7.6 Principles 289
the reason. That is what it means to say: ‘Two
wrongs don’t make a right.’
If you accept the principle that two wrongs
don’t make a right, you can’t really accept
Carla’s defence that the big music companies
have ‘asked for it’ by charging inflated prices.
You can sympathise with people who feel that
they are being overcharged. But you can’t
rationally argue that therefore cheating is good
behaviour.Differences of degree and
differences of kind
There is another line of reasoning used by
Carla that we need to consider. Straight after
her attack on the music industry she says:
‘Anyway, it’s not like I’m walking into a shop
and taking something off the shelf.’ To which
Dieter replies: ‘It’s still theft. You’re helping
yourself to something without paying for it.
And you are cheating the owners of the
copyright out of what is theirs.’Activity
Carefully consider or discuss the question of
whether it is still theft. Is there a difference
between shoplifting or stealing someone’s
phone, for example, and infringing the
copyright law in the way Carla intends to?
And if so, what is the difference?Commentary
The difference, according to Dieter, is one of
degree. According to Carla it is a difference in
kind. If these expressions are not familiar to
you, their meaning should soon become clear.
A difference in degree is just a difference
that can be measured or counted: for example,
degrees of temperature, or degrees of strength,
or of intelligence, or of wealth. The list could
go on and on. If we ask two people what their
earnings are, and find that one receives just a
little more than the other, we would call theSo how might Carla defend her position?
One of her lines of argument is to claim that
the companies who make and sell CDs charge
an unjustly high price, which to some extent
justifies cheating them. This is, in fact, quite a
common argument that people bring against
big and powerful organisations. It implies that
overcharging is itself a form of theft; or if not
theft, then at least an abuse of position. As
Carla says:
‘Do you know how much profit they all make
out of people like you and me? If they didn’t
charge so much, we wouldn’t need to copy
CDs. They’re greedy. And if piracy is denting
their profits, good for piracy!’‘Two wrongs don’t make a right’
The trouble with this argument is that it
infringes another principle that many people
rightly stand by: the principle that two wrongs
don’t make a right. Basically this means that if
someone takes advantage of you, it doesn’t
make it right for you to behave in the same
way. Of course, we all know of occasions when
it seems quite appropriate to say that so-and-
so ‘asked for it’, or ‘deserved it’, or ‘had it
coming to him’. Suppose a politician has come
to power by spreading malicious lies about her
opponents, only to meet her downfall because
someone has finally done the same thing to
her. You might say with good reason that she
‘deserved’ the shame and humiliation it
caused her. But that would not make it right to
publicly tell lies about her.
Spreading a malicious lie is wrong,
whichever way you look at it. It is harmful; it
is untruthful; and (since it is malicious) it is
obviously done with intent to do harm. No
matter how ‘deserved’ it may be, it remains a
bad thing to do. In fact, by saying that it is
‘deserved’, you have already made the
judgement that the original act was bad. So
you can’t have it both ways: it can’t be a bad
thing when one person does it and a good
thing when another person does it – whatever