Socrates, Martha Stewart, and the Definiton of Right Conduct

Plato composed The Republic nearly 2500 years ago. Yet the questions about right conduct that it raises are as timely as today's headlines and Twitter feeds.

In the first section of the dialog, Socrates takes aim at the ethical inadequacy of conventional views of justice. The first of these to be explored is the notion that justice consists in telling the truth and paying one's debts.

Socrates finds much lacking in this view. But even the minimal conception of justice it expresses is at odds with major trends in an American landscape littered with failed Ponzi schemes and a compendium of ethical lapses.

To catalog the scope of the contemporary problem, financial journalist James Stewart has published a book called Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff.

Socrates, one suspects, might have found a way to talk Martha Stewart out of her plans for insider trading. He would surely have also been impervious to the pecuniary lures of Madoff's investment fraud.

Incarceration of the Masses

Philosophy beings in wonder, Socrates famously said.

Two millenia later, Descartes said it begins in doubt.

I have Socratic wonder at the enormity of American incarceration, as well as Cartesian doubt.

Two years ago, when introducing his proposal for a criminal justice reform commission, Senator Jim Webb asked it this way. Are Americans more evil than virtually every other people in the world, justifying such high incarceration rates? Or has our sentencing and corrections system gone terribly wrong, locking up people who really dont' need to be behind bars?

To my mind, the latter is true. Due to an out-of-control drug war and other ideological factors, the American prison population is preposterously high. Prison used to be reserved for the worst of the worst. Now, among the lower depths of the population, it's an expected rite of passage.

This is a plea for recovery of the ability to be shocked, and to ask the right questions again. "To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand," wrote Ortega y Gassett in The Revolt of the Masses. By expressing my surprise at a society that puts 2.3 million people in jail or prison , I am trying to understand.

Know 2, Don't Know 8?

In sixteeenth century Europe, when pretensions to absolute certainty made burning supposed heretics at the stake an all-too-common occurrence, Michel Montaigne remained a cool reserve.

How, he queried in his essays, could people be so certain of the truth of dogmatic, abstract propositions, when the human mind is so inherently limited? And, one must also note, the human heart is so potentially treacherous?

A decade into the 21st century, such healthy scepticism remains an important counterpoint to pell-mell orthodoxy. Why are so many people in America incarcerated, and what do we really get for the constant and still increasing drain on our collective coffers?

Let's admit that, to a very great extent, noone knows.

A number of the foremost criminologists have recently moved toward this more Montaigne-like view. Michael Tonry, puncturing holes in the easy explanations of why crime rates fell throughout the 1990s, speaks openly of "mystery." Alfred Blumenstein points out the very low amount of money spent on criminal justice research, compared to medical and even dental research. And Franklin Zimring commented a couple of years ago, regarding the state of criminal justice knowledge, that one could describe the score on that question as Know 2, Don't Know 8.

To recongnize the importance of this epistemological humilty, one could even go two millenia back from Montaigne to Socrates. Admitting what you do not know can be the beginning of wisdom.