The trouble with right and wrong
Decision making is, more than we imagine, guided by our sense of right and wrong — and that can lead to difficult dilemmas
Mathematics and language have several things in common. One of them is that, just like in mathematics, in many languages, a double negative makes a positive. Someone who is “not unattractive” is good-looking, and an experience that is “not unpleasant” is usually quite enjoyable. That doesn’t mean we can extrapolate this to morality though: two wrongs make a right is considered as an informal fallacy of relevance. Specifically, the premise (the existence of the first wrong) is not relevant to the conclusion (the second wrong is actually a right). It is not because you know that the shopkeeper commits tax fraud that shoplifting is OK.
Strangely, the opposite — two rights make a wrong — has some merit. As an old joke has it: a professor arguing that two rights cannot make a wrong is proved, well, wrong by a heckler from the back of the auditorium shouting, “Yeah, right!” The moral concept of right and wrong, and the somewhat uneasy relationship between multiple ‘rights’ manifests itself also in the decisions we make.
