Crimes and Misdemeanors
Terri Murray gets to the core of ethics with Socrates and Woody Allen
Here though “good” is just a word that we invented because, for all practical purposes, in any given community, certain behaviors are going to be either rewarded or punished. And clearly to the extent that you are rewarded [in whatever manner] for doing this instead of that that is a good thing and not a bad thing.
It’s just that going back to the pre-Socratics, the Greeks are thought to have come up with a new way of thinking about and then exploring this. Let’s call it philosophy. Here in the “West” for example.
Yet here we are, thousands of years later, and, just like the Greeks, still squabbling ferociously over which behaviors really are the good ones and not the bad ones.
Why? Well, cue the arguments I make in my signature threads here. Or provide us with arguments of your own.
Now, imagine a “human condition” where the overwhelming preponderance of men and women around the globe thought like Glaucon. So, of course one or another rendition of God or political ideology or deontology or true “natural” behaviors had to be invented. Social interactions had evolved from the brute facticity embodied in might makes right, had gone through any number of right makes right historical creations, and, with the advent of capitalism, had “settled” on one or another variant of democracy and the rule of law.
But: the right makes might objectivist are always around to wrench that back. We’ve got any number of them right here. Most being reactionaries. Some fancying themselves as one of Nietzsche’s Ubermen. A few practically Nazis.
And then the moral nihilists who figure that “show me the money” is as good as it gets in their own best of possible worlds.
Now, in Crimes and Misdemeanors, we know the trajectory that Judah Rosenthal chose. Or, rather, given a new experience revolving around a new relationship… stumbled into?
Existentially as it were.