“Two wrongs don’t make a right” is a plain rebuke to anyone who answers a wrong done to them by doing a wrong of their own. It says that returning harm for harm, or excusing your own bad behaviour by pointing at someone else’s, does not put matters right; it simply adds a second fault to the first. People most often reach for it to counter the schoolyard defence “but he did it too,” or to argue against revenge and the ‘an eye for an eye’ school of justice. The logic is arithmetic dressed as morality: two negatives here do not cancel to a positive.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’?
The saying has an older cousin that carried the same idea in different words. “Two blacks make no white” is recorded in James Kelly’s collection of Scottish proverbs of 1721, where, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, it is glossed as an answer to those who, when blamed, plead that others have behaved as badly or worse. The image is a laundry one: adding a second black mark does not wash the first one clean. This “two blacks” form stayed in use through the nineteenth century before the “two wrongs” wording overtook it.
The words “two wrongs” and “one right” do appear together as early as 1734, in a poem titled “The Moral” printed in The London Magazine, which contains the line “in spight of fate, two wrongs infer one right.” That couplet, though, argues the opposite of the modern proverb: it claims two wrongs can add up to a right, so it is better read as an early pairing of the words than as the source of today’s sense.
The negative, moralising form is documented later. On 2 August 1783 the American physician and Declaration of Independence signer Benjamin Rush wrote, in a letter to Elias Boudinot about the Philadelphia mutiny, that “three wrongs will not make one right.” His version counts to three rather than two, and it is not clear when or how the extra wrong was dropped, but the sentiment is the one we now express. Rush did not coin the modern proverb, and the saying is sometimes wrongly credited to Benjamin Franklin; the more accurate picture is of a settled English proverb whose “two wrongs” wording hardened into its familiar shape over the following century.