 Okay, this is a sculptural set that's in the Prado, that famous museum in Spain, not the one in Galboa Park. That depicts Seneca advising Nero. You can see the Skulking insolent Nero sitting there barely paying attention, and then Seneca's got a very long scroll of advice for him, which seems to be going unheeded. This work is addressed directly to Nero, a known and in fact famous person. He was Emperor of Rome. Can I borrow your book for a second? I broke my own rule and didn't bring my book, but I want to quote the very opening of it, where he says, I have assumed the task, Nero Caesar, of writing about mercy so that in some sense I might fulfill the purpose of a mirror and reveal you to yourself as one who is destined to gain the greatest of all pleasures. So first of all, I explained to you before how there's a kind of genre of letter writing known as mirror of princes, and what that means is that the letter writer holds up a mirror which reveals what the person, usually a prince or a king or somebody that a philosopher thinks needs advice, reveals who they are to themselves. And you can tell by this rhetoric, reveal to yourself as one who is destined to gain the greatest of all pleasures. And you find this what I call diplomatic rhetoric. Diplomatic rhetoric basically works like this. You want to convince somebody to do something. They're more powerful than you are. So you can't say, do this, you idiot. What you have to do is say, I see that you are inclined to do such and such, and that is a very good thing, whether they're inclined to do it or not. Or you say, I see that you're not doing such and such, and that's very good. It would be a bad thing and one would be a bad person to do that. That thing that they're supposedly not doing is in fact what they are actually doing. But you have to wrap it in this diplomatic rhetoric or it won't be received well and won't have the intended effect. So I don't know how much you know about Nero but he's one of the great bad guys of history, playing a fiddle while Rome burned and so forth. He considered himself a great artist and he made people sit there and listen to him doing performances and people like, ah, this is terrible but you can't say that. You criticize him and then you wake up dead the next day or something, right? And he's sort of an insufferable, horrible guy. After huge parts of Rome burned down, lots of people died and so forth, he built the biggest palace of all time devoted to himself. The colossal statue of himself and so forth. And so there's a bit of awkwardness in the fact that this stoic philosopher is advising this horrible tyrant and it really creates for us this crisis of interpreting everything in Seneca as I thought was really brought home when I read the first page of James Rome's biography of Seneca called Dying Every Day where he says, look you can look at it like this, yes he's an earnest philosopher doing his best under hard circumstances or he's this really cynical manipulator who's using a stoic philosophy to mask this his own extremely wealthy powerful status and covering over crimes that he's engaged in like usury to people in Britain and things like that. So it is, you know, the biggest problem with this work on mercy is this part at the very beginning that says to the emperor Nero. I mean that already causes a big enormous problem of interpretation here and what's going on here. But that is the reason why there's this diplomatic rhetoric saying you're great, you're a wonderful guy, you're practically like God and so forth. I mean why would you be praising somebody we actually know from historical sources to be bad and the answer to that is diplomatic rhetoric. Okay, sort of a lost art nowadays because we don't really do diplomacy anymore. We just show up and say look we're going to bomb you if this doesn't happen. But there used to be this way of doing things where you sort of, you know, oh I see that you're inclined to pull your troops out of there and that would be a very good thing because you know we cause a world war if you didn't. And so on. So there's diplomatic rhetoric in here. Now we know that the thing was written between 55 and 56 AD and there's a sort of, there's a set of facts external to this text about who Nero was, what he did and so forth. And to some extent we can criticize what's going on here by reference to that and we can understand why this diplomatic rhetoric is involved because we know he actually was a powerful person. One way then to read it. I have a Kindle on my Kindle. Okay, very good. I'll borrow your book as it were. And if you need to borrow anything, let me know. So one way to read this is, again, Ernest Cicero, real stoic philosopher trying to improve the world. He's got a difficult situation. Would it make it a better world if he just abandoned his post and went on and did something else? No, you've got to try to rein these people in. Like the anonymous guy who wrote a New York Times op-ed saying, we've got this crazy guy in office but I'm going to stay here and keep doing things to make sure it's like kept under control. And admitted, you know, this guy's insane but don't worry, there's able people that are reining him in. That's one way you might look at what's happening with Seneca here is that he's the same guy in the room and he's doing everything he can to