The Philosophy of Crime And Defenses
On Bear Stearns executives charged with deception, a military lawyer’s defense by attack, and Bush’s call for an end to the 27-year old ban on off-shore drilling.
Ralph R. Cioffi and Matthew Tannin managed two risky Bear Stearns funds that ultimately collapsed early in the subprime market tumble. The investors lost all their money. 100%. Federal prosecutors have now charged Cioffi and Tannin with deceiving investors while protecting their own interests. Cioffi and Tannin knew that the funds were losing value rapidly and could collapse, but presented a confident picture to investors. Meanwhile Cioffi moved $2M (of $6M) of his own money out into a lower risk fund.
Ranked on impact, Cioffi and Tannin’s deception falls at the far end of the deception spectrum. But if every business person who deceived were to be subject to criminal prosecution, America (and most everywhere else) would be out of business. In practice, crime becomes a matter of degree. Small, unremarkable lies go unremarked. Medium lies maybe wrinkle your reputation. Big lies with real impact get you shunned. And maybe a huge lie with devastating business impact will get you an indictment.
The concept of crime requires the concept of law. And the concept of law rests on the idea that we can codify certain acts as wrongdoing. Society identifies behaviors it doesn’t want to tolerate and enacts laws so that people can be punished for such behavior. Cioffi and Tannin may have broken a codified law by lying (we’ll have to see what the courts say) but for sure they broke an uncodified law; they lied big and the people they lied to lost a lot of money.
Military lawyer Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler has been going on the offensive in his defense of a Canadian, Omar Khadr, who has been charged with lobbing the grenade that killed an American soldier in Afghanistan in 2002. Kuebler has publicly and repeatedly attacked the military court system by which his client is being tried. Devoutly religious and ultra-conservative, Kuebler might seem like an unlikely activist. But he’s a stickler for fairness. It seems likely that Khadr isn’t an innocent party — he has the pedigree of a terrorist, and he wasn’t in Afghanistan sight-seeing. But Kuebler defends his aggressive defense tactics. “If we’re not advocating against the process,†Kuebler says, “we’re not competently representing our clients.â€
Another way of reconciling Kuebler’s philosophy would be to say that if a society must have laws it should have some tension balancing the enactment and enforcement of those laws against the protection of its members against arbitrary, unjust or inappropriate indictment and punishment under the law. If not, the laws will inevitably become arbitrary, unjust or inappropriate.
Ironically, those who make law — politicians — are often some of the most deceptive and corrupt members of society. This, I expect, is no coincidence. Politicians have a feel for matters of rightness and wrongness because they identify with the urge leverage any advantage for their gain. And, as we’ve seen with Elliott Spitzer, they’ll be no less zealous for their empathy with the perpetrator of the crimes they seek to prosecute.
I’m trying to get to the idea of whether such a thing as natural or fundamental crime exists or is merely fabrication. In Plato’s dialogues Socrates pushes and pulls his interlocutors in an attempt to have them break free of the idea that something is right or wrong, good or bad, because we feel it is so. You can get many or most people to agree on whether some things are a crime. Other things tend to be more difficult to gain consensus on. But the ground of wrongdoing, if such a thing exists, must find its feet beyond human judgment.
The only pertinent to existence is whether it continues to exist. As human beings we feel this same urge. To continue to exist, to persist. And if we examine our feelings about right and wrong we find that they tend to stem from a judgment about whether an action will contribute to the persistence of a person or group or not.
A former co-worker asked me in an e-mail today whether consciousness, through the potential for personal growth, doesn’t offer in itself some goal or reward outside the persistence of humanity and existence. Valerie, a frequent commentor to this blog, coined a term ‘the evolution of consciousness’ which puts me in mind of the same idea.
I am tempted to subscribe to this idea. After all, why must consciousness be subordinate to material existence just because it came after and through material existence?
This may explain my disgusted reaction to George Bush’s grandstanding about oil drilling. I don’t even care whether he’s right. I just don’t like the idea that someone with so little integrity and such narrow thoughts could hold so much sway. If consciousness does have an independent evolutionary trajectory, we can only hope that the Bush’s of this world will one day be no more than fossils in the museum of intellectual history.
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