Protect the Innocent from “Witch Hunts”
“Hang them high over the town! Who weeps for these, weeps for corruption!” (Millar, 1992, p116) When Danforth and the villagers in Salem ironically cheer for the hanging of the innocent victims of “witch hunts”, a serious fault could never be remedied. The fear of witchcrafts, together with the other complicated reasons causes people to accuse the innocent blindly and finally leads to the deaths of inculpable people. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible shows us a pervasive problem throughout history: the practice of accusing some innocent people with insufficient regard to evidence. As Miller narrated ( Miller, 1996), this kind of practices, like Cultural Revolution in China in 1960s and the Red hunt by HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee), or the so called McCarthyism in America in 1950s, interfered people’s normal lives grievously. Victims of persecution are countless. In this case, we have to take actions to protect the innocent from being accused. Three possible solutions in terms of jurisprudence, social ethos and moral education could help us solve and prevent this problem.
An effective method of combating the accusation of the innocent is through lawmaking, such as to establish laws on how to punish those who calumniate others and to set rules on what acceptable evidence is like. In The Crucible, people calumniate others freely due to personal reasons. Abigail covets Elizabeth’s husband so that she tells a lie and charges her (1992, p. 60). She dares to lie because there is no punishment waiting for her. But what if there were? Certainly it would be hard for her to carry out her wicked project. As a result, Elizabeth would still live a normal and respectable life. On the other hand, if there were rules on what evidence is acceptable, the accusers’ charges would not be taken seriously because they do not have evidence based on science or other reliable theories, and thus Salem would not be plunged in fear. In...