Arguably the most ubiquitous and eternal debate in all of philosophy is the debate about what is right and wrong. Perhaps this is the most hotly contested debate in all of human history. History’s greatest conflicts, from the crusades to to cold war, can be seen fundamentally as disagreements about ethics. The major religions have all essentially been attempts to answer the question of ethics. Philosopher’s have attempted to answer this question, from logic based universal Kantian ethics to Sartre’s moral relativism. However, not as much effort has been put towards asking the question of: when humans believe something is right, do they always do it?

Early philosophical attempts to answer this question seem to have come to the same conclusion: yes. The most famous example of this is Socrates, who contested that no one does wrong willingly. While Socrates never wrote anything down, at least formally, this idea is attributed to Socrates in the writings of Plato and Xenophon. At first glance, this idea may seem very clearly wrong. People often do evil willingly, right? To understand this claim better, it helps to go deeper into Socrates’s beliefs about human nature and will. Socrates believed that humans can only do what they believe to be in the best interest of themselves. Some would disagree with this, but this is a far more reasonable sounding claim than his claim about evil being involuntary. Socrates builds from this argument about self interest by claiming that when one does evil, he does harm to himself. He combines these two ideas, by arguing that doing what is unjust is the greatest harm to one’s soul, and no one would wish to harm himself, therefore no one willingly does injustice or evil. This is admittedly a logical conclusion, if both of his premises are correct. But, as we will see, they may not be correct.

A contrary perspective to that of Socrates is the perspective of Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard believed that sin is not ignorance, and vehemently contested Socrates’s definition of sin or evil. Kierkegaard colorfully laments in Sickness unto Death that someone may know something is right, yet do the opposite and wrong thing. To Kierkegaard, “it is infinitely comic that a man can understand the whole truth about how wretched and petty this world is, etc.—that he can understand this, and then cannot recognize again what he understood; for almost in the same moment he himself goes off and takes part in the same pettiness and wretchedness, takes glory in it and receives glory from it, that is, accepts it.” The fact that Kierkegaard was Christian and grew up in a milieu of Christianity likely influenced his beliefs in this regard. Whatever the case, Kierkegaard, seemed to believe that Socrates’s definition leaves out the possibility of an individual knowing the right and yet failing to do it.

So who is right? Kierkegaard certainly seems to have a point that one may “understand” something yet do the opposite. Nevertheless, Socrates might respond to this by saying that if someone does the opposite of the right thing, even if he consciously knows it is right, then he really did not understand that doing wrong does harm to his soul. I think this may be true a large part of the time when one sins or does wrong. However, I think that this ignores the fact that human desires are often opposed to doing the right thing, and thus humans will do the wrong thing while knowing it’s wrong and knowing that it will harm their soul, simply because it feels good and convenient in the moment.

For example, take lying. For the sake of the argument let’s assume that lying is wrong. One may know that lying is wrong, that it corrupts his soul to lie, and that he will be harming himself by lying, and yet he still may lie because his human nature desires the easy way out, which feels good in the moment. I think that the crux of this problem is that humans can do them selves harm intentionally, because the logical mind sometimes is in conflict with human nature. I think this is what Kierkegaard instinctively knew, but didn’t outright express. To Kierkegaard, when one consciously does wrong and thus harms himself, this is despair, the so called “sickness unto death,” and in my view, this is a result of the human nature oriented desire for ease in the moment being in conflict with the logical human mind.