Continuing from my earlier post on "reason" / "why", I thought that at times we exonerate someone because a reason was not found for their (wrong) action. Because of an absence of explicit intent, the wrong act isn't punished as in the case of the judge's ruling in the case of Asians against Harvard admissions. Read the link below:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-determines-harvard-s-race-conscious-admissions-policy-is-constitutional-11569958184
In other cases, we exonerate a wrong act because there was a reason. "He came late because there was a traffic jam on the way" or "she couldn't deliver the project because her grandmother was in the hospital".
The social reason given is basically to remove any trace of any material intent for the wrong doing and hence to give a clean chit to the party that didn't do the right thing.
Either the presence of a reason or it's absence could be used to exonerate someone. The insidious thing is that this is used not consistently across all occasions and all peoples.
Maybe the pedophile who molested your baby was just trying to learn biology. We really don't know why he was molesting, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment