Cover of Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories

Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories

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  1. Necessity licenses the next crime

    Someone who has been wronged out of hunger can use that same excuse to justify wronging others: if survival made your act forgivable, it makes mine forgivable too. Moral rules turn upside down once each person treats their own desperation as permission. The thief who robs a robber simply hands the robber's argument back to them.

  2. Morality inverts under scarcity

    When conditions are desperate enough, the usual order of right and wrong does not just weaken but flips. What would be condemned in ordinary times gets recast as the sensible, even necessary, thing to do. In such a world the honest person and the predator can be the same person, an hour apart.

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