Ill-Gotten Gains

This work leads us through a tangled realm, with puzzles and dilemmas, to find the underlying principles that not only guide the law but our moral decisions as well. Katz aims to uncover what is really at stake in crimes such as insider trading, blackmail and plagiarism. He then goes on to look at their connections to cases that try to evade the law by finding refuge in it, from the convict who staves off execution by rendering himself incompetent with mind-altering drugs to companies that sell strategies to beat the SAT test. Ultimately, Katz argues that the law, as well as our conscience, is surprisingly uninterested in final outcomes, but sensitive to how we get there. He states that the fact that we abhor sins of commission so much more than sins of omission is just one manifestation of that.