If the British won the American Revolution, Benedict Arnold would have been a beloved hero. Every city would have a “Benedict Arnold Avenue”.

So morality is beyond being merely subjective. It is totally dependent on the situation, the context, a determination to be made on a case by case basis. This is why “thou shall not do x” type rules never work out and always lead to injustice and irrationality. Kids being kicked out of kindergarten for using a butterknife to cut a muffin. College students being expelled from university for taking an aspirin during class. Stupidity.

In the midst of my engineering education I stumbled into a year-long elective in the Philosophy department with the deceptively simple title of “Man and Society”. It followed the various paths trod by philosophers over the millenia while pondering what is and what should be the relationship(s) between Man and Society. We started with Socrates and Aristophanes (his nemesis), then Plato and Aristotle, visited Englishmen Milton and Hobbes, Frenchmen Rousseau and Descartes, also Marx and Freud (social philosophers both), and several religious philosophers before moving on toward contemporary philosophers. We also tip-toed along the borders between social philosophy and economics. And every step along the way we learned more about how to critique a philosophical stance.

Society’s behavoir toward the individual is often referred to (and summarized by) the term “justice”. Rawls’ amazing tome “A Theory of Justice” stopped me dead in my tracks, and made me think harder than did any of my other classes.

The individual’s relationship to other individuals and society as a whole can be called “ethics”. I much prefer the concepts of personal “ethics” and societal “justice” over the relatively vague/overused/misapplied terms of “morality” and “law” or “rules”.

We can reason deeply about social morality through the lenses of ethics and justice. How do various social (small group) and societal (large group) structures facilitate or hinder key aspects of ethics and justice? What is the “proper” tradeoff or balance? Why?

What is the difference between a “right” and a “privilege”? (Hint: It’s a trick question.) How can it be shown that the “War on Drugs” is immoral? (NOT a trick question.) Why is murder worse than manslaughter, but reckless driving is not worse than a DUI?

Which of a society’s “laws” or “rules” may be considered to be more “fundamental” than others? Which can be shown to be arbitrary, despite intuition or feelings to the contrary? When is “common knowledge” in this context “not even wrong”?

What are the equivalent concepts for basketball? What is the game’s relationship to the individual and team, and the individual’s relationship to the team, game, and sport? What is the root metaphor here? What do the “rules” represent?

For Pankration, the “rules” are emergent successful strategies (based on the results of prior attempted behaviors), arguably ones that make the game as short as possible by establishing advantage as quickly as possible. In basketball, the “rules” are limitations on arbitrary behavior. It’s like comparing evolution to classical physics: In what context does this make sense?

The subject of the blog post may well be paraphrased as “the origin and dispensation of rules”. But the sports metaphor was broken before it really got started.

The thing is, unlike a game, social and moral rules often lack solid mappings, or clear derivations, or even well-defined interactions. We do have some generally agreed-to extremes of “good” and “bad” rules and behavior, but we have to work hard to make sense of the in-between. What I find amazing is that it is at all possible to do so, and to do so with a surprising degree of confidence and power. Social philosophers rock!

I recommend reading Rawls in the comfort of Plato’s Cave.