reliable

Man Most Guilty

Dan was the guiltiest man I ever met. I don’t think that he was actually guilty of anything, at least anything I knew about… anything significant anyway. It was just that he often felt guilty over things I viewed as trifles. Like all men who care (or dare) to be honest with themselves, he had done many things he rightfully felt badly about, more so than some, less than most. At least that’s the way I saw it.

“Dan,” I said, “you have to let go of this imagined guilt.”

“No,” he said, “you just haven’t thought this through. We’re all liars and thieves. I mean…”

“It seems like you’re putting a rather fine point on things,” I replied. I’ve never stolen anything more than a candy bar from the Quick Stop – when I was just a kid.

“Did you ever go to work and slough (rhymes with ruff) off a bit”?

“Well, yeah. Not very often though, I’m a pretty reliable guy.”

“So how is that not stealing. Let’s just say your boss pays you $30.00 per hour, and you did eighty percent of what you were capable of doing on one of those days. How exactly did you not steal $48.00 from your boss on that day”?

“Oh, come on, Dan! You can’t actually believe that’s really theft, can you”?

“Why shouldn’t I, or you? If you go to to WalMart and steal a $48 electric griddle, it’s not OK. Why is it OK to steal $48 of your boss’s money just because you don’t feel quite as ambitious on a particular day? Is it OK because you kind of feel like you’re stealing from your own rather than from some unknown stranger at a store”?

“I don’t know, Dan. Seems like you’re tying yourself in knots over next to nothing. No one thinks like that.”

Now you can see what I was up against in my arguments with Dan about ethics. He also asserted that all unethical behavior was one form or another of theft. Take for instance how he regarded lying: He felt it robbed the listener of the information required to make an informed choice, and that further, it robbed the listener of his ability to trust others, and finally, if done repeatedly, it robbed the dissembler of his reputation. As to murder, he felt it robbed the victim of his life and future, his loved ones of the pleasure of his company, and society of its sense of safety.

It was all one big multi-faceted theft in Dan’s view. Dan was not completely comfortable with his position that all sins boiled down to theft. It smelled of sophistry to him, and he hated sophistry. But try as he would, he could not see a flaw in his reasoning. But still it bugged him. He said it reminded him of the way economists tried to reduce everything to a question of choice, and since how people make choices was the subject of economics, everything was economics. Dan didn’t like such definitional sleight of hand, and considered it a sneaky attempt to claim an undeservedly large chunk of philosophical turf. He fretted that he might be guilty of the same arrogance.

Well, I just thought you might be interested in a fellow like Dan.