Do you realize how hard it was this morning to find a radio station that wasn't devoting all its time to this story? (In hindsight, Howard Stern would've fit the bill, given that he's national and not local.)
Ten years ago one could pretty safely guess that a divorce after a politician became famous would finish off his national aspirations; now, hard to say.
Three random opinions I happen to hold even though they're probably irredeemably logically inconsistent:
1. Newsom did the right thing last year when the city started granting same-sex marriage licenses. Yes, they violated a law, an arguably unconstitutional law. For whatever reason there's massive stigma in this country about judge-made law, even when the judges get it right. (C.f. the 2000 presidential election.) If there's going to be a case about whether the law is constitutional, don't sue; break it and let them sue.
2. Stealing bread is still a crime even if it's to feed your family. This comes up every time young people encounter Les Mis for the first time. Yeah, sucks to be Valjean, but he had to face the music. (I'll readily admit that 19 years was excessive; then again, part of the reason for a sentence is deterrence and if enough families are poor enough that enough heads of household will be tempted to steal bread, how do you deter them?)
3. It's okay not to divert the train even to kill one person instead of five. No matter how tightly you define the hypothetical, you can never have enough knowledge to be sure enough that the situation is what it looks like to take responsibility for the one person.
I wish there were a remotely coherent philosophy tying those together; you can at least see why #1 made me think of the other two, though, right?
Posted by Matt Bruce at January 6, 2005 09:38 AMThe intriguing question, regarding Les Mis is not whether Valjean commited a crime (there was a law, he broke it) but whether he was wrong to do so.
Incidentally, 1 and 2 are closely related but the connection with 3 is more tenuous, yes?
Posted by: John at January 6, 2005 07:25 PMI'll go a bit further (though not much further) and say that whether he should be punished (he should) isn't interesting either.
He did wrong (in absolute terms - relative to his other options he did the best thing, though it still wasn't right) in a situation where it was impossible not do to wrong, hence the relevance of #3.
Posted by: me at January 6, 2005 07:34 PMNitpick: Valjean was sentenced to a shorter term (I think five years) for stealing the loaf of bread. They tacked on more years because of his unsuccessful attempts to escape.
Posted by: Richard Mason at January 9, 2005 03:49 AM