Where's the "rather than-ness"? Surely there are few of us who believe that our personal morality has been entirely deferred to the criminal law, let alone to the criminal justice system. It's merely another, weak and barely reliable, form of social control.

and placing it in an unreliable and often unpredictable system that nonetheless binds us all?

But this is the thinking of an impulsive child, and has very little to do with the supposed thought process of mature people. And, despite all the love we have for simplifications, stealing from the cookie jar isn't stealing and what causes real people to commit real crimes is substantially more complicated.

That's one way of understanding the situation: morality and the way we are raised are two working parts of a system of hegemony, designed to make us internalize the demands of power, so that we never challenge power externally, and our "good behavior" comes from within. This view is widespread and I think it's disgusting. We should be trying to raise children who are free, not internalizing voices representing others' power, but understanding their own varying personalities in order to behave self-expressively and with empathy, consistently, in all social relationships.

But also not, depending on the personality structures of the individual who has been "apprehended." You're talking about what happens to a particular type of person raised a particular way under contingent circumstances with certain characteristics. At that point, making it sound as though you're observing a general social principle is a little misleading.

But someone in his position might have said to himself, I don't care whether I live or die, so if this doesn't work and I don't get the life I want to live I'll just kill myself, so there's no reason not to go ahead. Or perhaps he always knew he was going to die by suicide, as some people do, and the question was always just whether the time was right.

But the things I most want to know about have to do with this man's relationship to his parents. Understanding the psychic environment he emerged from would help frame some less general questions.

Had Gil's concept of wrong aligned with the legal one, however, he may have stayed his hand.

Once you're in the conditional subjunctive, you might want to ask yourself whether you are too far out on a limb. To have said he didn't think stealing was wrong would have been an obvious oversimplification, and to say he might not have done it if he really thought stealing was wrong is not much of an announcement. So instead you use verb mood and tense to create an aura of significance, with high diction standing in for sense.

An internal sense of wrong creates immediate consequences.

I'm not sure this is true, and it passes by pretty quickly given the work it is called upon to deliver. My experience of people is that they are capable of hiding an internal sense of wrong from themselves for an awfully long time. Could you provide something here to make me a little less skeptical? If this isn't right, your whole distinction between morality "inside" and "outside" is kind of in trouble....

When the punitive force is an external one, its actions can be long delayed. Future risk outweighed present desire, and so Gil spent his early mornings at Sullivan and Cromwell, "spleunking" for information on deals and mergers.

It's hard to believe that you don't want to put scare quotes around "good" and "bad" there. One might say simply that people who bring developed capacities for empathy into all the personal and social relations tend to see the rules as reflections of mutual respect for one another's needs, while people who do not bring empathy to their social relationships are likely to respond to the rules on the basis of their own immediate or long-term interests and desires. People radically unencumbered by empathy may be said to have narcissistic personality disorder. They may behave sociopathically. Such people will probably be called "bad." That word here seems to me to have a meaning that is directly related to deficit: such people are bad at living in social communities, which—as human beings are biologically social—can be regarded as a form of "brokenness." But we would then have to admit that if they are "bad," so are all the others who are socially disabled.

But if it is their actions that are "bad," those actions are performed also by people who are not unencumbered by empathy. When we find harmful, injurious deeds done to humans or some animals, and those deeds have been done in a manner which specifically shows the absence of empathy, or the offender shows no remorse indicative of empathy when "apprehended," we then tend to put the conduct in a category of special severity, or "badness," and we either kill the person who did these deeds, or we declare him socially dead and confine him forever where we cannot see him and he cannot see us.

But most people who "offend" commit all the same crimes and cause all the same horrors without being incapable of empathy, and what they have are reasons, justifications, feelings, conflicts, rages, and confusions. Social control of all varieties is applied to us, and has its effects. Our behavior is shaped by the world in which, as individuals, we live. We also acquire psychic self-states, personae, personalities, and they live out their lives using our brains and our bodies within the social matrix. The interactions among those self-states, those with whom we have relationships, and the remainder of the social world brings about events through which we are judged either "good" or "bad." The judgment, however, captures the least of it.