Is Nothing Sacred? Aristophanes’s The Clouds and Moral Taboos

Although legal prohibitions against murder, robbery, and theft can be justified by reference to utility, some “taboos” require a different type of justification. In The Clouds, Aristophanes’s brilliant “comedy of ideas” about household debt and Socratic sophistry, the great playwright suggests that only a religious culture gives liberal rights their nonconditional status as moral imperatives.