Crimes and Misdemeanors: Can A Bad Person Be Happy?

Woody Allen’s movie Crimes and Misdemeanors depicts Martin Landau’s character, Judah Rosenthal, as literally getting away with murder. The woman he has been having an affair with is threatening to tell his wife about it, plus a few dubious old business dealings for good measure. He hires a hitman to kill her. Initially plagued with guilt, Rosenthal learns to ignore it. Allen repeats this general scenario in a later movie called Match Point. A wealthy man, Chris Wilton, gets his girlfriend pregnant and asks her to have an abortion. She refuses, so he murders her; this time up close and personal, not using a hitman. He later tells the ghost of his victim that it is necessary to suppress feelings of guilt to continue living and that if he were caught and punished it would be only fitting, “at least there would be some small sign of justice, some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning.” The repetition of the word “small” suggests that his being caught would not amount to much anyway. The fact that he is not caught suggests there is no justice and no meaning if we are supposed to take his character as authoritative on this matter and depending on whether this reflects authorial intention.

Plato argued against the point of view of Allen’s characters more than two millennia ago, contending in the Republic that a good person with a reputation for corruption is in a better position than a corrupt person with a good reputation. Gorgias addresses a similar topic, with Socrates arguing that being an all-powerful tyrant does not mean you have the power to be happy.  If a tyrant’s desires are expanded maximally, for the joy of satisfying them, the tyrant will not be master of himself, he will never be satisfied, and will find it impossible to live a well-regulated life, and to do his duty concerning his friends and the gods. He will, as a tyrant, be forced to pander to the public in order to stay in power, and to do what they want and not what he wants. At one point, Socrates says that he too can murder anyone he wants. Polus replies that that is no good because Socrates is an ordinary citizen and would be punished. Socrates replies that if he has committed an evil act then being punished is exactly what he deserves. Punishment is just in itself and it also acts as a deterrent from traveling further along that path. Socrates argues that if you really want to ruin someone’s life, give him unlimited money and power and make him exempt from prosecution; the exact opposite of the sophists’ boastful claim that they are powerful because they can convict the innocent and exonerate the guilty. The power to be unjust and corrupt is a failing, not a desirable ability. For Plato, only the power to be happy matters.

The situations presented in the movies raises the question: would you kill your girlfriend, or any other person who has been deeply within one’s sphere of moral concern, in order to procure your own happiness? If you have ever suffered from a bad conscience, guilt and regrets for far lesser behaviors than that, the answer should be a definitive “no.” In fact, it seems like an excellent way of never being happy again.

In a Twilight Zone episode titled “Button, Button,” a man knocks on the door of a couple and tells them that if they push the button of the box he is holding they will get two hundred thousand dollars and that someone they do not know will die. The husband is against it, the wife is in favor. The husband opens the box to find that the button is not attached to anything. He is skeptical, but also against murder. The couple does nothing for several days. Finally, the wife decides to push the button. Shortly afterwards, the man returns to take back “the button unit” and  to present them with the money. The wife asks if someone died. The man answers, “Of course.” “So, what happens now?” The wife asks. “Why, you spend the money. And I hope you enjoy it.” “The button unit will be reprogrammed and offered to someone else under the same terms and conditions.” He says, “I can assure you that it will be offered to someone … who … you … don’t … know.” The answer is a perfect instance of karma. Reciprocity is a foundational aspect of morality – “Do unto others as you would have been do unto you” – so all’s well that ends well.

The parable of the Sultan and the Vizier has a related message. The Sultan asks his Vizier to build him a palace while he is away. The Vizier thinks, “Now is my opportunity to enrich myself. I have been a loyal servant all these years and yet I have little to show for it.” So, he builds the palace with inferior materials. Instead of gold, he uses bronze and pockets the difference in price. Instead of marble he uses plaster. After a couple of years, the Sultan returns and says to the Vizier, “Please arrange an opening ceremony for the palace.” The Vizier does so. At the ceremony, the Sultan says, “I have a surprise. You have been a good and faithful servant. This palace is for you.” The moral of the story is that one builds one’s own soul and one has to live within it. If you are a hateful despicable person then you must live with an angry monster for the rest of your life. It might seem that maltreating and ripping off other people could be to your benefit but it will really be to your detriment.[1]

