Between Vice and Virtue
Striking farmworkers in Patagonia, Argentina, protested against low wages and increasing working hours, prompting the military to assume responsibility for restoring order, with executions taking a heavy toll. On a night like this one in 1921, exhausted soldiers, weary from excessive killings, went to the Macachín brothel in the port of San Julián to claim their well-deserved reward. However, the five women working there slammed the door in their faces and drove them away, shouting, “Get out of here, you murderers, get out!” Osvaldo Bayer recorded the names of the five women and appended a note to the page: “Chaste prostitutes.” This story places us before a glaring moral paradox: can vice and virtue coexist in the same person? Behind the details of the tale, the conventional framework of moral concepts collapses. Here, we are not seeking sympathy; rather, we place vice and virtue on the same scale. Can noble traits emerge from the ashes of a sin rejected by society? Or is the attempt to combine them merely an intellectual illusion? Perhaps the most striking aspect is observing in a single individual a trait worthy of praise alongside an act deserving of condemnation. Does the condemnable act nullify the praiseworthy trait and strip it of its value? From a psychological perspective, the human self does not follow a straight moral line; rather, it is governed by defensive mechanisms that enable individuals to separate their turbulent external behavior from their inner noble values, thereby protecting their identity from collapse. Sociology, meanwhile, argues that oppressive environments and social coercion impose this contradiction: practices such as vice are the product of structural and economic dysfunction in society, while sudden nobility serves as evidence of the individual’s innate resistance to attempts to erase their humanity. Thus, moral judgment remains perplexed: should we treat a person as a monolithic entity, in which the corrupt part ruins all purity, or should we understand their fragmentation under the weight of circumstances? This reading leads us to believe that virtue is a stance, not merely a settled lifestyle. Nevertheless, the question remains open: on the other hand, is a single noble act sufficient to forgive a lifestyle rejected by society? Or is true nobility defined by rising above wrongdoing, regardless of the harshness of circumstances?
