Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,

You gotta understand,

It’s just our bringin’ up-ke

That gets us out of hand.

Our mothers all are junkies,

Our fathers all are drunks.

Golly Moses, natcherly we’re punks!

This is an excerpt from the song, Gee, Officer Krupke, from West Side Story. It was sung by members of the Jets, street gangs in the Upper West Side in the late 1950s, to taunt the police officer named Krupke by attributing their life in the gang to their upbringing.

I love this song, but at the same time, I do find the concept it implies mind-bugling. Setting the ontology of moral philosophy aside, how do we associate a person’s behavior to the societal responsibility this person is expected to take? How should we gauge the infringement of a moral or legal norm? What kind of transgression should the society impute guilt to the persons that are held accountable?

I have no clear answer to these questions, but I do think they all stem from the conflict between the societal expectations based on the slowly evolved moral philosophy that the majority enshrine, and the hereditary disposition and milieu that we are consigned to. We cannot choose the innate disposition we inherit, nor can we help the milieu into which we are born. If we believe that one’s character and temperament is shaped by the intricate interaction between disposition and milieu and that one’s action is the outcome of this personality reacting with the society so concrete that specific norms can be defined, then there’s a problem. How is that we can be reproached for our actions that break the standard but not for any of the congenital and environmental factors that might have contributed to this action?

Moral philosophy is a strange thing to me, for it expounds that guilt and responsibility are measured based on the functional values they embody and that their legitimacy is judged based on expediency. This kind of operational definition sounds arbitrary, but it has dramatic consequences on our lives. Hopefully, I’ll have more thoughts on this one day.