{"id":277,"date":"2005-03-26T22:15:09","date_gmt":"2005-03-26T16:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/2005\/03\/26\/right-wrong-and-society\/"},"modified":"2005-03-26T22:15:09","modified_gmt":"2005-03-26T16:45:09","slug":"right-wrong-and-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200503\/right-wrong-and-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Right, Wrong and Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

Suppose that an assembly of citizens is gathered to decide on whether a homosexual should be executed or not. Two citizens – let’s call them Ravikiran and Nilu – are supposed to speak before the assembly to present their points of view. <\/p>\n

Ravi speaks first. He argues against, not only putting the homosexual to death, but also against punishing him in any way whatsoever. He points out to his fellow citizens that this person has not harmed others. He argues that the assembly should adopt the principle that no one should be punished based on what the assembly finds distasteful, or even sacrilegious, because such criteria are apt to rebound on their perpetrators.
\n
\nHe goes on in this vein for some more time, but the exact details of his argument need not detain us. What matters is that to be able to say anything on this issue at all, he needed to be able to assume that there exist right and wrong independent of what society says it is, and the job of the assembly is only to discover what is the right thing to do, not decide it.<\/p>\n

Contrast this with Nilu’s predicament. Nilu, by the way, was up next. Just as he was about to speak, he remembered that he had earlier chastised<\/a> Ravi for saying that a particular law was wrong. He had done it on the grounds that right and wrong depended on what society decided it was, and it was and one could not sit in judgement over others over right and wrong. But in this case, “society” in the form of the assembly had not yet decided what was right. So how could he say anything? So he sat down without saying a word.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Suppose that an assembly of citizens is gathered to decide on whether a homosexual should be executed or not. Two citizens – let’s call them Ravikiran and Nilu – are supposed to speak before the assembly to present their points of view. Ravi speaks first. He argues against, not only putting the homosexual to death, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}