part. Getting caught completes the crime. | | | The question is: what stays the hand of some would-be criminals, while others commit the forbidden act? Is it the internalization of the law, some sort of social empathy, disconnect between different senses of self or a combination thereof?
A Case Study | |
<
< | In the early morning hours of October 26, 2009, Gil Cornblum jumped off a bridge. This was not his first attempt at suicide, but it was his last. Suicide is an unknowable tragedy, the world's brief and brutal glimpse at private, unplumbable depths. We can grasp (and often cling to) the how; what can we know of the why? We know, according to his wife, that Gil had struggled with depression for his whole life. We also know that Gil was under investigation for a 14-year streak of insider trading, allegedly conducted while an attorney at big name law firms in the US and Canada. His first two suicide attempts were made after the investigation began; his last was reportedly on the eve of a settlement in the criminal investigation. | >
> | In the early morning hours of October 26, 2009, Gil Cornblum jumped off a bridge. This was not his first attempt at suicide, but it was his last. Suicide is an unknowable tragedy, the world's brief and brutal glimpse at private, unplumbable depths. We can grasp (and often cling to) the how; what can we know of the why? We know, according to his wife, that Gil had struggled with depression for his whole life. We also know that Gil was under investigation for a 14-year streak of insider trading, allegedly conducted while an attorney at big name law firms in the US and Canada. His first two suicide attempts were made after the investigation began; his last was reportedly on the eve of a settlement in the criminal investigation. | | | Gil killed himself after he got caught. It would be facile and tidy to conclude that he killed himself because he got caught. It would be stupid to conclude they were not connected. | |
<
< | So why did Gil kill himself? Was it an extreme result of the gap created by the distancing of personal morality from that contained by the law? Perhaps Gil never believed he was doing anything wrong, and when faced with the imposition of the state’s version of “right” and “wrong,” death seemed like the more logical solution. Or maybe Gil misunderstood himself. In evaluating the costs and benefits of his crime, he may have thought he was smart enough to avoid getting caught. He may also have miscalculated as to his own capacity for withstanding the opprobrium of detection. Or maybe his interests did not extend beyond himself, so he committed a crime to get rich, and then killed himself when he no longer stood to gain. | >
> | So why did Gil kill himself? Was it an extreme result of the gap created by the distancing of personal morality from that contained by the law? Perhaps Gil never believed he was doing anything wrong, and when faced with the imposition of the state's version of "right" and "wrong" death seemed like the more logical solution. Or maybe Gil misunderstood himself. In evaluating the costs and benefits of his crime, he may have thought he was smart enough to avoid getting caught. He may also have miscalculated as to his own capacity for withstanding the opprobrium of detection. Or maybe his interests did not extend beyond himself, so he committed a crime to get rich, and then killed himself when he no longer stood to gain. | | | INSERT YOUR ORIGINAL THOUGHTS ON THE MATTER.
Conclusion | |
<
< | Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." But bad men and good men don't relate to the law in the same way. A good man (and a naive one) sees in the law a reflection of what he sees within; a bad man sees a mechanism for enforcement of an arbitrary rule that can potentially be sidestepped. Gil knew what he was doing was "wrong:" hence the secrecy and subterfuge. But he didn't know it was wrong until it was too late. | >
> | Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." But bad men and good men don't relate to the law in the same way. A good man (and a naive one) sees in the law a reflection of what he sees within; a bad man sees a mechanism for enforcement of an arbitrary rule that can potentially be sidestepped. Gil knew what he was doing was "wrong:" hence the secrecy and subterfuge. But he didn't know it was wrong until it was too late. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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CarolineFerrisWhiteFirstPaper 8 - 01 Jul 2010 - Main.JacquelynHehir
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| | | brings about events through which we are judged either "good" or
"bad." The judgment, however, captures the least of
it.
\ No newline at end of file | |
>
> | So the thing I was having the most trouble reconciling is your introduction with the Gil example. Your set-up seems to ask, why do people break the law? In your first draft, you concluded it was some sort of incomplete internalization of external legal codes. However, after reading through your thoughts in the Empathy and Law posts (and taking into account Eben’s comments), it seems you aren’t quite as committed to that interpretation after all.
