The everyday American uses legal terms on a daily basis, often without realizing it. Sometimes, the meanings that those terms develop in everyday use vary significantly from their actual, legal definition. “Bankrupt” and “Bankruptcy” are two very notable examples.
To the average American, being on the verge of bankruptcy means being very broke, and unable to make ends meet. To be “bankrupt” means to have no money. To the lawyer, however, filing bankruptcy means escaping debts, keeping some assets, and getting a clean slate to start financial life anew. To be sure, in order to qualify for bankruptcy, your debts generally must exceed your assets, and you WOULD be totally broke and then some if you DIDN’T file bankruptcy. Going “bankrupt” however, prevents you from being broke in the lay person’s sense of the word.
To be “morally bankrupt” means, in every day parlance, to have lost all sense of morality. Utilizing the everyday concept of bankruptcy rather than the legal meaning, those who use the phrase morally bankrupt use the term to negatively characterize someone who appears to have lost all ability to act in a societally acceptable manner. They are completely out of moral capital. They are flat broke in the morality sense of things. To most people, being called morally bankrupt is to be cast in the harshest, unfavorable light. It is an insult with few peers. Interestingly, however, as much as we despise the implications of the term when it is used in the layman’s sense, most Americans do in fact go morally bankrupt in the lawyer’s sense of the word, on a regular basis.
Thinking of moral bankruptcy in the same manner as lawyer’s view financial bankruptcy, would cause the term to refer to an act by which the person who has lied, stolen, cheated, and otherwise acted immorally takes some action which wipes out those moral “debts” to those he has wronged, and allows him or her to move forward with a clean moral slate. Although referring to this process as “moral bankruptcy” may be unique, new, or perhaps even controversial, the concept itself is far from it. The grant of moral clemency is a concept long imbedded in Judeo-Christian thought.
The Catholic practice of confession, penance, and absolution is, in fact, a form of filing for moral bankruptcy, in the lawyer’s sense of the word. So too is the Jewish “Day of Atonement,” a fast day which caps off a period in which the believer seeks forgiveness from those persons he or she has wronged, and on which the believer then seeks, and obtains, absolution from God as well. These processes of remorse, repentance, forgiveness, and absolution are the moral equivalents of the Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition. You list all your “debts”, acknowledge them, ask that they be forgiven, and the slate is wiped clean.
Luckily for those of us who qualify as fallible humans, however, moral bankruptcy is not subject to the same limitations as those imposed by American lawmakers on our financially troubled brethren. In the world of economic bankruptcy, an American debtor can only obtain absolution once every seven years. Our religions and basic human nature, however, allow us to go back to the well over and over and over again asking forgiveness and being granted new starts – until presumably we get it right.
Just because we are given multiple opportunities however, there is no need to live our lives dependent upon them. As the world’s economic situation causes more and more of our friends, family and neighbors to seek the protection of economic bankruptcy, it is time for all of us to take steps to eliminate the need for fresh starts on the plane of right and wrong. It’s really not that hard – just do the right thing.
© 2011 under analysis LLC. under analysis is a nationally syndicated column of the Levison Group. Charles Kramer is a principal of the St Louis Missouri based law firm Riezman Berger, PC. Comments or criticisms about this column can be sent to the Levison Group c/o this newspaper or direct via email to comments@levisongroup.com.