The moral ambivalence of crime in an unjust society

Abstract

I Our Crime In the summer of 2005, after thirty-five years of thinking and writing about crime, I was--along with my wife--the victim of one. It happened in the French city of Nice. There they have a crime called vol a la portiere, theft through the car door. Teenagers wait for cars with foreign license plates or recently rented or leased cars. They come up along the passenger side of the car and grab a purse or a watch through the window, or they try the doors and, if they are not locked, open them and grab whatever they see. That is what happened to us. After flying all night, we picked up the car that we were leasing for the summer and, before we could lock the doors, before we even figured out how to lock the doors, we stopped at a red light and two teenage boys pulled open the front and rear passenger doors, and grabbed what they saw. boy who opened the rear door grabbed a carry-on bag. boy who opened the front door, grabbed my wife's purse off her lap. She tried to hold on to it, but in vain. He yanked it away from her and, in the process, broke her finger. I jumped out of the car and started running after the boys. You can guess the outcome. Do the math. I was 63 at the time, they were 15 or 16. I lost them in the French equivalent of housing projects. Then followed dealing with the police, my wife to the hospital in an ambulance, a summer punctuated by two operations--her finger was not only broken, but dislocated, so that pins had to be put in the bone to make it heal straight, and later the pins had to be taken out--and numerous visits to the hospital to change bandages and talk to the surgeon, and so on. When this happened--for example, when I was running after the two boys--I must confess that I had violence in my heart. I do not clearly know what I would have done had I caught one of them, but later I came to think that it was lucky that I had not. I might now be in jail in France for murder. Afterwards, in the days that followed, my anger slowly dissipated. I found that I did not hate these boys. I did not feel rage or even much in the way of anger. My wife's feelings were much the same. We would have liked to see them caught and punished, but we knew that was unlikely--and we did not have any strong feelings about that. My wife and I decided that our revenge against the thieves would be not to let their crime ruin our summer, and it did not. I suspect that we had a better summer than they did, even with our trips to the hospital and without the things that were stolen. They were poor kids living in what the French call a quartier chaud, what in America we would call a rough neighborhood. At the same time, I started to wonder about these feelings and thoughts, in particular, about the dwindling of my anger at our criminals. How should one think and feel morally about such criminals? To answer this question, it is necessary to reflect on the moral nature of crime, since that will tell us what the criminal who commits it is morally responsible for. II Moral Nature of Crime Some people might think that the moral nature of crime is easy to determine. That the youngsters took our possessions or that a law was broken, they think, is enough to show that a moral wrong was done. But, things are more complicated than that. Consider this: Suppose you see someone huddling over a bicycle that is chained to a post. You look closer and you see that the person is sawing the chain and, once the chain is severed, you see the person jump on the bike and pedal quickly off. I think that you would believe that you had witnessed a crime, and so would I. But now look at this letter that appeared in a New York Times Sunday Magazine column called The Ethicist: A few weeks after my bike was stolen, I saw it locked to a post. I knew it was mine, since I had modified it in various ways and recorded the serial number. I ... had no qualms about ... taking it back. …