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| | | brings about events through which we are judged either "good" or
"bad." The judgment, however, captures the least of
it.
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> | 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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