Either way, I think the Gil example is where things get messy, because you use the example to explore why he committed suicide. With your first draft the answer was easier: he never fully internalized the law, thus when he got caught and had to answer to the law, he killed himself instead. But once you take into consideration other theories about why he committed the crime in the first place (Eben points out rationalization, in your other post you consider multiple selves, etc), then the answer to “Why suicide?” depends on which “Why break the law?” you select. And this is all complicated by the fact that there is no easy answer to why he broke the law; in fact it may be some weird hybrid, or some other idea I’ve missed entirely. Of course, though, it has to be your answer.
So I’ve done the rudest thing ever, and rewrote your paper so you now have 200 words to answer that question (you’ll also probably need a new conclusion, but since I don’t know what your conclusion will be, I left that for now). Hopefully what I wrote will streamline the process of getting there. IF, after you read it, I’ve missed the mark, let me know and I’ll take another look.
I have included this below the former draft (not in a brand new revision page) because I didn’t know how it’d be easiest to see the original, Eben’s comments, and my partial rewrite. If this is annoying, of course, feel free to paste it on top of what you had from before. In fact, send me an email and I'll be glad to do it while you are asleep in the past.
(Also, your writing style is far prettier than mine, and I realize that, in trying to mirror it, some of my rewrite reads a bit like a Victorian romance novel. I wasn’t trying to mock you; it was just the best I could do, and I have confidence that one wave of your magical CFW wand will result in a much smoother and more lyrical version of exactly what I was trying to say.)
Split Selves: Morality and the Law- Rewrite
The Law Binds Us Together; the Law Splits Us in Two
Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law… evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of disparate selves bound together through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one thinker's dream of the law. Each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but.
Criminal law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. Yet most people would agree that the law acts as a deterrent, or at least something to take into account in strategic criminal action. How can such a broken system still have such an effect?
Criminal Calculus
Crimes of passion aside, doing something "wrong," whether stealing a cookie from the cookie jar or millions of dollars from corporate shareholders, involves a cost-benefit analysis. How likely am I to get caught? What do I stand to gain? Does the combined pull of these two forces outweigh the punishment if I am found out? Are there negative consequences even if I am not found out? The questions are inherently personal, and those asked by one person may be never even be considered by another.
Many things can go wrong in this process, and often do. We do not all emerge with a clarion conscience and a moral compass that point due north. Additionally, the thought process (assuming there is a conscious one) that transpires before committing a crime is far more complicated than the one I've outlined. But, with perhaps an exception for the truly sociopathic minority, the law, in binding us all, plays a part. And getting caught completes the crime.
The question is: what stays the hand of some would-be criminals, while others commit the forbidden act? Is it the internalization of the law, some sort of social empathy, disconnect between different senses of self or a combination thereof?
A Case Study
In the early morning hours of October 26, 2009, Gil Cornblum jumped off a bridge. This was not his first attempt at suicide, but it was his last. Suicide is an unknowable tragedy, the world's brief and brutal glimpse at private, unplumbable depths. We can grasp (and often cling to) the how; what can we know of the why? We know, according to his wife, that Gil had struggled with depression for his whole life. We also know that Gil was under investigation for a 14-year streak of insider trading, allegedly conducted while an attorney at big name law firms in the US and Canada. His first two suicide attempts were made after the investigation began; his last was reportedly on the eve of a settlement in the criminal investigation.
Gil killed himself after he got caught. It would be facile and tidy to conclude that he killed himself because he got caught. It would be stupid to conclude they were not connected.
So why did Gil kill himself? Was it an extreme result of the gap created by the distancing of personal morality from that contained by the law? Perhaps Gil never believed he was doing anything wrong, and when faced with the imposition of the state’s version of “right” and “wrong,” death seemed like the more logical solution. Or maybe Gil misunderstood himself. In evaluating the costs and benefits of his crime, he may have thought he was smart enough to avoid getting caught. He may also have miscalculated as to his own capacity for withstanding the opprobrium of detection. Or maybe his interests did not extend beyond himself, so he committed a crime to get rich, and then killed himself when he no longer stood to gain.
INSERT YOUR ORIGINAL THOUGHTS ON THE MATTER.
