The Nuremberg Offense

"If your friends told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?"

Did your mother or father ever ask you that question?

If they did, it was because you had attempted to rationalize something that you had done wrong, by way of someone else's conscience. This is a stock Socratic maneuver known to parents for generations, and intended to establish the concept of personal, individual responsibility for one's own free choices. That is the point that it aims for: "You, son, are the one who has to make up your mind. That's why you have a mind."

It is a principal and characteristic attribute of human existence, that we have to choose our way of living. This has implications that are both immediate and profound. Virtually everything about our lives turns around this power to analyze facts, in order to determine what they mean to our existence, for good or ill: to either preserve and enhance our existence, or diminish and -- ultimately -- see it end.

There is necessarily a political aspect to this attribute. It is in the requirement for each individual human being to be able to think and act without the imposition of any other human being in determining the best way to live. This is called "freedom".

Prior to that political aspect, however, there is a moral aspect. It is the fact that human beings must make choices that gives rise to the very concept of "morality".

When we consider an action to be either "moral" or "immoral", the first thing that we understand is that the individual who committed the action could have done something different in facing the situation that caused him to act. The judgment that we characterize with those terms expresses either endorsement or rejection of the choice that the individual in question has made. The standard by which we conclude on these judgments is in the difference between human beings and all other living things. For example: it would not even arise in a rational person's mind to morally indict a tiger for attacking a human being, because that's what tigers do. There is no serious choice involved for that creature.

There is for human beings, however, and the entire mechanism for concluding on the choice resides completely in each individual.

The most penetrating illustration of this set of facts and principles in the 20th century occurred at Nuremberg, Germany. The facts of the cases brought against the Nazi defendants were so vile that it should not surprise anyone that the defense so often consisted in the argument that "they told me to do it". However, if there is any such thing as the everlasting credit of mankind, then one hard kernel of it will always reside in the fact that, in that unprecedented crucible of justice, it was proclaimed for all to know that no corrupt soul may freely resort to the conscience of others for redemption.

Full conceptual integrity requires us to understand that this set of principles is a two-way street. When we say that no person is responsible for the actions of others, we are simply turning the principles that struck down the Nuremberg Defense to view in the opposite direction. The determination of any individual's responsibility for his action necessarily excludes any individuals who are not responsible for that action, for the manifestly obvious reason that they did not choose to commit it.

Senator Rick Santorum did not stab to death Miss Shakia Gunn, aged 15, of Newark, New Jersey, early last Sunday morning. No matter the precision or depth of his thinking -- or even complete lack of thinking -- the person who did that, did so completely on his own authority.

This fact is why Arthur Silber is utterly wrong in his insinuations that anyone else is responsible, "to whatever degree" -- or to the least degree -- for that murder.

Santorum is a stupid and reprehensible person, presumptive of power that no person should ever have, and incompetent to wield it to the standards that credulous people constantly hope he might. However, the observation and endorsement of reality that sensible people call justice demands that they keep this truth: he did not kill that girl, or have anything else whatever to do with her murder.

To assert otherwise is to deny the moral responsibility of the person who did murder her, and to turn the vehicle of judgment into the wrong lane of the conceptual street. If we really are to agree that crimes are attributable to "a cultural atmosphere" instead of the solely willful agency of the individuals who commit them, then Adolf Eichmann should never have been marched to the scaffold at Jerusalem.

And everyone who matters knows just how wrong -- offensive, actually, to the very ideas of morality and justice -- that would have been.