Happy Tuesday, all! We had a slight delay with Monday’s post by Stephen Hall, but the good news is, while you’re reading this and it feels like a Monday, it’s actually Tuesday already!!!! So without further adieu…..
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” – Wayne LaPierre.
The picture above seems directed to refute that very quote, but does it? Let us divide and examine that particular sign.
One might first look at the basic statement without regard to the prepositional phrase as an abstract assertion, i.e. that there is no such thing as a good man. It is not without philosophic precedent; “for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”
What follows is that if all men are bad, then no man can be trusted with a weapon, which must of necessity include the state, for every government must be made up of men, and such men could not be trusted with weapons.
Of course, men being bad by assumption, there must be men who will retain arms, ergo it is essential to have a weapon to protect oneself from those bad men. If man is ubiquitously evil, arms must be a universal right.
Suppose the assertion false, that man is good not evil, then man being good no man may object to a good man possessing a weapon. If man is ubiquitously good, arms must be a universal right.
Let us then examine the addition of the sign’s qualifier that there may exist good men, but such men are not ever the ones with a gun. Thus, the only good men are those which must be at the mercy of the evil men, being thus unarmed and defenseless.
That reasoning cannot stand because it renders the quality of being good as definitionally subservient and inferior to evil, helpless and powerless because of an unnatural quality of passivity which could only depend upon the prowess of other for defense but those others must of necessity be evil.
The qualifier that inherent goodness or evilness is contingent upon the possession of a weapon is thus irrational. It must be that the ownership of a weapon is immaterial to the quality of good or evil in man.
But whether any man is good or evil is the essence of civil discourse, it is the fundamental question of all society, of every society, of society itself. For if a man is evil, association with such a man is itself a harm and one may not have society with him
The great questions of Socratean philosophy, according to the dialogs, revolve around this central question of what makes a good man, or rather what is the nature of those virtues which make man an ideal citizen of society.
The essential question of each such dialogue was to study the very nature and definition of one virtue asked of one held in esteem by society of possessing the desired virtue to distill its essence that having it thus defined it might be replicated and adopted as a practice of every man, to make such virtue potentially universal.
I am convinced that not only is such an outcome of universal virtue unattainable, not only would it be undesirable, but that it would itself be a failure of virtue.
That may seem odd, for why would society not want men who were courageous, honest, persistent, temperate, kind, decisive, et cetera?
Well for one thing many of the virtues are seemingly contradictory, or certainly circumstances may warrant that such virtues war with one another. By this one might suppose and support the fallacy that ethics and virtue are situational, that one trait may be virtuous in one circumstance but a vice in another.
One may laud the virtue of honesty, but to disclose the military secrets of one’s nation is a treason. An act of kindness of taking in a stranger becomes a vice when that stranger murders the kind person’s family in the night.
A recent news item that a man exchanged his freedom for that of a hostage, subsequently dying in their place. Was this altruism an act of virtue or a vice? Nobly done, to lay down one’s life for another, it may be said. It might also be said that as a defender of the weak, to sacrifice oneself is to subject them to future attack without such a defender.
It appears to me that no society is uniform, thus virtue is not universal in its proportion, but that is not to say that it is in any manner less than universal in its quality. That seems at odds with itself at first glance.
The distinguishing characteristic of all virtue is not the quality itself, and the mistake lies in looking for the virtue of courage in courage itself, or to look for the virtue of any virtue in that same virtue’s nature.
It is through the lens of wisdom where the true nature of any and every virtue can be seen.
The firefighter who risks his life to save a child from a burning building is not courageous depending on whether or not he succeeds or fails, neither is he foolhardy dependent upon the opposite outcome. One determines whether such action is courageous or foolhardy based on the foreseeable possibility of success.
The courageous firefighter may fail, the foolhardy firefighter may succeed. We are inclined to view the decision through the lens of hindsight rather than foresight, which is erroneous but an understandable human frailty in the observer not the actor.
The actor believes he will succeed, or he will not act. The non-actor believes that he will fail, or he would have acted. We assess the virtue based upon our assessment of the likelihood of success, not the assessment of the person whose virtue is under examination.
We assess that the Broward county deputy sheriff who stood by and waited while children were being slaughtered lacked the virtue of courage because most people consider the possibility of success to be worth the risk, myself included.
He had the ability and training to make a difference, he was placed there with an affirmative duty to take such a risk, thus action was required, appropriate, but alas found wanting. We would not expect such action from a eighty year old lady walking by the school with a walker and a can of mace, we would not brand her a coward.
This gets to the real point, that virtue, in this example the virtue of courage, is not the same for different individuals, because our expectations and demands for such virtue is contingent upon the ability of the individual to effect the outcome desired.
This does not make the virtue of courage to be that of situational ethics, but rather contingent upon the potential effectiveness of action. The little olde lady may have the courage to face down such attacker, but would be foolish to do so.
It is the conjunction of the virtue with wisdom by which we measure the value of the virtue. A society does not profit from everyone acting courageously, or honestly, or humbly; however it does profit when those people in the position where such virtue is appropriate are appropriately virtuous.
It is in the nature of men to defend their families, but it is in the nature of women to protect their children, not to protect their men; and the nature of children to be thus protected. We do not put children in front line combat to protect grown men, that would not be virtuous, because it would be foolish.
Virtue follows function; it has its place in context though the essential nature of the virtue remains unchanged, the form that virtue takes varies.
So are there good men? Man is often good, sometimes bad, and capable of change. Good and evil, like virtues and vices, are universal abstract concepts. A man is not an abstract concept; he must choose.