On the topic of whether a murderer can be happy, an officemate once insisted that if I were one of two people stuck on a desert island and needed food to survive until the rescue ship arrived, I would of course kill and eat the other person in order to make it. The fact that I was vegetarian at the time suggests a greater squeamishness concerning plans for dinner than that! He would not take no for an answer. But, he was also a liar and morally unscrupulous himself, so it may have been projection. He would deny that he had said something a few minutes ago in order to win an argument and he claimed Native American heritage to get a job, but was all white. One might live biologically as having been a murderous cannibal, but living with oneself would be another matter. Hopefully, claiming to be unwilling to behave in a fashion approaching that of a Jeffrey Dahmer is not to be regarded as obnoxious virtue signaling.

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece. Chris Wilton, in Match Point, is shown reading the novel. Due to the similarities between the plotlines, the movie can be taken as some kind of comment on and response to Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov murders an unpleasant elderly pawnbroker and her sister. The pawnbroker’s maltreatment of her sister was one of the reasons Raskolnikov had selected her to murder as part of his plan to act in the manner of Napoleon in the first place. He reasoned that if you kill someone you are a murderer. If you kill millions, you are a great general and a great man. Raskolnikov determined to kill in the manner of the general in a bid for logical consistency and to put himself on the level of Napoleon. Ironically, the pawnbroker’s sister happened to witness the attack so Raskolnikov felt obliged to kill her, too; thus, treating the sister worse than the pawnbroker had ever done. Chris Wilton similarly kills an innocent neighbor in order to be in a good position to kill Nola Rice, the girlfriend. Wilton describes the neighbor’s death as collateral damage – “the innocent are sometimes slain to make way for a grander scheme.” Calling what he has done “a grander scheme” seems literally illusions of grandeur.

Porphyry – a detective named after a famous Neo-Platonic philosopher – knows Raskolnikov did it, but cannot prove it. He very carefully and persistently sets up situations to play upon the conscience of Raskolnikov to get him to confess, which he eventually does after many false starts and prevarications. Because Dostoevsky is a great and honest artist, the way this is depicted is believable. Raskolnikov is not really an unredeemable sociopath; just horribly misguided in wishing to “make his point.” The punishment part of Crime and Punishment is a happy ending. Raskolnikov gets to repent and atone for his behavior. Like all great tales, it is a conversion story and a self-overcoming in the manner of Madam Bovary, The Red and the Black’s Julien Sorel, Remembrance of Things Past’s Monsieur Swann, and Don Quixote. Martin Landau and Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ characters do not get the happy ending. Supposedly, they have no need for a Porphyry and can go on contentedly unpunished. Match Point also has a detective, Detective Banner, one who at one point realizes that Wilton’s character is guilty, only for the blame to fall on a homeless man who happened to pick up the discarded ring of the murdered neighbor that landed on the sidewalk when Wilton tried to dispose of the neighbor’s jewels he stole to make it look like a burglary by throwing them in the river. That turn of events resembles “The Mysterious Visitor” in The Brothers Karamazov who visits Father Zossima. He too had killed his lover, only for an uncouth servant to get the blame. Unlike Chris Wilton, the mysterious visitor is plagued with guilt and worried what his children would think of him if they knew the truth. He doesn’t feel worthy of their love, or his wife’s.

Plato and Dostoevsky were geniuses of the human condition and the human soul. One wonders if Woody Allen could have found a better way to engage with them rather than a brute negation. Chris Wilton’s murder with a shot gun of the neighbor and girlfriend, and his response to the ghosts of his victims is ugly, bad, and false; the obverse of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Plato’s Republic and Gorgias are two of the most seminal and famous texts of Western Civilization, next to Homer, Hesiod, and the Bible. Dostoevsky is a recognized literary genius. Will people be watching and celebrating Match Point for thousands of years in the future as also attaining that level? It would be most disappointing if they were. Match Point is Allen’s artistic rebuttal to Crime and Punishment. There is simply no question about which has more merit. One has a picture of the possibility of a humane redemption, the other does not. Artistic productions have to be intellectually and emotionally persuasive. One can imagine Allen’s despairing characters being more compelling to an atheist since despair is harder to avoid for them. However, if Viktor Frankl could find people who remained loving and kind in a concentration camp, then despair is not inevitable.

