|  There is a pithy little bit of wisdom spouted off by "grown ups" the world over. Big people try to convey a sophistication that they expect, or at least hope, will not be subject to scrutiny or critical thinking by the person to whom they would preach that age old malapropism "two wrongs don't make a right". Okay, okay - perhaps I'm being a bit of a smart-_ss by calling it a malapropism - and by such calling, declaring out of my literal interpretation that the utterer of that phrase would be so clumsy as to misuse language and not know it. By calling it a malapropism, I'm as much as saying that the user literally does not know the difference between "right" and "wrong".
Then, perhaps, maybe that is the case. I shall address that later in the piece.
So, okay then - I'll take my tongue out of my cheeck and swallow my disdain long enough to be, quite literally*reason*able. According to long held constructs of reason and logic, there are varying degrees of fallacy that are committed by most or even all practitioners of argument and persuasion - casual and formal alike. Parents, teachers, clergy, judges, police, politicians, and authority figures of all stripes and influence have all attempted to wield this rhetorical gem.
But, perhaps this diamond of moral dicta is a mere cubic zirconium. To assess and address any situational conflict, especially in the superficial nature that is the pragmatics of all behavioral management - be it classroom discipline and order, traffic control, parenting, et cetera - by trying to apply the "two wrongs" argument, is to commit what is called the fallacy of presumption.
Presumption? What presumption? You odidn't make a judgment, right? You haven't doled out any punishment or consequence. The presumption isn't that of finding one party or the other guilty. The presumption is to declare them BOTH or all guilty - or "wrong"!
Do two wrongs make a right? Maybe that isn't the question, because the assumption (presumption) that is made in this cirumstance is that retribution or "revenge" - the act of retaliating is, in and of itself, wrong. The assumption is that the very nature of revenge is, per se, a wrongdoing.
Is it so wrong to try to right a wrong? That is the question.
If that is true, however - if it IS to wrong to answer thuse, then our whole species did, once upone a time, come upon two paths which did diverge in a yellow wood, and we went the wrong way!!! If in fact we preach that it is wrong to get even, then how do we find justice?
The religious would argue that justice - judgment - belongs to God. We mere animals are His and we are arrogant and foolish to attempt to find our own way. Maybe by attempting to ascribe order to and upon ourselves, man and lady liberty did in fact bite blindly into the apple and so we are now doomed to bear (hmmm.....bare????) eternal responsibility for their love child we call human nature.
But then, I am uncomfortable with accepting that we humans are inherently bad - that we have this indelible sin by virtue of being just another animal species run amok, and so do indeed pay for it with mortality.
I find that to be an unbearably cynical and futile frame of mind, however, and that it seems to contradict the very benevolence of a loving and merciful God that should compel our eternal trust and submission. If we are His, and not to dabble in matters of right and wrong, then why do we take physical form at all?
We were born with free will, and thus the responsibility to find our own way. Would we not be spiting God were we to surrender to chance the very lives with which we have been bestowed? Oh, how do we reconcile these questions whose answers seem eternally disparate and yet transcendentally linked?
We do so empirically - by*living*. We are born so that we can experience these very conflicts and act and react - so that we can answer the questions, and answer our calling, and answer to and before each other.
In other words, we have no choice BUT to seek "eveness". We are here to BE, to LIVE, to act and react.
How, then, can it be wrong to respond to a conflict. How can it be "wrong" to respond to an alleged wrong? That is the fallacy of the dictum of "two wrongs don't make a right". We are NOT talking about two wrongs!
And, alas, we arrive at the end - the death - of the logic which defends the thinking that answering "tit for tat" or "an eye for an eye" is not right or just.
I find that we MUST answer. And so find all of the aformentioned authority figues! That's right. The same ones who declare that retribution is wrong, do in fact take on that responsibility themselves. It is by that*title* that they assume the right to judge, and thus dispense a consequence. Is it merely by position or power or place that one has his reaction interpretted as a right versus a wrong? Is it the powerful who are thus the righteous?
Of course it isn't. That is the fallacy of presumption. We presume to judge the response of others as being a second wrong. We are threatened by the potential chaos that such independent retribution implies. But who should yield to whom? Who has the authority of judgment???
If we are true to the "two wrongs" philosophy, then the answer is NOBODY, and the very system of laws and rules and manners and mores that humanity has conceived over these oh so many thousands of years - are WRONG! We are back to that divergent fork in the yellow wood.
But there is no such rewind button, lest God himself pulls a bit of prestidigitation and goes all "Noah" on us - in which case, the pondering of this and all questions is moot. It is out of our hands.
That seems hopeless and cynical and downright blasphemous if you hold to formal doctrine. We are here to live. We are here to err. Indeed, to err is human and to forgive is divine.
God forgives. We err. How can it be wrong to be the humans that we are? No, there is no such thing as two wrongs. That is fallacious. The only way to discover the answer to the questions that come up as conflicts in our lives is to work through them, to answer he who has allegedly done us wrong. We have that right. We have that duty.
Do two wrongs make a right? It looks like that is not the question after all.
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