The Lowest Common Denominator (Part I)

[salib]

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/02-09-2008/106267-Lowest_Common_Denominator-0

Over ten years later, I still remember the lecture. My law professor had drawn two squares on the chalkboard and labeled them A and B. .... Faced with the prospect of lost income, the owner of factory A abandons the idea of installing “scrubbers”: “Thus B’s refusal,” the professor stated, “reduced A to the lowest common denominator.”

The point of this lecture was to illustrate how laws were often required to achieve what a sense of higher purpose could not. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explained after President Dwight Eisenhower denounced proposed civil rights legislation as an attempt to “legislate morality”: “A law may not make a man like me, but it can stop him from lynching me.”

But I discerned another lesson in the professor’s example: It is easier for evildoers to lower others to their depths than it is for those who do good to elevate others to their heights.