Tipping Toward Gyges

Joseph Bottum’s On the Square column (which, by the way, now appears every Monday) considers the problem of freeloaders and the church :

Lately, however, I’ve become interested in the question of much freeloading on the churches has cultural consequences. It’s a simple proposition of philosophical ethics that the best of all possible worlds, for me, is a world in which all others are obedient and faithful, while I am free. This is why Socrates tells the story of the Ring of Gyges in the Republic, and it’s why Kant phrases the Categorical Imperative the way he does. When he insists that we must act as though our action could become universal law, what he’s outlawing is Gyges: the man who thinks he gets to be immoral in a world in which everyone else has to be moral.

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