Entries Tagged 'Ethics' ↓

Outside of our hotel here in Winnipeg the annual Gay Pride parade marched by yesterday afternoon, and the journalist in me forced me outside to observe. Suggestion to the Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered community: If you want to become socially acceptable, parade in business suits or go business casual. Lesbians and transvestites, wear nice dresses. Gentlemen, wear shirts. Also trousers. Everyone, keep your leather fetish gear in the closet, if I may use that term, and try to defy, rather than confirm, the stereotypes. If heterosexuals carried on like you do, they wouldn’t be allowed to get married either.

Here is a fascinating history of international copyright law, occasioned by recent attempts to bolster it even more in light of the new techological “sharing” possibilities. Back in the 19th century, copyright used to extend only within a particular country. That meant that America, Canada, and England used to pirate each other’s authors, printing their work and giving them no royalties. That eventually changed, due to the crusading, among others, of Mark Twain, who would travel to these other nations and ask why someone who stole his bottle of whiskey would get imprisoned but nothing happens to someone who steals his writings.

The article alluded to some people who resist these laws even today, maintaining that copyright restricts education, people’s access, and whatnot. I certainly understand why people download music illegally. But I can’t see how that can be justified in any kind of moral argument. Attempts to say that stealing music or other created products are anything but violations of the commandment seem to be just casuistry (in the sense I explained a few days ago in a comment) so as not to think of oneself as a sinner. Isn’t Twain’s analogy valid? Can any of you think of a moral justification for taking an artist’s property without paying for it?

Wisconsin leads the nation in people who admit to drinking and driving. The rest of the top five in this particular list of shame are North Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota. Utah has the least problem with this, followed by a number of Southern states. One reason, according to this AP article is religion:

Eric Goplerud, research professor at George Washington University Medical Center, said cultural and demographic issues probably have a role in the higher rates of driving under the influence in certain states. He said that religious affiliations in the Southeast often strongly discourage drinking, but that doesn’t occur so much in the upper Midwest.

What is mercifully unspecified is what the religion of those Northern states is. According to Adherents.com, the five states with the highest proportion of Lutherans are THOSE very states (in this order: North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Nebraska).

And it is true, in something that surprised me when I became one (and later came to appreciate), that Lutherans–for all of their theological, social, and moral conservatism– have NO problem with drinking alcohol. (At least not in the LCMS, though I’m aware there are more pietistic Lutherans that do.) Yes, drunkenness and alcoholism are considered wrong, as is alcoholism, but Lutheranism posits not the slightest guilt or stigma about social drinking. Indeed, beer is often served at church dinners. (I have often wondered why Lutherans don’t promote THAT in their church growth efforts.) And yet, I have not witnessed in my congregations any major problems with this, no more than in my earlier anti-alcohol liberal and evangelical congregations down in Oklahoma. When I was growing up, we actually were in a “dry” county, and yet drunkenness was rampant.

Drinking and driving, of course, is wrong, but there is another part of the story (in addition to questions about how the survey defined the transgression–it may be that citizens in these states are, like good Lutherans, more open to confessing their faults than driving while actually impaired). The fact is, Wisconsin has FEWER TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS than the average. (I don’t have statistics for the other top four.) See this and follow the links.

What are we to make of all of this?

Barbara Walters , icon of TV journalism, has published an autobiography in which she boasts about all of her promiscuous and adulterous relationships. There was a time–in fact, it was Barbara Walters’ generation!–in which people, especially women, were ashamed of their sexual transgressions and didn’t want them to come out in the open. Now, they dish about them on talk shows, with no sense of losing respectability. This shift is culturally significant: it isn’t a matter of violating norms anymore. There are no norms to violate.

Thanks to Ball Point Blog for alerting me to the fact that my Table Talk columns are available online. I did not know that. I like writing for that magazine, since each issue has a special theme, and I, in effect, get assigned a topic. That forces me to think about things I otherwise would not. The topic for this month was “The Seven Deadly Sins.” Here is what I did with it.

The high court in the Presbyterian Church (USA) ruled that a pastor who performed a same-sex marriage cannot be censured, BECAUSE the church does not recognize same-sex marriage. Get a load of this reasoning:

The order issued Tuesday said, “The ceremonies that are the subject of this case were not marriages as the term is defined (by the Book of Order). These were ceremonies between women, not between a man and a woman. … It is not improper for ministers of the Word and Sacrament to perform same sex ceremonies.”

The church’s Book of Order says, “Marriage is a civil contract between a man and a woman,” and does not prohibit blessings of same-sex couples that are not determined to be marriages.

The high court said in the ruling that the lower court had erred by finding Spahr guilty “of that which by definition cannot be done. One cannot characterize same sex ceremonies as marriages for the purpose of disciplining a minister of the Word and Sacrament and at the same time declare that such ceremonies are not marriages for legal or ecclesiastical purposes.”