Conclusion
Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." But bad men and good men don't relate to the law in the same way. A good man (and a naive one) sees in the law a reflection of what he sees within; a bad man sees a mechanism for enforcement of an arbitrary rule that can potentially be sidestepped. Gil knew what he was doing was "wrong:" hence the secrecy and subterfuge. But he didn't know it was wrong until it was too late. |
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CarolineFerrisWhiteFirstPaper 7 - 01 Mar 2010 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | The Law Binds Us Together; the Law Splits Us in Two
Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law..., evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of disparate selves bound together through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one thinker's dream of the law. Each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but. | |
<
< | Criminal law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. We can debate the values of the criminal justice system: deterrence, retribution, order. What costs have we incurred in locating morality outside of ourselves, rather than within, and placing it in an unreliable and often unpredictable system that nonetheless binds us all? | >
> | Criminal law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. We can debate the values of the criminal justice system: deterrence, retribution, order. What costs have we incurred in locating morality outside of ourselves, rather than within,
Where's the "rather
than-ness"? Surely there are few of us who believe that our personal
morality has been entirely deferred to the criminal law, let alone to
the criminal justice system. It's merely another, weak and barely
reliable, form of social control.
and placing it in an unreliable and often unpredictable system that nonetheless binds us all? | | | Criminal Calculus
Crimes of passion aside, doing something "wrong," whether stealing a cookie from the cookie jar or millions of dollars from corporate shareholders, involves a cost-benefit analysis. How likely am I to get caught? What do I stand to gain? Does the combined pull of these two forces outweigh the punishment if I am found out? In the cookie jar scenario, the calculation is nearly instantaneous: Mom is outside + those cookies are delicious > probable scolding, possible timeout. If I steal the cookie successfully, I will likely not feel remorse. Why would I? I have not engaged in an internal debate about right and wrong; I have not pummeled my conscience into submission. Rather, I have chosen to go for the cookie jar, and unless I am caught, I win. | |
>
> | But this is the thinking of an impulsive child, and has very little to do with the supposed thought process of mature people. And, despite all the love we have for simplifications, stealing from the cookie jar isn't stealing and what causes real people to commit real crimes is substantially more complicated. | | | Getting Caught Makes a Wrong Real
But what if Mom walks in the kitchen and catches me? I'll feel terrible: I hate getting yelled at. My remorse comes not from within, but from an externally located rule of law--Mom's law--and the consequences of its application. The goal in raising a self-correcting child is to get that child to internalize the moral code of the parent, so good behavior comes from within rather than from a fear of getting caught. | |
>
> | That's one way of
understanding the situation: morality and the way we are raised are
two working parts of a system of hegemony, designed to make us
internalize the demands of power, so that we never challenge power
externally, and our "good behavior" comes from within. This view is
widespread and I think it's disgusting. We should be trying to raise
children who are free, not internalizing voices representing others'
power, but understanding their own varying personalities in order to
behave self-expressively and with empathy, consistently, in all social
relationships. | | | The Costs of Externalizing Our Conscience
Many things can go wrong in this process, and often do. We do not all emerge with a clarion conscience and a moral compass that point due north. Additionally, the thought process (assuming there is a conscious one) that transpires before committing a crime is far more complicated than the one I've outlined. But the law, in binding us all, takes on the role of the punitive parent, and creates a lapse in time between act and remorse. This remorse is something other than regret for the crime committed; it's also dismay at being caught. Getting caught completes the crime. Once the world knows and punishment looms, the actor is forced to recognize his actions and bear the consequences. The costs of this can be devastating. | |
>
> | But also not, depending
on the personality structures of the individual who has been
"apprehended." You're talking about what happens to a particular
type of person raised a particular way under contingent circumstances
with certain characteristics. At that point, making it sound as
though you're observing a general social principle is a little
misleading. | | | A Case Study?
In the early morning hours of October 26, 2009, Gil Cornblum jumped off a bridge. This was not his first attempt at suicide, but it was his last. Suicide is an unknowable tragedy, the world's brief and brutal glimpse at private, unplumbable depths. We can grasp (and often cling to) the how; what can we know of the why? We know, according to his wife, that Gil had struggled with depression for his whole life. We also know that Gil was under investigation for a 14-year streak of insider trading, allegedly conducted while an attorney at big name law firms in the US and Canada. His first two suicide attempts were made after the investigation began; his last was reportedly on the eve of a settlement in the criminal investigation.