Allen is following in the footsteps of Nietzsche who also rehashes arguments that Plato provides people like Thrasymachus, Polus, and Callicles, without bothering to include Socrates’ rebuttal or even mentioning it. And Nietzsche’s academic specialty was philology and the Greek classics. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was all about how to understand Greek tragedy and the meaning of the chorus and hero dynamic, so it was not an accidental omission.

The thought that the bad person can be happy is understandably worrisome. It would be disturbing were it true. Perhaps the question that cuts to the chase the fastest is to ask yourself if you envy these protagonists. A happy person is almost by definition enviable. Allen’s protagonists are contemptible, not enviable. For any decent person, being a girlfriend murderer would be a fate worse than death. Would you be willing to have a frontal lobotomy if you were assured that it would make you happy? Arguably, the recipients of frontal lobotomies are not candidates for happiness. Anything that you think will make you happy you consider good. Are murder and lobotomies good? The richest definition of happiness is the Greek concept of eudaimonia, better translated as “flourishing.” A flourishing person is absolutely enviable. Girlfriend murderers and those with frontal lobotomies are not. Both conditions represent a terrible stunting and diminishment within the human condition. One is a moral imbecile, the other an intellectual imbecile. In the latter case, most of the richness and possibilities of being a human are ruled out. Moral imbeciles, also known as sociopaths, fare no better.

Waking up one morning to discover that one is a murderer or a harmer of children would be a nightmare. Matthew 18:6, “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” Soldiers suffering from PTSD are more likely to be those who had to kill than those who were shot at or bombed. Their conscience plagues them decades later, in some cases.

If one were told that, “Yes, you will wake up to find that you are an immoral murderer, but, we will remove your conscience so that you will be oblivious to your crimes,” would this be any better? It would make you an even worse person who will go on to behave in other dastardly ways. In neither scenario is one happy, enviable, or flourishing as a human being.

If becoming a Goebbels or Stalin would be a fate worse than death – and it would be – then they are not happy. We envy rich people because we think being rich makes you happy. If you know better; if you know that having an ample sufficiency is about as good, then you stop envying them. Someone might reply that being a murderer or child harmer would not make you happy but that does not mean that someone else would not be made happy by those actions, then this would be like imagining that although no correlation between enormous wealth and happiness can be found it would somehow exist in individual cases. Then you would need to explain how having more money than you can possibly use would contribute to human flourishing for anyone. Has this imaginary rich person stepped outside the human condition?

Both of Allen’s movies have protagonists at the lowest possible level of moral development of the three that Lawrence Kohlberg identifies, which are pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. At a pre-conventional level, the reason one does not engage in immoral acts is because of a fear of punishment, including fear of God. Murder is about as major a moral transgression as it is possible to make, the closer a person is to you the worse, and a willingness to commit it betokens an abysmal character.

Someone at this level thinks that if he is not punished by the justice system then he “got away with it.” He has escaped the consequences of his murderous actions. This is not at all how people at higher levels of moral development see it. But, it will not work to try to communicate this superior vision to a moral imbecile. His lack of comprehension is what makes him an imbecile in the first place. In fact, trying to explain things to him is likely to make matters worse. Avicenna (980-1037 AD) and Origen (185-253 AD) know that exposure to knowledge that is beyond one’s level can be corrupting. Origen contends: “The anticipation of a higher knowledge by someone unpurified and unprepared can be harmful and even existentially false for a person.” “The WORD, the personal, absolute, and sole truth, does not become a liar by its adaptation to different stages of maturity.” Similarly, Avicenna appeals to two different sayings: “The secret of destiny is a stony path, do not walk along it.” And, “He who knows the secret of destiny is an atheist.” The secret of destiny is that one creates one’s own destiny, not God, which is what an atheist believes, too. Sinners can prosper materially and saints get martyred. God does not reward or punish. At higher moral and cognitive levels, one knows that all talk of extrinsic reward and punishment by God is metaphorical. Introduced too early in development, one might think that having one’s girlfriend murdered because she is about to tell your wife of her existence or she is inconveniently pregnant with your child is consistent with a happy life provided no one finds out.

