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10 Legal Ethics 1 (2007)

handle is hein.journals/lethics10 and id is 1 raw text is: Legal Ethics, Volume 10, No. 1 Editorial KIM ECONOMIDES AND JULIAN WEBB The Ring of Gyges and Legal Ethics In this editorial we begin with a story: the legend of the ring of Gyges.I According to the leg- end, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of King Candaules of Lydia. One day, when he was out tending his sheep, there was a violent earthquake, which broke open the ground to reveal a cavern in which Gyges found a corpse, entombed in a bronze horse, and wearing nothing but a gold ring on its finger. He took the ring and wore it to one of the regular meetings that were called to prepare a report to the king on the status of his flocks. Whilst fiddling with the ring Gyges discovered that, if he twisted it so that the stone was turned in towards his palm, it made him invisible. After making this discovery he hatched a plan, and arranged to have himself chosen as one of the messengers sent to report to the king. When he arrived at the palace, he used his new found powers to seduce the king's wife and, with her help, murder the king and take control of the kingdom. In Glaucon's telling, the tale of Gyges illustrates the ultimate power and attraction of injustice. Freed from the constraints of custom and reputation, he could steal whatever he wanted, have sex with whomever he chose, kill or free from prison anyone he wished, and not be apprehended. No one, not even the most just, argues Glaucon, could resist the temptation of such a ring. In various ways the papers in this issue can all be connected to the story of Gyges in par- ticular, and to the significance of stories in general in the shaping of moral sensibilities. Myths and stories have always played an essential part in human moral and ethical develop- ment-children's stories, such as Little Red Riding Hood, we know carry strong subliminal moral messages,2 and modern day ethicists still carry on the Socratic/Platonic tradition using 1 As told by Glaucon in Plato's Republic, Book II, 2.359a-2.360d. See Plato: Complete Works (J.M. Cooper ed.) (Indianapolis, IN, Hackett, 1997), 1000-1. The story was retold and adapted by J.R.R. Tolkien when creating the One Ring that appears in The Lord of the Rings (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1967). As with the ring of Gyges, the One Ring has the power to grant invisibility while corrupting the character of whoever is in possession of it. 2 Charles Perrault's original (1697) version was clearly intended as a precautionary tale to warn young girls of the dangers of getting too close to predatory but smooth-talking wolves, furry or otherwise. This message was subse- quently modified or sanitised in later re-tellings by the Brothers Grimm and others-though cf also Angela Carter's post-freudian reclamation of the tale in her short story The Company of Wolves in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981). See also B. Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York, Random House, 1976).

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