Gil killed himself after he got caught. It would be facile and tidy to conclude that he killed himself because he got caught. Were we to assume a link between his alleged crime and his death, however, we would see an extreme result of the gap created by the distancing of personal morality from that contained by the law. Gil may have misunderstood himself. In evaluating the costs and benefits of his crime, he may have thought he was smart enough to avoid getting caught. He may also have miscalculated as to his own capacity for withstanding the opprobrium of detection: it's hard to imagine anyone incorporating suicide into a decision-making process and deciding to go forward with the act. My hypothesis is that Gil didn't do much thinking at all, or didn't know himself well enough to understand that he couldn't cope with his wrong made real, and therefore no benefit could possibly outweigh the cost. | |
<
< | Had Gil's concept of wrong aligned with the legal one, however, he may have stayed his hand. An internal sense of wrong creates immediate consequences. When the punitive force is an external one, its actions can be long delayed. Future risk outweighed present desire, and so Gil spent his early mornings at Sullivan and Cromwell, "spleunking" for information on deals and mergers. | >
> | But someone in his
position might have said to himself, I don't care whether I live or
die, so if this doesn't work and I don't get the life I want to live
I'll just kill myself, so there's no reason not to go ahead. Or
perhaps he always knew he was going to die by suicide, as some people
do, and the question was always just whether the time was
right.
But the things I most
want to know about have to do with this man's relationship to his
parents. Understanding the psychic environment he emerged from would
help frame some less general questions.
Had Gil's concept of wrong aligned with the legal one, however, he may have stayed his hand.
Once you're in the
conditional subjunctive, you might want to ask yourself whether you
are too far out on a limb. To have said he didn't think stealing was
wrong would have been an obvious oversimplification, and to say he
might not have done it if he really thought stealing was wrong is
not much of an announcement. So instead you use verb mood and tense
to create an aura of significance, with high diction standing in for
sense.
An internal sense of wrong creates immediate consequences.
I'm not sure this is
true, and it passes by pretty quickly given the work it is called
upon to deliver. My experience of people is that they are capable of
hiding an internal sense of wrong from themselves for an awfully long
time. Could you provide something here to make me a little less
skeptical? If this isn't right, your whole distinction between
morality "inside" and "outside" is kind of in
trouble....
When the punitive force is an external one, its actions can be long delayed. Future risk outweighed present desire, and so Gil spent his early mornings at Sullivan and Cromwell, "spleunking" for information on deals and mergers. | | | Conclusion
Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." But bad men and good men don't relate to the law in the same way. A good man (and a naive one) sees in the law a reflection of what he sees within; a bad man sees a mechanism for enforcement of an arbitrary rule that can potentially be sidestepped. Gil knew what he was doing was "wrong:" hence the secrecy and subterfuge. But he didn't know it was wrong until it was too late. | |
<
< |
# * Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, CarolineFerrisWhite | >
> | It's hard to believe
that you don't want to put scare quotes around "good" and "bad"
there. One might say simply that people who bring developed
capacities for empathy into all the personal and social relations
tend to see the rules as reflections of mutual respect for one
another's needs, while people who do not bring empathy to their
social relationships are likely to respond to the rules on the basis
of their own immediate or long-term interests and desires. People
radically unencumbered by empathy may be said to have narcissistic
personality disorder. They may behave sociopathically. Such people
will probably be called "bad." That word here seems to me to have a
meaning that is directly related to deficit: such people are bad at
living in social communities, which—as human beings are
biologically social—can be regarded as a form of "brokenness."
But we would then have to admit that if they are "bad," so are all
the others who are socially disabled.
But if it is their
actions that are "bad," those actions are performed also by people
who are not unencumbered by empathy. When we find harmful, injurious
deeds done to humans or some animals, and those deeds have been done
in a manner which specifically shows the absence of empathy, or the
offender shows no remorse indicative of empathy when "apprehended,"
we then tend to put the conduct in a category of special severity, or
"badness," and we either kill the person who did these deeds, or we
declare him socially dead and confine him forever where we cannot see
him and he cannot see us.
But most people who
"offend" commit all the same crimes and cause all the same horrors
without being incapable of empathy, and what they have are reasons,
justifications, feelings, conflicts, rages, and confusions. Social
control of all varieties is applied to us, and has its effects. Our
behavior is shaped by the world in which, as individuals, we live.
We also acquire psychic self-states, personae, personalities, and
they live out their lives using our brains and our bodies within the
social matrix. The interactions among those self-states, those with
whom we have relationships, and the remainder of the social world
brings about events through which we are judged either "good" or
"bad." The judgment, however, captures the least of
it. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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CarolineFerrisWhiteFirstPaper 6 - 26 Feb 2010 - Main.CarolineFerrisWhite
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| | | -- By CarolineFerrisWhite - 17 Feb 2010
The Law Binds Us Together; the Law Splits Us in Two | |
<
< | Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law..., evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of binding together of disparate selves through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one man's dream of the law. And each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but. Criminal law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. What costs have we incurred in locating morality outside of ourselves, rather than within, and placing it in an unreliable and often unpredictable system that nonetheless binds us all? | >
> | Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law..., evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of disparate selves bound together through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one thinker's dream of the law. Each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but.