Someone’s life and soul will take a turn for the worse if he acts on his worst impulses. If his only way to understand this fact is to imagine a punitive God, rather than just “consequences,” then he is closer to the truth that being good is better than being bad, even if he has the nature of those consequences wrong. They are self-inflicted, not bestowed by God. A parent must act in lieu of a conscience for a child, until he manages to develop one. Some adults are in need of such help, too. But, more significant even than consequences is the disposition and failure of character that led to the immoral action in the first place.

Avicenna writes that, in contrast to the punitive lawmaker image of God, “reward,” and “closeness to God” are really pleasure in the soul corresponding to the extent of its perfection, and “punishment” and “alienation from God” is really pain in the soul corresponding to its deficiency. To a degree, this means that each one of us is exactly as happy as we deserve to be, with gradations of hell and heaven here and now. Of course, there is also the matter of undeserved misfortune or good fortune with the former perhaps obliterating any real chance of happiness. You can fool your neighbors, sometimes, but you cannot fool reality.

The argument here boils down to a difference between intrinsic and extrinsic punishment. The morally naïve person thinks that there is no punishment at all if it is not inflicted from without. The more morally mature person knows that punishment for being a certain kind of person who engages in certain kinds of activities is intrinsic. It does not depend on some external agency. The intrinsic reward for practicing the violin is, assuming the practice is along the right lines, to get better at playing the violin. The extrinsic reward might be to make money or to win applause from an audience. There is nothing necessary about the extrinsic reward – most violinists make no money and get no applause, but the intrinsic reward is inherent to the activity itself.

The Greeks identified four virtues necessary for human flourishing. Eudaimonia is not a passing feeling, but someone doing well with reasonable satisfaction with life. The four virtues are justice (morality), generosity, courage, and moderation. Any lack in these areas will make eudaimonia impossible. Cowardice will stop you from taking the chances needed to ask someone out, apply for a job, accept social invitations, stand up to bullies, etc. A failure of generosity will poison one’s relations with others. One will hate gifts because they necessitate their reciprocation. Failures of moderation will lead to overeating, overdrinking, injury through overdoing exercise, or through sloth. The necessity of moderation for health means that having a massive expendable income serves no particular purpose. Overworking will harm one’s emotional wellbeing – running on adrenaline – and it will alienate you from friends and family. Failures of morality will damage one’s relationships with other people and possibly lead to prison.

Woody Allen’s fantasy of the girlfriend killer betokens someone without a conscience, particularly if the murder does not go on to plague him later, which would make him a sociopath with all the deficiencies attending that state of being. The idea that one is otherwise a nice person but deliberately, coldly, and rationally planned such a murder does not make sense. One can imagine an impulsive murder in a fit of rage. Around eighty percent of imprisoned violent criminals killed or assaulted in that manner. But, the coldly calculating murderer seems more sociopathic. Neither the impulsive killer nor the coldblooded murderer would be capable of having healthy, happy, trusting relationships. Romantic love involves trust, respect and admiration and a murderer is not worthy of any of those qualities. Impulse killers lack moderation and self-control, and sociopathic killers lack morality and justice. The latter violate, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If one is prepared to murder, there is no reason to expect one to be moral in lesser regards either. No nice well-adjusted person will want to be in a relationship with the murderer, so the murderer is stuck with the maladjusted and imperceptive. The imperceptive will discover what kind of person they are living with sooner or later. Or, perhaps, they will simply be unhappy in the relationship without knowing why. The “happy wife, happy life” saying contains the truth that living with someone who is miserable will rub off on you.

Warren Farrell points out that a woman might select a successful trial lawyer to marry because he is socially and economically well off and in a good position to be provider and protector. However, being the romantic partner of such a person might be no fun at all. Imagine having the usual arguments that romantic couples do. How is that likely to turn out? The very qualities that make him a success at work might make him a failure at home. There is a good chance that his hatred of losing disputes, serving him so well at work, will make its appearance at home, too.

Plato, in The Gorgias, observes that we are friends with people who are like us, morally and intellectually. This is confirmed by ordinary observation and modern psychology. Plato also comments that he who is without temperance will not be able to do what is just and holy with regard to the gods or man. He will lead a robber’s life and look to the main chance, unable to give others the consideration they are due. A creep will end up with another creep, or make the non-creep intensely unhappy leading to his own unhappiness.

