I’ve been listening to a series of 24, half hour lectures on famous Romans by J. Rufus Fears. His name makes him sound like a punk rocker but he’s a professor. He also has some unfortunate neocon tendencies and that particular manner of barely suppressed blood-lust that you only ever find in an academic who has never had the shit kicked out of him, kicked the shit out of anyone else or been at the mercy of armed men. In spite of all that, his lectures are quite good.

I bring this up because two of these lectures weighed heavily on my mind yesterday while I was scrubbing cheese and eggs off dishes during a busy Saturday brunch. I was concurrently processing two questions, which I find much easier than dealing with one. These were related to Cicero, Augustus and crudity.

The first question was: Cicero believed that an immoral action could never be expedient. But Prof. Fears says that the life of Augustus, particularly his murder of Cicero, refutes that principle. My question: Does it?

The second: What exactly qualifies an action, thought or statement as crude?

To decide the first one, I had to decide the second. Because, it seems impossible to understand what immorality without understanding crudity. But first I had to figure out what is moral. It’s a tough nut to crack and I’m still not entirely satisfied with my answer.

Morality, I figure, must be efficiency and production. Immorality, therefore is inefficient and destructive. Inefficiency is actually destructive, just as efficiency is naturally productive. One is good, the other bad. So the morality of any given action can be measured by determining whether or not it is efficient and productive or inefficient and destructive.

Now, when I tentatively accepted this premise, I decided to question it and see if it held up when challenged with some self-evident moral problems. For example, I know it is immoral to kill a baby. Everyone should know that. But, under this premise, is it immoral to murder a baby?

The answer, happily, is yes. You are destroying that baby’s whole lifetime of creative potential. It is, therefore, worse to kill a baby than to kill a person on their deathbed. I think the gut agrees with this. It might not be nice but, given the choice, I think we would all make the same decision. So far, so good.

But what about a brain-damaged baby who will likely never contribute anything? Given the severely limited creative potential of that child, is murdering it still wrong? I had to think a while about that one. But once again I came a tentative answer.

While that child may not do anything productive it is unlikely that it will do anything destructive either. Along those lines, it is neutral. What tips it into being a positive force deserving of life, is that it presents a problem of untapped potential. If cured, it becomes equal in productive ability to any person. Killed, it become nothing. And murder is destructive and should not be undertaken except in extreme cases.

Besides, the future is unknowable for the living. (We know what the dead do – they rot.) But that child, damaged though is may be, is still deserving of life because we do not know what will become of it. Given this total lack of predictive power, we have to err on the side of morality instead of becoming immoral and destructive by killing it. So, take a potential moral action instead of a definite immoral one. It’s a decent gamble.

So, in light of this, I turned back to Cicero and Augustus. Was that murder immoral? Augustus did choose a definite immorality but the goal and the gamble was incredibly high. Balanced on Cicero’s neck was a civil war, the future of civilization and thousands of potential corpses. Augustus cut through that problem, restored peace and built the greatest empire that we’ve yet seen. As he said: “I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.”

It’s the killing Hitler as a baby gamble and it paid off. If it hadn’t, history would not judge the man so kindly. But Cicero said that: “No immoral action can be expedient.” And I think he was right. The life of Augustus confirms this. Because murdering Cicero, a man Augustus admired, saved many lives and improved many more, it was not immoral to do so. Augustus was highly moral in taking that difficult action.

Of course, Cicero didn’t think so, saying to the soldier who did him in: “What you do is not proper but at least try to kill me properly.” Perhaps he should have thought of something he said earlier in his life, to the unyielding stoic Cato: “You act as if you’re in the Republic of Cato, not the cesspool of Romulus.”

Anyway, I’ll get to the crudity thing later. This post has already gone on way too long.