But someone will say, what then? Does it make no difference, whether a man murders his father or his slave? If you instance these acts abstractedly, it is difficult to decide of what quality they are.
If to deprive a parent of life is in itself a most heinous crime, the Saguntines were then parricides, because they chose that their parents should die as freemen rather than live as slaves. Thus, a case may happen in which there may be no guilt in depriving a parent of life, and very often we cannot without guilt put a slave to death.
The circumstances therefore attending this case, and not the nature of the thing, occasion the distinction: these circumstances as they lean to either case, that case becomes the more favorable; but if they appertain alike to both, the acts are then equal.
There is this difference—that in killing a slave, if wrong is done, it is a single sin that is committed; but many are involved in taking the life of a father. The object of violence is the man who begat you, the man who fed you, the man who brought you up, the man who gave your position in your home, your family, and the state. This offense is greater by reason of the number of sins involved in it, and is deserving of a proportionately greater punishment.
If to deprive a parent of life is in itself a most heinous crime, the Saguntines were then parricides, because they chose that their parents should die as freemen rather than live as slaves. Thus, a case may happen in which there may be no guilt in depriving a parent of life, and very often we cannot without guilt put a slave to death.
The circumstances therefore attending this case, and not the nature of the thing, occasion the distinction: these circumstances as they lean to either case, that case becomes the more favorable; but if they appertain alike to both, the acts are then equal.
There is this difference—that in killing a slave, if wrong is done, it is a single sin that is committed; but many are involved in taking the life of a father. The object of violence is the man who begat you, the man who fed you, the man who brought you up, the man who gave your position in your home, your family, and the state. This offense is greater by reason of the number of sins involved in it, and is deserving of a proportionately greater punishment.
—from Cicero, Stoic Paradoxes 3
I have a vivid memory of one particular week while I was in high school, which challenged me to look at justice in a whole new light.
When we arrived on Monday morning, all the chatter was about a celebrity who had been murdered over the weekend. Even among my progressive friends, there was much talk about a swift and severe retribution: “We’ve lost someone who touched so many lives! The killer needs to rot in jail for what he did!”
Later that day, I noticed some police cars in an alley down the block. The owner of our local diner explained how a homeless man had been beaten to death during the night. His biggest concern was whether the delivery truck could be unloaded on time, and my schoolmates only shrugged when I mentioned what I felt was a terrible tragedy.
For the next few days, the newspapers were full of moving tributes for a singer. I could not find any mention of the vagrant. I knew neither of them personally, but I had great difficulty believing that the life of the one was so much more valuable than that of the other. We place the dignity in the trappings of a life, and so easily forget what makes the man.
Whatever the degree of the circumstances, the crime is still the same in kind, though it is often difficult to see through the layers of our many attachments and aversions. Why, for example, do we say that it is worse to kill our own kin than it is to kill a stranger? Or why are we more offended at the abuse of children and the elderly?
Behind the impressions of malice or brutality, we are also compounding many different offenses into one, such that mistreating my wife is both a violation of her rights as person and the betrayal of a special bond of fidelity, and thus it should carry with it a harsher penalty.
The wrong, of course, remains a wrong, regardless of the many different ways I may express it, or how many times I may commit it. I notice how the courts like to pile up endless lists of charges in cases where the public is especially outraged, though I sometimes wonder if one count is already more than enough to prove the point, and five or ten life sentences will hardly end up being all that different.
At the very least, I should not say that my lie is less of an injustice because I only told it once, or that my treachery is less severe because it happened so long ago. I ought to feel regret for any of my vices, and not to believe that a greater or lesser penalty somehow changes my fundamental responsibility.
I have a vivid memory of one particular week while I was in high school, which challenged me to look at justice in a whole new light.
When we arrived on Monday morning, all the chatter was about a celebrity who had been murdered over the weekend. Even among my progressive friends, there was much talk about a swift and severe retribution: “We’ve lost someone who touched so many lives! The killer needs to rot in jail for what he did!”
Later that day, I noticed some police cars in an alley down the block. The owner of our local diner explained how a homeless man had been beaten to death during the night. His biggest concern was whether the delivery truck could be unloaded on time, and my schoolmates only shrugged when I mentioned what I felt was a terrible tragedy.
For the next few days, the newspapers were full of moving tributes for a singer. I could not find any mention of the vagrant. I knew neither of them personally, but I had great difficulty believing that the life of the one was so much more valuable than that of the other. We place the dignity in the trappings of a life, and so easily forget what makes the man.
Whatever the degree of the circumstances, the crime is still the same in kind, though it is often difficult to see through the layers of our many attachments and aversions. Why, for example, do we say that it is worse to kill our own kin than it is to kill a stranger? Or why are we more offended at the abuse of children and the elderly?
Behind the impressions of malice or brutality, we are also compounding many different offenses into one, such that mistreating my wife is both a violation of her rights as person and the betrayal of a special bond of fidelity, and thus it should carry with it a harsher penalty.
The wrong, of course, remains a wrong, regardless of the many different ways I may express it, or how many times I may commit it. I notice how the courts like to pile up endless lists of charges in cases where the public is especially outraged, though I sometimes wonder if one count is already more than enough to prove the point, and five or ten life sentences will hardly end up being all that different.
At the very least, I should not say that my lie is less of an injustice because I only told it once, or that my treachery is less severe because it happened so long ago. I ought to feel regret for any of my vices, and not to believe that a greater or lesser penalty somehow changes my fundamental responsibility.
—Reflection written in 5/1999
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