maintain stability and order and that if you've got somebody who really is cruel and really is tyrannical then you need to use this diplomatic language in order to moderate him and improve things. But of course the other way to look at it is that what this is is a big published open letter coming from this famous guy, Seneca, and he's a credible philosopher and what it is is a piece of propaganda to make it look like Nero's actually a good guy who listens to philosophers and is being refined and so forth. And so we get all this stuff about how a king behaves versus a tyrant and combined with the mode of diplomatic rhetoric where I was telling you about yes, I see you're doing this and that's a good thing or I see you're not inclined to do such and such and I'm glad you're not doing that then makes it appear like he's basically saying that Nero is not a tyrant. He isn't a bad guy. He's more like a king and he's a merciful person and so forth. And in particular it makes him look good relative to these other examples of bad guys like Nero's immediate imperial predecessors, Claudius and Caligula, true monsters in their own right. But what we do is we sort of make Nero look good by contrast by showing he's following the advice of philosophers, he's inclined to be merciful and so on. And so this whole thing is not an earnest philosopher trying to improve things but is Seneca the propagandist using the mass of stoic philosophy to cover up monstrous crimes and so forth. How do we figure out which one is actually the case? Well, we don't have the means to resolve that but one thing because we don't have access to the documentary materials and the historical facts that would be relevant to resolving that dispute. So we have to look at the internal literary coherence and philosophical value of this work. So I give you a couple of different modes of how to criticize it and criticism here means interpret it and figure out if it's a good or a bad thing. It doesn't just mean treating it negatively and it means treating it critically. So first thing is that it's practical philosophy. If it's practical philosophy then it needs to have outcomes because empty are the words of a philosopher that relieve no suffering and so forth. And practical philosophy, we don't want to know about health, we want to be healthy. We don't want to know what wealth is, we want to have a lot of it. And mainly we don't want to know what living well or happiness is. We want to actually be happy and live well. And so a practical philosophy that doesn't actually produce these things is as worthless as an institution like a business school that supposedly teaches people about business but then they go on bankrupt or just as broke as everybody else studying some other field. Totally worthless thing to have because the entire point of it is to be practical and produce some effect. We're economics. We don't want to just know about the economy. We want to be able to predict when it's going to collapse and when there's going to be problems with the economy. So if we have a field that supposedly tells us we have perfect economic theories here, yes we didn't predict the biggest economic crisis since 1929 but that's how it goes. We're a theoretical, not a practical thing. You might say, no, that's flawed and it's whole reason for existing is called into question. There is no point in having a merely theoretical approach to practical philosophy. So in that sense, if this work didn't actually make Nero a merciful person and improve him and so forth, then it's a worthless piece of garbage that nobody should read or consider and from a philosophical perspective it's a spectacular example of a failed piece of philosophy because the success condition of a piece of practical philosophy is that it actually improves someone's life or something not that it merely produces some kind of knowledge or definition or whatever. So in that case, this is one of the worst pieces of philosophy to ever have been written because we know the fact of the matter is that this is one of the least merciful people of all time and so it did not have its intended consequences or effect but that is the success condition of a piece of practical philosophy. Now on the other hand, we could look at it as actually being a kind of piece of theoretical philosophy examining whether mercy is a good thing. How mercy does relate to justice whether it's a virtue or a vice and there is some theoretical fact of the matter here like it either conflicts with justice or it does help with justice or it's equivalent to pity or it's not or it's a good alternative to cruelty or it's not the wise person will practice mercy or she will not and in that sense it doesn't matter how Nero reacted to it the success condition is, is the thing coherent? Does it make internally coherent arguments? And does it edify us? Does it tell us something about virtue and about government and about justice and that sort of thing so that we could use it for other people? We could give this to Donald Trump and say this is how you should act and maybe he'll take it better than Nero did I wouldn't hold my breath on that but maybe something like that will happen and it doesn't matter if it's succeeded in its local context what matters is whether it's true or not and whether it's true or not first of all depends on whether