Legal Commentary

As one who has written in the past about how various forms of moral wrongfulness -- lying, cheating, stealing, promise-breaking, disloyalty, disobedience, coercion, and exploitation -- inform the criminal law, I'm always on the lookout for new insights into how people can be bad. 

Two recent items have caught my attention.  One comes from the Vatican.  Fifteen hundred years ago, Pope Gregory the Great laid down a list of Seven Deadly Sins: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy, and pride.  During the Middle Ages, Dante wrote about them in The Inferno, and a few years ago, Oxford University Press published a neat collection of volumes on each of the sins, featuring contributions by people like Wendy Wasserstein (on sloth), Joseph Epstein (on envy), and Simon Blackburn (on lust).  Now, the Catholic Church has offered a list of updated sins for the ?Age of Globalization.? They include polluting, genetic engineering, being obscenely rich, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia, and causing social injustice. Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican body which oversees confessions and plenary indulgences, said that priests must take account of ?new sins which have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalization.? Whereas sin in the past was thought of as being an individual matter, it now has ?social resonance.?

The other, considerably more lighthearted item, is a new book by Peter Sagal, entitled The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them).  Apparently employing the jokey and irreverent manner that is familiar to listeners of his NPR radio show, Wait, Wait . . . Don?t Tell Me, Sagal visits various dens of iniquity ? casinos, strip joints, swingers? clubs, porn movie sets, and a restaurant offering a $700 24-course dinner ? and discovers ? surprise, surprise -- that he prefers his staid, suburban, monogamous lifestyle. I haven?t read it yet, but it sounds like it might at least be good subway reading.

So what?s the difference between sin and vice?  Well, these are concepts that find their origin in Christian theology, a subject about which I know very little.  What I?m wondering is whether the distinction has any significance in contemporary moral theory.  I?ll take a stab at it, but I?d be happy to hear from anyone better informed than I.  My guess is that sin has traditionally be considered a much more serious matter (hence, the notion of sins being ?mortal?).  Sins are viewed as acts against God.  They can result, according to the Church, in eternal damnation for the sinner.  It?s interesting, though, to observe a significant difference between the list of sins compiled by Pope Gregory and that complied by Bishop Girotti.  The sins on Gregory?s list are morally wrong (though even that?s unclear in some cases), but they don?t typically cause harm to others.  Girotti?s list, on the other hand, consists mostly of acts that cause serious harm to others -- polluting, pedophilia, drug dealing.  And what about the vices?  Sagal says they must involve social disapprobation, actual pleasure, and shame. They tend to reflect defects in character, but they do not, as I understand it, typically involve harms to others. That is, the vices seem to correspond roughly to what modern theorists call harmless wrongdoing.  If that?s correct, then it seems to suggest an interesting convergence between what casebook authors Franklin Zimring and Bernard Harcourt call vice and what Pope Gregory called sin (though not what Bishop Girotti calls sin).