Moral Debt
(Or why you cannot get away with it)
Whenever one human being violates the rights of another human being, either deliberately or accidentally, what I refer to as a 'moral debt' is thereby incurred, which, if left unpayed by the offending party, will sooner or later be paid by someone else, who may not even be the perpetrator or the victim of the original crime.
To understand why this is so, I will attempt to give you a visual image of what a moral debt is, and why it occurs in the first place.
Imagine that there exists in some parallel dimension a 'moral field', which in appearance and behavior is very much like an unstable snow feild on the side of a mountain. This feild is divided into squares, 10 feet on a side, and in every square there is one person. There is a square here for every person in the world. Also, people who know eachother or are dependent on eachother tend to have squares which are closer together, and people who are more important to larger numbers of other people tend to have squares which are closer to the bottom of the mountain.
The snow contained under each persons square consists of the God-given rights they possess, such as the right to life, the right to property, etc. When a crime is commited against a person, part of that snow is removed, leaving a hole, which creates an instability in the whole field. In addition, if the crime is deliberate, the removed snow is dumped on the criminal's square, making a hill, which further increases the instability.
This hole in the square of a crime victim's rights is what I refer to as a 'moral debt'. Assuming that it is not paid, it will have a number of consequences. Most immediately, snow from nearby squares will gradually drift into the square of the victim's to partially fill the hole. This occurs when such things go on as the friends and family of a burglary victim pitching in to buy them new furniture, paying for the hospital bill of someone who was assaulted, or when the prices of food in a store are raised to pay for the loss of shoplifted goods. However, this does not remove the moral debt, it only speads it around, and makes a wider, shallower hole, which has the benefit of causing less instability in than the smaller, deeper one.
When a moral debt is incurred, it is possible to erase that debt by punishing the perpetrator, and having him make compensation to the victim. When this is done, what you are doing is correcting the various holes and mounds in the 'moral field' which were created by the crime. And by punishment, I mean appropriate punishment. Giving someone a slap on the wrist for murder or putting them in jail for 15 years for taking drugs, is not appropriate.
Please note that it is probably not possible to keep people from creating any moral debts. There will always be accidental offenses, as well as deliberate criminals. What we must do is to stop tolerating, both as a society, and in our various institutions, the creation of very large moral debts by permitting some individuals to violate the rights of other individuals without fear of punishment.
In the long run, if a society or instituition accumulates too many moral debts which it refuses to pay, the result is that your snow field (moral field) is riddled with large numbers of very deep holes, and eventually there is an avalanche, which has some very dire consequences indeed for those caught in it. This avalanche will occur more quickly as a result of the rights of people who are more important being violated, which is why I specified that their squares were near the bottom of the slope, where there is much more snow resting above it. But even if the people whose rights are being violated are 'nobodies', the continual violation of their rights will cause an avalanche eventually. This is why it is important to protect everybody's rights and be sure that people are not casually permitted to get away with not paying their moral debts.