it's coherent and makes a coherent argument. So again since we don't really have the historical facts that would let us really figure out the situation with respect to it being a piece of practical philosophy we will focus on the theoretical issues it raises and primarily the issue of whether Seneca makes a coherent argument or not. Okay so here's the structure of the work the work as it stands is incomplete it ends with three dots which means that our manuscripts did not report the complete work in fact an entire book seems to be missing so we have two books but the description that Seneca gives of what he's going to do is in three parts as described in section three of book one the first part will deal with the remission of punishment the second will attempt to show the nature and appearance of mercy for since there are certain vices that simulate virtues they cannot be distinguished without the stamp of marks that enable you to tell them apart in the third place I shall look into the question of how the mind is led to adopt this virtue how it establishes it and through use makes it its own so that third part is missing so we're not going to be able to say much about that and this first part which is actually the majority of what we have essentially goes into explaining why one ought to think mercy to be a good thing okay but first of all we're probably all inclined to accept those arguments anyway and if we aren't it's probably because we don't understand what mercy actually is and therefore the second part is crucial to the project of resolving the theoretical value of the work and whether it's coherent we need to examine the definitions given of mercy figure out if it is a virtue and if so how it relates to and can be cohere with the other virtues identified by Stoics okay but I'll give you a sampling of some of the stuff in the first section and the initial question raised is mercy a virtue and you might think it's not for the reason given in section 2 mercy sustains the worst kind of people it has no purpose unless a crime's been committed and the only virtue it's the only virtue that seems to define no employment among those who are guiltless so it only happens when somebody's done something wrong and they need to be punished and then you sort of refrain from giving that punishment or at least giving the full punishment so it's strange because it's not a virtue doesn't seem much like a virtue like justice or temperance or courage or something where it's its own thing it's in relation to other people and in relation to bad people and if you have a world where nobody's doing anything bad and nobody's committing any crime kind of Stoic cosmopolitan utopia or something this wouldn't even exist it wouldn't arise as an issue so how can it be a virtue how can it be something that we inculcate as a habit in practice constantly so Seneca gives several responses first he says well by that argument medicine wouldn't be any good after all medicine only treats the sick so suppose I tried to discourage you from going into medical school and said what value does medicine have it only works if you're treating somebody who's diseased and sick that's not a good thing okay that's a lame argument with respect to medicine and so by analogy it's lame with respect to this yes maybe it only deals with people who are flawed who are mentally ill or something in some way but there can be a sort of virtuous activity in connection with that furthermore it doesn't only benefit the guilty it can benefit the innocent because often innocent people are accused wrongly or even convicted wrongly in which case mercy restores justice to those people and this is if you want to focus your mind on the most vivid case of this think about capital punishment where the state kills people and it turns out the state kills people that were totally innocent of the crime sometimes it just happens they got convicted by a jury that was led on by their emotions or by skilled attorneys or whatever and ends up executing innocent people in irreversible things so if mercy was employed by judges in those cases or by legislators in getting rid of the death penalty or that sort of thing then it could be good you actually would be saving those innocent people who were wrongly accused and finally it can return people to virtue assuming we have a rehabilitative model of punishment merciful punishment might be more effective in encouraging the bad to return to virtue return to justice return to moderation return to courage and so forth in which case you really are working on an attempt to morally develop someone question? so what would be the difference between simply punishing someone and punishing someone the rest of the jury doesn't put on any well we'll see that when we get to the definitions but it has to do with withholding something from justified punishment not giving the full punishment so for example using discretion if the sentence is that they should be sentenced from 20 years to life you give something more like 20 years instead of life in prison and that's merciful compared to throw the book at them and just give them life in prison or execute them so it withholds something from what is in theory a just punishment and as we'll see that's what actually creates the problem of whether it can cohere with other virtues especially