Does society corrupt man?

(LR: Christopher Siy, Carla Santos, Sabrina Tan, Pia Baria, Steph Sol, Abby Canlas)

19 May 2008. The debate today was on Rousseau's theory that society corrupts man.

Government (Tan, Santos, Siy) gave two major reasons why it does. The first was that the very idea of common good necessarily means that people will have to limit some their desires, but such desires never disappear. The result is that people find ways of “outwitting” others to get these desires, and this leads to corruption. The second reason is that society “defines” what is right and what is wrong. In effect, if there were no definitions, there would be no corruption.

Opposition (Canlas, Sol, Baria) argued that although society puts limits and makes definitions, it is man himself who decides on his actions. Therefore, the source of corruption is human decision. Error, which leads to corrupted decisions, comes from man’s wounded nature. In fact, they added, society exists in order to educate man in correct conduct. It certainly is not society’s intention to corrupt.

The audience gave this debate to the Government because of this argument: Both sides agreed that corruption was a vicious circle, with society corrupting man (government) and man corrupting society (opposition). Thus, the motion holds true; Government was not refuted.

In effect, Government used an argument very difficult to destroy. The only way Opposition could have gotten around this, I think, would have been to use an analogy. In a murder, we say that the gun killed the victim, but we do not imprison the gun. Opposition could have made the case that society is, like the gun, amoral. Then they could have used Government’s definition of corruption as “moral degradation” to argue that moral actions, and therefore corruption, can only arise from free decisions. An amoral object is amoral precisely because it does not make free decisions. Such objects may, indeed, cause evils, but they can not be said to cause corruption in the moral sense. Difficult, but playable.