Criminal law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. We can debate the values of the criminal justice system: deterrence, retribution, order. What costs have we incurred in locating morality outside of ourselves, rather than within, and placing it in an unreliable and often unpredictable system that nonetheless binds us all? | | | Criminal Calculus | |
<
< | Leaving aside crimes of passion, doing something "wrong," whether it's stealing a cookie from the cookie jar or millions of dollars from corporate shareholders, involves a cost-benefit analysis. How likely am I to get caught? What do I stand to gain? Does the combined pull of these two forces outweigh the punishment if I am found out? In the cookie jar scenario, the calculation is nearly instantaneous: Mom is outside + those cookies are delicious > probable scolding, possible timeout. If I steal the cookie successfully, it's likely I won't feel bad about it. Why would I? I have not engaged in an internal debate about right and wrong; I have not pummeled my conscience into submission. Rather, a clinical calculus has led me to make the choice to go for the cookie jar. | >
> | Crimes of passion aside, doing something "wrong," whether stealing a cookie from the cookie jar or millions of dollars from corporate shareholders, involves a cost-benefit analysis. How likely am I to get caught? What do I stand to gain? Does the combined pull of these two forces outweigh the punishment if I am found out? In the cookie jar scenario, the calculation is nearly instantaneous: Mom is outside + those cookies are delicious > probable scolding, possible timeout. If I steal the cookie successfully, I will likely not feel remorse. Why would I? I have not engaged in an internal debate about right and wrong; I have not pummeled my conscience into submission. Rather, I have chosen to go for the cookie jar, and unless I am caught, I win. | | | Getting Caught Makes a Wrong Real | |
<
< | But what if Mom walks in the kitchen and catches me? I'll feel lousy. I hate getting yelled at. My remorse comes not from within, but from an externally located rule of law--Mom's law--and the consequences of its application. The goal in raising a self-regulating child with a reasonable moral compass is to get that child to internalize the moral code of the parent, so good behavior comes from within rather than from a fear of getting caught. | >
> | But what if Mom walks in the kitchen and catches me? I'll feel terrible: I hate getting yelled at. My remorse comes not from within, but from an externally located rule of law--Mom's law--and the consequences of its application. The goal in raising a self-correcting child is to get that child to internalize the moral code of the parent, so good behavior comes from within rather than from a fear of getting caught. | | | The Costs of Externalizing Our Conscience | |
<
< | Many things can go wrong in this process, and often do. We do not all emerge with clarion consciences and moral compasses that point due north. Additionally, the thought process (assuming there is a conscious one) that transpires before committing a crime is far more complicated than the one I've outlined. But the law, in binding us all, takes on the role of the punitive parent. Enter the lapse in time between act and remorse. This remorse is something other than regret for the crime committed; it's dismay at being caught. Getting caught completes the crime. Before being caught, the act continues to be beneficial to the actor; cost to the victims(s) is just an externality. Once the world knows and punishment looms, the actor is forced to internalize his actions and attendant shame and bear the consequences. The costs of this can be devastating. | >
> | Many things can go wrong in this process, and often do. We do not all emerge with a clarion conscience and a moral compass that point due north. Additionally, the thought process (assuming there is a conscious one) that transpires before committing a crime is far more complicated than the one I've outlined. But the law, in binding us all, takes on the role of the punitive parent, and creates a lapse in time between act and remorse. This remorse is something other than regret for the crime committed; it's also dismay at being caught. Getting caught completes the crime. Once the world knows and punishment looms, the actor is forced to recognize his actions and bear the consequences. The costs of this can be devastating. | | | A Case Study? | |
<
< | In the early morning hours of October 26, 2009, Gil Cornblum jumped off a bridge. This was not his first attempt at suicide, but it was his last. Suicide is an unknowable tragedy, the world's brief and brutal glimpse at private, unplumbable depths, deepest darkness. We can grasp (and often cling to) the how; what can we know of the why? We know, according to his wife, that Gil had struggled with depression for his whole life. We also know that Gil was under investigation for a 14-year stint of insider trading, allegedly conducted while an attorney at big name law firms in the US and Canada. His first two suicide attempts were made after the investigation began; his last was reportedly on the eve of a settlement in the criminal investigation. | >
> | In the early morning hours of October 26, 2009, Gil Cornblum jumped off a bridge. This was not his first attempt at suicide, but it was his last. Suicide is an unknowable tragedy, the world's brief and brutal glimpse at private, unplumbable depths. We can grasp (and often cling to) the how; what can we know of the why? We know, according to his wife, that Gil had struggled with depression for his whole life. We also know that Gil was under investigation for a 14-year streak of insider trading, allegedly conducted while an attorney at big name law firms in the US and Canada. His first two suicide attempts were made after the investigation began; his last was reportedly on the eve of a settlement in the criminal investigation. | | | Gil killed himself after he got caught. It would be facile and tidy to conclude that he killed himself because he got caught. Were we to assume a link between his alleged crime and his death, however, we would see an extreme result of the gap created by the distancing of personal morality from that contained by the law. Gil may have misunderstood himself. In evaluating the costs and benefits of his crime, he may have thought he was smart enough to avoid getting caught. He may also have miscalculated as to his own capacity for withstanding the opprobrium of detection: it's hard to imagine anyone incorporating suicide into a decision-making process and deciding to go forward with the act. My hypothesis is that Gil didn't do much thinking at all, or didn't know himself well enough to understand that he couldn't cope with his wrong made real, and therefore no benefit could possibly outweigh the cost. | |