justice but Seneca certainly implies that it is in fact he launches into one of his rhetorical tirades no virtue is more human it must be generally accepted that no other is more appropriate for a human a belief to be held not just by those of us i.e. Stoics who regard humans as social creatures born for the good of all but also for those like the Epicureans who consign humans to pleasure whose words and actions all look to their own advantage for if repose and quiet are what we're seeking he finds this virtue which loves peace and holds back the hand constant with its own nature but of all mercy becomes none so well that is fitting for none so well as a king or an emperor that is you Nero so in this passage Seneca seems to say definitely a virtue for Stoics definitely a virtue for Epicureans every person is either a Stoic or an Epicurean and therefore it's a virtue for everyone it's fitting for everyone each of you individuals in this room and especially you Nero I don't know whether you're an Epicurean or a Stoic but in any case it's the most human virtue okay we have to talk about who mercy applies to so in one sense there's a strict sense in which it applies to somebody issuing a sentence to a criminal okay that's where the paradigm case is sentencing okay in a criminal justice system but by extension it applies to any relation where there's a power differential so you could be merciful towards your animals right if my cat won't get off of the table while I'm trying to eat dinner I can either coax it off with a snack or I can get off the table and if I'm a merciful person I'll do something more like the former instead of the latter or how parents treat children right they put their hand in the cookie jar they can either get spanked or they can have to go without having dessert the next night or something and that's merciful masters can either be cruel towards their slaves nice towards them he goes into many many examples about that it applies to bosses and employees it applies to generals and soldiers it applies to kings or emperors and their subjects and that's the immediate prima facie target of this particular one I thought you might have found it interesting that it applies to the relation between teachers and their students so quoting from section 16 of book one which teacher worthily represents liberal studies the one who flays his pupil's backs if their memory fails or if the eye is not quick and falters in reading or the one who prefers to use gentle criticism and a sense of shame to impart correction and instruction okay so ask yourself which of those you would prefer and notice that there's no other options there's nothing like just letting them off or something you either play on your sense of shame or I have to whip you and use corporal punishment so you could think of Monty Johnson as being a very merciful person because he merely embarrasses and shames you and does not actually beat you like some people who don't buy into this virtue of mercy would do okay and as we've become accustomed there's all this soul searching about am I being a real stoic here or not you notice from the list of virtues that I gave you that mercy didn't seem to appear on that official list of virtues is that because I'm slack and just left it off no it's because you know hardcore Greek stoics didn't seem to mention this one and Seneca is sort of innovating or introducing it as a notion and so the question arises how orthodox does the stoicism remain and of course stoicism has this reputation for being a really unforgiving and strict and stern kind of philosophy so as he says I'm aware that the stoic school is regarded unfavorably by the ill informed as excessively harsh and quite unsuited to giving advice to princes and kings it's criticized for maintaining that the wise man does not show pity or forgiveness such a position is hateful if formulated in the abstract for it appears to leave no hope for human error but rather to consign all offenses to punishment okay now that's Seneca describing the way you would think stoics handle punishment okay you read their philosophy and it doesn't look like there's much room to cut people slack you're either a sage or you're a fool you're either entirely virtuous or you're entirely vicious all vices equal and equally bad and so on but he says if this is the case what kind of philosophy is it that tells us to forget the lessons of our own humanity and to close up the surest haven against misfortune that of helping one another but no school is more kind and gentle none more loving of mankind and more devoted to the common good so that its guiding principle is to be is be useful and helpful and to consider not merely self-interest but that of each and every person on earth so this is Seneca's kind of warm fuzzy version of stoicism if you will that stoicism is really about recognizing our common humanity and cultivating that being concerned with other people not just wanting to get my vengeance or something when I'm punishing somebody but really caring about how can I improve that person hurt me yes but how can I actually help them improve and become a better person because we're all in this human boat together and so on so I think this is interesting because he acknowledges it's not in line with the perception the prima facia perception one has of stoicism but