Eric Fromm suggests, in The Art of Loving, that our ability to be happy is limited by our ability to love. This seems true, especially if we include moral aspiration, and also beloved activities. Achieving some kind of mastery concerning the things we love doing, the inspiration of the divine and higher, and communion with friends, children, spouses, and community, all seem crucial to eudaimonia (flourishing).

If we are a parent, or a teacher, a doctor, or an accountant, an engineer or a police officer, we have a duty to those we serve; namely to do what we think is in their best interests. If the child, student, patient, client, or community, loves us back and says nice things about us, that is very nice. But, we cannot pander to them and do and say what will flatter them, assuring them that no effort is required on their part. Love is a gift and should not be sought directly. We must do what we think best in the role that we are playing. Only then can we have self-respect and only then can any love sent our way have any meaning or worth. We want to be loved for what we really are, and what we really are must be worthy of love. A flattering, pandering, sycophant, should he be the recipient of kindly sentiments and thoughts knows he is not worthy of love and that this good will has been bought with fraudulent coin.

Can the Mafia hitman be happy? Can he flourish? His friends might be reasonably smart, but they will be morally bankrupt. They will kill and torture without mercy. They might even enjoy it. Can such a person be admired? Of course not. Being loved or liked by someone you respect, admire and trust is a blessing. Being admired by the worst of men is not. As the worst of men, the hitman will associate with his kin. If, instead, he socializes with genuinely nice people, then he must hide his true nature and his profession from them. They will thus have an entirely false image of who he truly is. If they found out, they would be horrified. Any affection he receives, the hitman will know is misguided. These acquaintances are loving some entirely fictional version of him. No one can get any real joy or satisfaction in being admired and loved for something he is not. If someone were to be confused with Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest sprinter, and admired for that reason, it would be merely embarrassing. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else,” they would say and take no pleasure from the confusion.

All this is most especially true for the family of the hit man. According to fictional portrayals, Mafia hitmen regularly have wives and children. With regard to his wife, but especially his children, he will seek to prevent them from knowing how he earns his living. He will not bring them to “Take your kid to work” day. He will want to hide his intimidation, knee-capping, torturing, and murdering, and instead present himself as someone worthy of respect, admiration, and trust. This will all be a lie. He knows that he deserves none of those things. If his children should learn the truth and continue to love him without abatement, then the hitman will know that his children are as evil, corrupt, and contemptible as he is, and this would be more painful to him, if he loves his children, than if they knew the truth and despised him.

Let us imagine the hitman has no conscience and sees nothing wrong with how he earns his living. He brings his work home with him and tortures his victims in the living room, having tied them to the radiator. His wife and children are as morally corrupt and evil as he. They sit there watching TV or eating their breakfast on a tray; perhaps asking for a thicker gag to stifle the victims’ screams because they are having trouble hearing the dialogue. Are such monsters capable of love? No. Would they cut out the hitman’s liver and serve it to dinner guests if the Mafia boss suggested doing so? Yes. Absolutely. The hitman could not trust them, and they could not trust him. If they were capable of respect and admiration at all, they would presumably value utter heartlessness. In other words, they would look up to what any normal person would look down at and despise.

There have been dramatic portrayals of such people. One is a cannibalistic bounty hunter in Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch, shown nibbling on the skeletal remains of someone’s arm and hand beside a fire at night time. Such a person is incapable of friendship. He would have no interest in talking to someone. If he had a tracking dog, he would slice up any faux “friend” as dog food without a second thought. He would take no pleasure in being respected, admired or trusted by anyone and would consider trust the sign of a fool. He is solitary; a loner. He has effectively exited the human community. No one really thinks such a person is “flourishing.” To flourish means to fulfill human potential and a loveless psychopath is not it. He would be neither happy nor unhappy perhaps. It is likely that he would be bored and find little meaning in anything. A talented shipbuilder, tentmaker, storywriter, ditch digger, air traffic controller, all get their satisfaction from doing their jobs well and people enjoying and appreciating the results of their efforts.