<
< | Had Gil's concept of wrong aligned with the legal one, however, he would likely have not acted. An internal sense of wrong creates immediate consequences. When the punitive force is an external one, its actions can be long delayed. Future risk outweighed present desire, and so Gil spent his early mornings at Sullivan and Cromwell, "spleunking" for information on deals and mergers. | >
> | Had Gil's concept of wrong aligned with the legal one, however, he may have stayed his hand. An internal sense of wrong creates immediate consequences. When the punitive force is an external one, its actions can be long delayed. Future risk outweighed present desire, and so Gil spent his early mornings at Sullivan and Cromwell, "spleunking" for information on deals and mergers. | | | Conclusion | |
<
< | Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." But bad men and good men don't relate to the law in the same way. A good man (and a naive one) sees in the law a reflection of what he sees within; a bad man sees a mechanism for enforcement of an arbitrary rule that can potentially be sidestepped. | >
> | Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." But bad men and good men don't relate to the law in the same way. A good man (and a naive one) sees in the law a reflection of what he sees within; a bad man sees a mechanism for enforcement of an arbitrary rule that can potentially be sidestepped. Gil knew what he was doing was "wrong:" hence the secrecy and subterfuge. But he didn't know it was wrong until it was too late. | | |
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CarolineFerrisWhiteFirstPaper 5 - 25 Feb 2010 - Main.CarolineFerrisWhite
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<
< | Splitting Selves: Morality and the Law | >
> | Split Selves: Morality and the Law | | | -- By CarolineFerrisWhite - 17 Feb 2010
The Law Binds Us Together; the Law Splits Us in Two | |
<
< | Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law..., evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of binding together of disparate selves through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one man’s dream of the law. And each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but. The law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. What costs have we incurred in locating morality outside of ourselves, rather than within, and placing it in an unreliable and often unpredictable system that nonetheless binds us all? | >
> | Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law..., evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of binding together of disparate selves through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one man's dream of the law. And each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but. Criminal law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. What costs have we incurred in locating morality outside of ourselves, rather than within, and placing it in an unreliable and often unpredictable system that nonetheless binds us all? | | | Criminal Calculus | |
<
< | Doing something “wrong,” whether it’s stealing a cookie from the cookie jar or millions of dollars from corporate shareholders, involves a cost-benefit analysis. How likely am I to get caught? How bad is the punishment if I am found out? What do I stand to gain? In the cookie jar scenario, the calculation is nearly instantaneous: Mom is outside + those cookies are delicious > probable scolding, possible timeout. If I steal the cookie successfully, it’s likely I won’t feel bad about it. Why would I? The world doesn’t know about it; it’s between me and the cookie jar. | >
> | Leaving aside crimes of passion, doing something "wrong," whether it's stealing a cookie from the cookie jar or millions of dollars from corporate shareholders, involves a cost-benefit analysis. How likely am I to get caught? What do I stand to gain? Does the combined pull of these two forces outweigh the punishment if I am found out? In the cookie jar scenario, the calculation is nearly instantaneous: Mom is outside + those cookies are delicious > probable scolding, possible timeout. If I steal the cookie successfully, it's likely I won't feel bad about it. Why would I? I have not engaged in an internal debate about right and wrong; I have not pummeled my conscience into submission. Rather, a clinical calculus has led me to make the choice to go for the cookie jar. | | | Getting Caught Makes a Wrong Real | |
<
< | But what if Mom walks in and catches me? I’ll feel lousy. I hate getting yelled at. My remorse comes not from within, but from an externally located rule of law (Mom’s law) and the consequences of its application. The goal in raising a self-regulating child with a reasonable moral compass is to get that child to internalize the moral code of the parent, so good behavior doesn’t result from fear of getting caught but from within. | >
> | But what if Mom walks in the kitchen and catches me? I'll feel lousy. I hate getting yelled at. My remorse comes not from within, but from an externally located rule of law--Mom's law--and the consequences of its application. The goal in raising a self-regulating child with a reasonable moral compass is to get that child to internalize the moral code of the parent, so good behavior comes from within rather than from a fear of getting caught. | | | | |
<
< | A Case Study?