there is a way of thinking of stoicism in which something like mercy has its place so the definitions of mercy finally come in the third chapter of the second book that you might think is a very disorderly thing come on we're philosophers here definitions ought to come in the first chapter of the first book that's everything unless you have definitions that's how it is in Euclid you open up Euclid and there's a set of definitions and then it moves on to everything else so but we have to read through an entire book talking about how great mercy is before we get to an account of what it is and as I said this is what we need to concentrate on he introduces it by saying I'm going to say what mercy is what its nature is and what are its limitations and I've put into bold the subsequent four different definitions of it that are given the first one mercy consists in controlling the mind when one has the power to take revenge or in the forbearance of a superior towards an inferior in determining punishment so that looks like a fine definition but Seneca says it would be safer to put forth more definitions and in case a single one doesn't sufficiently cover the subject and so to speak loses its case therefore mercy can also be described as the inclination of the mind towards mildness in exacting punishment and that actually seems to be the closest formulation to the concept of virtue that he had been employing in book one and that he employs in the rest of book two but while we're piling on definitions the next definition we'll find objections despite coming very close to the truth so pay attention to this one and we describe mercy as the moderation that removes something from the due and merited punishment ok in a way this is the key definition as he explains in effect trying to preempt the criticism the protest that will be raised that no virtue bestows on a man less than he deserves ok but here is a definition of a putative virtue as a kind of moderation well that's virtue talk moderation temperance self control but moderation that removes something from due and merited punishment and then he lines up this litany of definitions however everyone understands the fact that mercy consists in stopping short of the penalty that might have been deservedly fixed ok that one is also similar to the third definition and that it acknowledges a due and merited or deserved punishment and then defines mercy as the withholding or stopping short of that which is due yeah just so I understand it seems that mercy is like a cross between temperance and justice that seems worship well it certainly the term moderation could have the relevant Latin term but easily have been translated temperance as well so temperance is coming in here the idea of being temperate like not being flying off the handle not not being excessive and so forth so certainly it looks like temperance is relevant now justice is relevant but this seems to be instead of embodying our idea of justice to be conflicting with it in a way ok so what is our definition of justice well here's the definitions I gave you on that crucial handout ok justice knowledge of the distribution of proper value to each person according to Cicero a disposition of mind preserved for the common good attributing to each person his worth or a disposition of mind to assign to each person his share according to his worth as opposed to injustice the antithesis of this ignorance of the distribution of proper value to each person ok so if we inter-translate this idea of proper value as corresponding to do deserved fitting and so forth punishment then what justice is is that if you deserve a certain form of punishment then justice requires I give you that form of punishment ok so if death is the deserved form of punishment for a mass murderer or something then if I put you to death I'm doing what's just why even though judges kill people by giving them capital punishment we don't then imprison them or execute them for doing it we say they're just people they get to wear these robes and stuff because they are they're actually doing what's just and what's good that's a virtuous thing they're doing if they sentence a man to life in prison who did these really bad things then we don't think that's bad or cruel or harsh we think that person is doing what is just and it's hard to do what's just it'd be nice to be able to be slack towards people let students slack off and not actually do their research and stuff that's a lot easier to do it's very hard to to punish them and shame them and make them do the things that you want but good teachers do that because that's the just thing that's what the these people deserve and what they they merit be easy to just give everyone an A but not everybody actually merits or deserves that kind of grade and justice is giving each person the grade they actually deserve no less and no more okay so if we take these technical definitions of justice now all of these are external to the text we're dealing with as far as I know there isn't a definition of justice in this text okay but I don't think that Seneca has in mind any other definition than these standard stoic ones and therefore we have a problem between his definition of mercy and of justice and I try to spell this problem out here okay so take the definition that justice is an inclination of