A narcissist is egocentric and cares mostly about himself. Again, this will prevent successful social connections from occurring and ruining happiness. Two thought experiments reveal who is a narcissist. One involves a counterfactual. You get married, live a long life, and then you die. It turns out that your spouse never really loved you and faked it for an ulterior motive, e.g., money. You are dead and will never know the truth. Does the thought of that bother you? If you say, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” or, “Ignorance is bliss,” then you are a narcissist because it means you do not care what your imaginary spouse actually thinks and feels. All you care about is how you feel. And, you feel great. If it is good for you, it is good. Period.

Another version of this is Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine. Here, you get to program the machine for what you imagine is your perfect life. Once inside the machine, you will forget that it is fiction and you can never change your mind and leave. Only a narcissist would accept such a scenario because all the friends, lovers, and admirers in the machine will be fictional. You know that before you enter the Experience Machine. Again, so long as you feel good, then it is good. You do not care about the reality of what other people are feeling and experiencing. Not caring about such things has consequences and will prevent someone from living a good life and from being happy.

An additional consideration is that most of us get meaning in our lives from raising children and doing a job and doing it well – mastery, autonomy and meaning being key. In the Experience Machine, one is doing nothing. There is no job and there are no children. They are all an illusion. The utter pointlessness of an activity in the Experience Machine should discourage anyone from entering it.

The quality of character that lets someone murder for convenience cannot help but have an influence on other areas of one’s life and especially with friends and spouses. Remember that Woody Allen characters are not angry; merely calculating. Killing someone who is outside one’s sphere of moral concern is one thing. Murdering a lover is another. If lovers are not in the sphere of moral concern, then who is? It is true that divorcing or divorced romantic partners can be the objects of hatred and resentment, but that is the familiar phenomenon of hate being the flip side of love. Disappointment and betrayal; broken vows to love and to hold, in sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer, all color the former relationship. The strength of such feelings reflects the continuing emotional connection. Mr. Crimes and Misdemeanors, or Match Point, is not a victim of passion and failed love. He is a remorseless killer who has taken a calculating attitude – a cost/benefit analysis. Expecting such a person to have high quality and rewarding human relationships is like expecting someone with a club foot to win a foot race. That club foot is likely to interfere with nearly any athletic endeavor. Likewise, an excellent athlete – particularly the all-rounder who participates in something like the decathlon – will be very good at anything involving athleticism. Mr. Crimes and Misdemeanors has a clubfoot of the soul.

Non-philosophers sometimes take philosophers to task for focusing on killing when thinking about ethics. We do that to bring the questions into finer focus. If the topic is bad or evil people, then considering marginally bad or ambiguous behavior about which reasonable people can have differing opinions, merely muddies the waters. What is needed is a clearly evil deed. Otherwise, the debate changes from whether evil people can be happy to whether someone is evil in the first place. We need an unambiguously evil act and the Woody Allen movies provide that.

In conversation, the topic of happy war criminals came up. These were generals who committed war crimes in Yugoslavia’s civil war. Presumably, their victims were outside the generals’ sphere of moral concern and were seen as enemies. Also, a war without atrocities barely deserves the name. They can be expected. Moral development goes from egocentrism, to ethnocentrism, to worldcentrism, with many degrees of ethnocentrism. Wives, husbands, lovers, children, parents, siblings and friends exist at the most intimate and lowest degree of ethnocentrism. For the generals, this would extend to members of their ethnic community. It would seem that the generals could be capable of being reasonably happy though the murderous brutality of “ethnic cleansing” does not say good things about them. Ethnocentrism is different from the girlfriend killers. Killing your girlfriend is such a violation of moral concern that it seems like the murderer remains at the egocentric level. A moral clubfoot if ever there were one. Patricide and matricide are likely to make the news because they are regarded as particularly horrific for good reason. They represent a greater defect of soul than killing a stranger.

So much for murderers. Can less bad people be happy? They can be happy to the extent that the imperfections and deficiencies, and degree of perfection of their soul permit, following Avicenna’s formula. The more one’s heart is filled with hate, resentment, and desire for revenge, the more miserable one will be. Loving your enemies would make you the opposite. It might be an ideal, but the closer one comes to it, the better your quality of life. The less one can be trusted, respected and admired, the less one can be happy. If one is respected and admired by despicable people, this will not be rewarding and trust can certainly not come into it.

