The Mean

Moral discourse would go much more smoothly if there were public floggings for those attempting to use the principle ‘virtue lies in the mean’ in the consideration not of virtue, but of truth. Some think life starts in infancy, some at conception, and some, hearing both extremes and having read a line or two of Aristotle, assume the truth must be somewhere in the middle of gestation. When they meet someone who thinks personhood begins at seventy, they’ll have to conclude it’s really thirty-five. This is tool selection equivalent to peeling an orange with a hammer, and should be punished accordingly.