the mind to give each person what is due and merited to them if that's the case and if mercy is an inclination of mind towards moderation and removing something from due and merited punishment then justice and mercy will conflict and be mutually exclusive justice will require giving the due and merited punishment mercy will require stopping short and withholding the due and merited punishment but of course virtues can't conflict with one another a wise person has to be able to manifest all virtues consistently and wisdom has to tell has to be a virtue that applies to the right action being taken but if the action could be just if I give the full punishment or don't give it then wisdom can't can't be the description of the right train of mind for making the decision so either justice or mercy will not be able to be a virtue now of course we can't get rid of justice we can get rid of practically every other virtue but we need justice so therefore mercy can't really be a virtue and this is why he's concerned in addressing these people who say it can't be a virtue because it doesn't look like it fits now there is my concept of the problem that's going on with this essay do we any questions or comments about that problem before I try to show you how he how I think he resolves it any difficulty grasping what the problem is though I went through it so quickly what is the wise wise so a wise person will know what's due and merited because a wise person is necessarily just and justice just is a disposition of the mind to give the due and merited thing and so they must apprehend what is due and merited yeah if a wise person knows what's due and merited and they also have mercy so the amount of funds that they give shouldn't that be the due and merited? well that's the problem they know what's due and merited but supposedly there's a virtue that says not giving what's due and merited is a virtue right? I mean the virtue has been defined as withholding what is due and merited whereas justice is defined as giving what is due and merited and you can't both give what is due and merited at the same time and yet the just person has to act, has to give a sentence or whatever so it looks like a definitional problem ah ok but then that would be like saying some people need to be unjust in order to be just now is the stoic really going to be able to say that? yes this is unjust but he's so cruel and so evil that if he just thinks unjustly then it's like the stick is bent so far this direction that we have to bend it all the way this direction in order to make it straight and right and so if we just get him to do something really unjust like not punishing withholding due punishment then maybe it'll end up somewhere in the middle and he'll actually end up doing the right thing ok but then there is no way for the wise person then to be consistent to and so on I mean then that's a sort of consequentialist approach to this ok question if it's not a virtue why do I want it but he's claiming he wants people to be merciful so he's claiming it's a virtue but the problem is we have to ask is it coherent for a stoic to say mercy is a virtue yes we want to rein in this horrible tyrant who is giving excessive punishments and punishing people that don't deserve it and stuff and we have this really bad situation we need to rein that in should we do what Michael says and convince him oh just don't punish anyone we know that's not just but at least that would be better or something doesn't seem like that that avenue is available to stoics so here's the the solution that he seems to pursue first of all is distinguish mercy from pity a closely aligned notion second is characterize the opposite of mercy as not being justice withholding the due punishment or giving the due punishment but that mercy is the opposite of cruelty and define cruelty as some kind of obvious vice and compare mercy instead with sternness sternness is always giving the maximum punishment that's due and merited and then argue something like that well sometimes sternness is appropriate but sometimes mercy is appropriate it depends on the circumstances you have an absolutely horrible monster yes give them the full thing but you have somebody that sort of misguided and made some bad decisions and they had a bad upbringing and so on cut them some slack okay the problem with that is that then we would be making mercy and sternness into a kind of indifferent matter and then we choose the appropriate one in order to arrive at the virtuous condition like we do with things that are indifferent and maybe we call mercy the preferred indifferent and sternness the dispreferred or maybe we use the opposite but anyway it's an indifferent but if that's the case then mercy would not be a virtue because indifference aren't virtues that's exactly what they aren't okay so let's compare let's look at the definitions of cruelty you know only in philosophy do we actually need to give definitions of cruelty you think you know what it means but then you start talking to a philosopher nothing other than harshness of mind and punishment cruelty is an inclination of the mind to harsh thoughts and especially when in the context of punishment what about pity the other side sort of the opposite of cruelty what is pity? pity in his definition a mental sorrow caused by the sight of other