Some people might wonder about the happiness of certain politicians. Your having a visceral dislike of them as people is neither here nor there. You might disagree with their policies and you would have every right to do so. If they have been bought off by lobbyists or blackmailed by a Jeffrey Epstein, the CIA or the FBI, then they are corrupt – sacrificing the good of the nation over the good of themselves. Many of them are rewarded with positions in the private sphere for toeing the line. It is hard to know what to do about such corruption. Plato’s philosopher kings were not allowed to own property. There was a reason for that! But, bringing politics into it again muddies the waters and we go from considering the happiness of the evil man to policy or worldview disputes.

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The anti-heroes of those Woody Allen films are supposed to be people who commit an evil act knowing it is evil. Actual sociopaths belong to another category all together and there is no real question as to whether they can be happy, flourishing people. They cannot. Sociopaths lead miserable lives. With a very high threshold to feeling anything emotionally, they tend to seek high stimulation activities like extreme sports. But, how much time can one spend sky diving and cliff jumping? Sociopaths report feeling empty inside and their primary emotion is boredom. The key to their relative misery is their carelessness regarding other people. Unable to love, there is no point in having a conversation, watching a movie, reading a work of fiction, or having a romantic relationship. This puts them in an existential position comparable to being the last man on earth. Many of the things that interest us become pointless when there is no one with whom to share them. One reads a subject like philosophy partly for one’s own edification, but sharing one’s thoughts with friends, students and readers makes the whole exercise much more meaningful. In fact, meaning is a matter of connections to context – and it is not the inanimate world to which one connects in this case.

In the relative isolation of an academic’s summer, one’s interactions with people draw to a minimum for some of us and as a consequence one has less and less to say. This indicates that much of what we do say has to do with our dealings with people. Philosophy, as with most subjects, is a minority interest. One cannot simply start repeating what one has been reading or thinking about in most conversations.

The last man alive cannot be happy. He has no children of whom to be proud or watch with interest what they make of their lives. No friends with which to take a trip, watch a movie, or connect conversationally. One can golf or bowl alone, but would anyone find that fun? Finding congenial and like-minded people to talk to affirms that one is not alone in the world and that one’s point of view does indeed make sense. The alternative is that one is an “idiot:” originally a Greek word meaning “own,” or “private.” A sui generis, unique, worldview might seem to make one original, but it is more likely that one is mad. Given our mimetic nature, we start to feel that we are mad. What are the chances that we alone are right and all the others wrong?

The sociopath has nothing but contempt for normal people. Not having a conscience, he imagines that we are merely pretending. Knowing that were he to reveal his true nature this would lead to him being ostracized, he dissembles and puts up a false front. If he is liked, it is because he is hiding his monstrous nature. He is Dorian Gray. Not having a conscience, sometimes said to be our connection to God, he does not care, but the not caring contributes to his boredom. He makes no moral evaluations of himself or others – except a blanket condemnation for being fake. No gossip for the psycho.

Not having a conscience would mean feeling free to do what it takes to be happy. To lie, cheat, and sabotage others at work. To stab people in the back and undermine them. But, there is no point in this ability if being happy is not a real possibility anyway. One has gained the supposed means, but lost the end. There is a reasonable chance that such behavior will catch up with you eventually, too.

Others behave in an evil fashion while thinking they are being good, with negative consequences for the people around them and the society in which they live. While it is hard not to feel vindictive towards such people and to wish to see them punished, their moral stupidity presumably calls for lenience. Once they discover the truth, in this life or the next, they can take some comfort in knowing their intentions were good.

Many social climbers act in the same way as the “good intention” crowd, but their goal is to boost their rank by claiming to be more caring than others. Being prosocial is obviously something society needs. However, this is merely an act. Such a person does nothing concretely good for anyone and simply does not care if the policies for which he advocates will harm the very people he claims to love. An example would be releasing violent antisocial criminals instead of charging them with crimes, or releasing them without bail until their trial. This leaves their communities exposed to the predations of the offender. Anyone who actually cared about black Americans, for instance, would take care to lock the sadistic antisocial criminals away for as long as possible. Caring more about offenders than victims is obscene. Offenders are not the “real” victims. The actual victims are.

NOTE:

[1] Someone commented that the Vizier still gets to keep the money he has pocketed. True. But, he has to actually live in a shoddy, third-rate abode.

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