Response: Singular Truths

In response to Justine Cozza's post "2/2/12":
In response to the very last question of your post, I think that Plato would say that there is only one real truth.  There is no question as to who has the 'right' truth, because there is only one, and it is right; any contradicting views are not the truth.

As to the earlier question, whether we can condemn those who did bad things because they believed them to be truthful and right, that is a bit more complex.  Again, I doubt that Plato would think their views were actually the truth, but there is no reason that they might not believe those views to be true.  That does not, however, mean that we should necessarily condemn them - although I'm not sure exactly what 'condemn' means in this context.  Going by a general meaning, though, I can create an example:

A woman finds out that her former boyfriend, who she has not seen in many years, is bisexual and has married another man.  This woman has lived in Kansas for her whole life and is a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, as were both of her parents.  She travels to her ex-boyfriend's house and, while he is out, burns it to the ground.  The ex-boyfriend returns to the house while she is still there, sees what she is doing, and reports her to the police.  She is sent to prison, but still believes that what she did was right and justified.

In this example, the woman was motivated both by personal bitterness and by the morality she learned as a child.  I would say that we can quite safely condemn her for her actions, no matter how right she believed them to be.  This is not to say that sending her to prison should be considered an act of punishment; the legal system is supposed to act along preventative measures rather than retributive ones.  However, regardless of what actions we take to prevent her from doing further harm to others due to her misguided views, we can still say quite firmly that her version of the truth was definitively untrue.