ABSTRACT
Powerful offenders seek justification for their conduct through a selective interpretation of classical Western philosophy and by elliptically adhering to certain canonical ethical principles. The crimes of the powerful sit perfectly at ease within this philosophical reasoning, as powerful offenders can claim that the norms they violate are mere conventional prescriptions, and that, therefore, the conduct cannot be judged as intrinsically unethical. In Pascal and Machiavelli, as the chapter tries to show, powerful offenders find what they interpret as unambiguous enticements to ethical and normative violations. Machiavelli's acumen is then revealed in the analysis of consensus, which under certain circumstances which today describe as populism. The chapter shows how an ambiguous reading of Hume, Kant, Hegel, Pascal, Machiavelli and others may lead to justifications for offending that are potentially much more effective than ex-post techniques of neutralization invoked in criminology.