In the early morning hours of October 26, 2009, Gil Cornblum jumped off a bridge. This was not his first attempt at suicide, but it was his last. Suicide is an unknowable tragedy, the world’s brief and brutal glimpse at private, unplumbable depths, deepest darkness. We can grasp (and often cling) to the how; what can we know of the why? We know, according to his wife, that Gil had struggled with depression for his whole life. We also know that Gil was under investigation for a 14-year stint of insider trading, allegedly conducted while an attorney at big name law firms in the US and Canada. His first two suicide attempts were made after the investigation began; his last was reportedly on the eve of a settlement in the criminal investigation.
Gil killed himself after he got caught. It would be facile and tidy to conclude that he killed himself because he got caught. Were his suicide and his alleged crime linked, however, they would point to Holmes’ gaps between our selves and the “external deposit of our moral life.” | >
> | The Costs of Externalizing Our Conscience
Many things can go wrong in this process, and often do. We do not all emerge with clarion consciences and moral compasses that point due north. Additionally, the thought process (assuming there is a conscious one) that transpires before committing a crime is far more complicated than the one I've outlined. But the law, in binding us all, takes on the role of the punitive parent. Enter the lapse in time between act and remorse. This remorse is something other than regret for the crime committed; it's dismay at being caught. Getting caught completes the crime. Before being caught, the act continues to be beneficial to the actor; cost to the victims(s) is just an externality. Once the world knows and punishment looms, the actor is forced to internalize his actions and attendant shame and bear the consequences. The costs of this can be devastating. | | | | |
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> | A Case Study?
In the early morning hours of October 26, 2009, Gil Cornblum jumped off a bridge. This was not his first attempt at suicide, but it was his last. Suicide is an unknowable tragedy, the world's brief and brutal glimpse at private, unplumbable depths, deepest darkness. We can grasp (and often cling to) the how; what can we know of the why? We know, according to his wife, that Gil had struggled with depression for his whole life. We also know that Gil was under investigation for a 14-year stint of insider trading, allegedly conducted while an attorney at big name law firms in the US and Canada. His first two suicide attempts were made after the investigation began; his last was reportedly on the eve of a settlement in the criminal investigation. | | | | |
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< | Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law."