people's wretchedness you see a really pathetic horrible situation and that makes you sad pity is that feeling of sadness that like look at what a horrible world we live in this is the condition if you don't feel pity there must be something wrong with you if you look at how horribly screwed up our world is right now sadness induced by the suffering of others which they seem not to deserve something is happening these people they don't deserve to go hungry they don't deserve to have their country being bombed they don't deserve to have their children kidnapped whatever and so one feels sadness for them okay the problem is that on the stoic view a wise person cannot possibly have pity because then if it was true that pity is a mental sorrow caused by the sight of others wretchedness then the wise person would be the most miserable person in the world because they would have the greatest apprehension of the sufferings of others and thus they would have the greatest mental sorrow that accompanies that so you'd look at a you'd look at a stoic sage and it would be somebody just like Heraclitus weeping at everything they see but the stoic sage is supposed to be more like the democratine character who looks at all this absurd stuff and laughs at it okay it maintains their tranquility okay not because it's all a joke or it's funny that bad things are happening to people but because this is all a result of folly and lack of wisdom and it can be corrected and improved and addressed with wisdom and calm cultivation of virtues and so forth so the wise cannot possibly extend pity pity cannot be a virtue or else the wise will be the most miserable people so he sets up something like a continuum here between pity mercy sternness or strictness and cruelty so pity inclination of the mind towards sorrow calls the sight of another's wretchedness is a kind of vice think of it as an emotion it's a bad pathological emotion to be put into a sad state whenever you see suffering and pitiful people you go into a sad state that itself is a character vice okay and it's the opposite at the opposite end is something like cruelty inclination of the mind towards harshness and exacting punishment so I have a chance to punish this person and so I exact the most harsh thing oh they handed in something they fail right cat jumped on the table kicked the cat out of the house it no longer gets fed the child didn't learn their ABCs okay they never get to eat dessert again and have to stay in their room and so forth so that's cruelty and in between we have this putatively virtuous condition so then we set mercy up as a virtue which is inclination of the mind towards mildness and exacting punishment as opposed to being harsh and certainly we can differentiate it from inclining towards sadness where does that mean sternness or strictness suppose somebody has an inclination not towards harshness and exacting punishment but towards firmness when exacting punishment and giving the maximum serve these people are are this person is a criminal they get this punishment now this plays out in the real world of law and order in the issue about to what extent should judges be given discretion in sentencing okay so some people think judges should be given no discretion in sentencing if such and such punishment is committed then such and such a punishment must be imposed and California had this law that said this three strikes you're outlaw you commit three crimes in a row you go to prison for life and we had a situation where you know okay when the guy was 18 he shop lifted from 7-11 and then later and he was convicted for that later he did a drug deal and then and then he stole somebody's car now stealing somebody's car he served punishments for those other two stealing somebody's car is normally you spend a year in prison but three strikes you're out you spend life in prison if that happens okay now we got rid of that law essentially because it's cruel it's too much punishment it's too harsh it goes way too far or you think of even cruel punishments you steal we cut off your hands right um the uh we clearly want to get away from those but sternness in punishment giving the maximum of a punishment that somebody deserves that's not a vice that's not cruel in fact that looks just like the definition of justice giving each person what they are do and this nice colorful picture I've constructed here has got one enormous problem which is that virtues and vices can't lie on a continuum for the stoics you either are virtuous or you're not we don't have a thing where oh he's pretty virtuous he's usually he's usually strict but he's merciful in some situations sometimes he actually gives into pity right or sometimes he's cruel no these have to be categorically different and they have to represent firm established habits of mind so do we want people to have a firm established habit of mind so that they are always giving the exact punishment that would be the view that judges should not have discretion in sentencing and we have that situation where for certain crimes there is no judicial discretion for sentencing we have other crimes however where there is discretion and this is when you see sentences that are 5 years 5 to 10 years or you know committing robbery 5 to 10 years committing robbery with a weapon 10 to 30 years there's still latitude there