Section II | >
> | Gil killed himself after he got caught. It would be facile and tidy to conclude that he killed himself because he got caught. Were we to assume a link between his alleged crime and his death, however, we would see an extreme result of the gap created by the distancing of personal morality from that contained by the law. Gil may have misunderstood himself. In evaluating the costs and benefits of his crime, he may have thought he was smart enough to avoid getting caught. He may also have miscalculated as to his own capacity for withstanding the opprobrium of detection: it's hard to imagine anyone incorporating suicide into a decision-making process and deciding to go forward with the act. My hypothesis is that Gil didn't do much thinking at all, or didn't know himself well enough to understand that he couldn't cope with his wrong made real, and therefore no benefit could possibly outweigh the cost. | | | | |
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> | Had Gil's concept of wrong aligned with the legal one, however, he would likely have not acted. An internal sense of wrong creates immediate consequences. When the punitive force is an external one, its actions can be long delayed. Future risk outweighed present desire, and so Gil spent his early mornings at Sullivan and Cromwell, "spleunking" for information on deals and mergers. | | | | |
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< | Subsection B | >
> | Conclusion
Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." But bad men and good men don't relate to the law in the same way. A good man (and a naive one) sees in the law a reflection of what he sees within; a bad man sees a mechanism for enforcement of an arbitrary rule that can potentially be sidestepped. | | |
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| | | -- By CarolineFerrisWhite - 17 Feb 2010 | |
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< | Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law..., evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of binding together of disparate selves through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. T. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one man’s dream of the law. And each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but. The law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. What costs have we incurred in locating morality outside of ourselves, rather than within, and placing it in an unreliable and often unpredictable system that nonetheless binds us all? | >
> | The Law Binds Us Together; the Law Splits Us in Two
Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law..., evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of binding together of disparate selves through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one man’s dream of the law. And each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but. The law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. What costs have we incurred in locating morality outside of ourselves, rather than within, and placing it in an unreliable and often unpredictable system that nonetheless binds us all? | | | | |
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< | Gil Cornblum Jumped off a Bridge | >
> | Criminal Calculus
Doing something “wrong,” whether it’s stealing a cookie from the cookie jar or millions of dollars from corporate shareholders, involves a cost-benefit analysis. How likely am I to get caught? How bad is the punishment if I am found out? What do I stand to gain? In the cookie jar scenario, the calculation is nearly instantaneous: Mom is outside + those cookies are delicious > probable scolding, possible timeout. If I steal the cookie successfully, it’s likely I won’t feel bad about it. Why would I? The world doesn’t know about it; it’s between me and the cookie jar. | | | | |
>
> | Getting Caught Makes a Wrong Real
But what if Mom walks in and catches me? I’ll feel lousy. I hate getting yelled at. My remorse comes not from within, but from an externally located rule of law (Mom’s law) and the consequences of its application. The goal in raising a self-regulating child with a reasonable moral compass is to get that child to internalize the moral code of the parent, so good behavior doesn’t result from fear of getting caught but from within. | | | | |
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< | Subsection A
Subsub 1
Subsection B
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> | A Case Study?
In the early morning hours of October 26, 2009, Gil Cornblum jumped off a bridge. This was not his first attempt at suicide, but it was his last. Suicide is an unknowable tragedy, the world’s brief and brutal glimpse at private, unplumbable depths, deepest darkness. We can grasp (and often cling) to the how; what can we know of the why? We know, according to his wife, that Gil had struggled with depression for his whole life. We also know that Gil was under investigation for a 14-year stint of insider trading, allegedly conducted while an attorney at big name law firms in the US and Canada. His first two suicide attempts were made after the investigation began; his last was reportedly on the eve of a settlement in the criminal investigation. | | | | |
>
> | Gil killed himself after he got caught. It would be facile and tidy to conclude that he killed himself because he got caught. Were his suicide and his alleged crime linked, however, they would point to Holmes’ gaps between our selves and the “external deposit of our moral life.” | | | | |
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< | Subsub 2 | | | Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." |
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CarolineFerrisWhiteFirstPaper 2 - 25 Feb 2010 - Main.CarolineFerrisWhite
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> | Splitting Selves: Morality and the Law | | | -- By CarolineFerrisWhite - 17 Feb 2010 | |
>
> | Justice Douglas writes that "the rule of law..., evenly applied to minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage that holds society together." Oliver Wendell Holmes, even in denying the mapping of law onto morality, comforts us with the thought that "the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." Douglas speaks of binding together of disparate selves through the law. Holmes, in pointing to the externalization of our collective moral conscience, suggests a separation of the self through the law. T. Each vision is lovely. Each speaks to one man’s dream of the law. And each statement is a clean and hopeful gloss on a system that is anything but. The law does not reliably mete out punishments to the bad and absolve the good of blame; the justice we arrive at is, at best, rough and approximate. What costs have we incurred in locating morality outside of ourselves, rather than within, and placing it in an unreliable and often unpredictable system that nonetheless binds us all?
Gil Cornblum Jumped off a Bridge | | | | |
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< | Section I | | | Subsection A | | | Subsub 2 | |
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> | Justice Black writes that "[b]ad men, like good men, are entitled to be tried and sentenced in accordance with the law." | | | Section II | | |
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< | You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line: | | | # * Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, CarolineFerrisWhite | |
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CarolineFerrisWhiteFirstPaper 1 - 17 Feb 2010 - Main.CarolineFerrisWhite
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
Paper Title
-- By CarolineFerrisWhite - 17 Feb 2010
Section I
Subsection A
Subsub 1
Subsection B
Subsub 1
Subsub 2
Section II
Subsection A
Subsection B
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line:
# * Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, CarolineFerrisWhite
Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of that line. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated list |
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