The church defines marriage as between a man and a woman. A minister marries two women. But the minister cannot be sanctioned because, according to church teaching, gay marriage is impossible. So the minister could not have conducted such a thing.

Thus, the teaching AGAINST gay marriage provides a mechanism for allowing it.

Fed to Pursue Aggressive Checks on Credit Cards - washingtonpost.com:

The Federal Reserve and two other banking regulators are set to unveil today one of the most aggressive efforts in decades to crack down on the credit card industry, prohibiting practices such as arbitrarily raising interest rates on outstanding balances.

The proposed regulations, which could be finalized by year’s end, would label as “unfair or deceptive” practices that consumers have long complained about. That includes charging interest on debt that has been repaid and assessing late fees when consumers are not given a reasonable amount of time to make a payment. When different interest rates apply to different balances on one card, companies would be prohibited from applying a payment first to the balance with the lowest rate.

Before, all the Fed made the credit card companies do was to inform the consumer of such practices. Now, the Fed will forbid them.

Even if you bemoan government interference into businesses and the economy, isn’t this a good idea? Isn’t there a moral issue here that the state does have a Romans 13 right to restrict, namely that all-but-forgotten sin of usury?

The Austrian Josef Fritzl kept his daughter in the basement for 24 years and had seven children with her, who never saw the light of day. He had a “normal” family upstairs that supposedly never knew who lived in their basement. Here is evil on a scale that beggars the imagination.

How those children, the oldest of whom is 18, lived in total isolation and how they are reacting to experiencing for the first time the sight of the moon, the sun, and other human beings is heart-rending. From an article in the London Telegraph, Dungeon children speak their own animal language:

When he was rescued Felix pointed to the moon, which he was seeing for the first time, and said: “Is that God up there?”

He then made excited gurgling noises when he saw a cow.

Doctors said that since he emerged from his prison he is constantly excited and keeps trying to hit the air with his hand.

When he saw the sun for the first time he was even more excited than when he discovered the moon.

He made a squeaking noise and tried to look directly at the sun. When he realised he couldn’t he kept covering his face with his hand.

When police took him in a lift at the hospital he was petrified and clung on to his mother as the floor moved.

Police said he was stunned when one officers started talking into a mobile phone.

Felix was also excited about the police officer’s mobile phones. He was stunned by the ring tones and even more when one of the policemen used his mobile phone to talk.

The youngster also often hums an unknown tune to himself which police believe his mother used to get him to sleep.

More on the 18-year-old and the 5-year-old when they first saw the moon.

The theologian Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a piece during the last presidential election entitled The Only Vote Worth Casting in November arguing that not voting for either of two candidate can be a positive moral action. The first paragraph:

When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither. And when that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw from those arguments and debates, so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives. These are propositions which in the abstract may seem to invite easy agreement. But, when they find application to the coming presidential election, they are likely to be rejected out of hand. For it has become an ingrained piece of received wisdom that voting is one mark of a good citizen, not voting a sign of irresponsibility. But the only vote worth casting in November is a vote that no one will be able to cast, a vote against a system that presents one with a choice between Bush’s conservatism and Kerry’s liberalism, those two partners in ideological debate, both of whom need the other as a target.

MacIntyre is coming from that “consistent pro-life” position, maintaining that we need to be pro-life (which disqualified Kerry) AND pro-economic justice (which disqualified Bush). But if all such ideological purists refuse to get into the fray, wouldn’t that just mean that they are standing up for neither?

HT: Rod Dreher

Petty Officer Mike Monsoor, a Navy SEAL, who died in action in Iraq, is receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor. This is what he did:

Monsoor and a group of SEAL snipers took up position on a residential rooftop as part of an operation to push into a dangerous section of southern Ramadi. Four insurgents armed with AK-47 rifles came into view, and the SEAL snipers opened fire, killing one and wounding another. Loudspeakers from a mosque broadcast calls for insurgents to rally, and residents blocked off nearby roads with rocks.

Insurgents shot back at the SEAL position with automatic weapons from a moving vehicle and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the building. The SEALs knew that more attacks were inevitable but continued their mission of protecting the troops clearing the area below, according to an official account.

Monsoor’s commander repositioned him in a small hidden location between two SEAL snipers on an outcropping of the roof, facing the most likely route of another insurgent attack. As Monsoor manned his gun, an insurgent lobbed up a hand grenade, which hit Monsoor in the chest and bounced onto the roof.

“Grenade!” Monsoor shouted. But the two snipers and another SEAL on the roof had no time to escape, as Monsoor was closest to the only exit. Monsoor dropped onto the grenade, smothering it with his body. It detonated, and Monsoor died about 30 minutes later from his wounds.

“He made an instantaneous decision to save our teammates. I immediately understood what happened, and tragically it made sense to me in keeping with the man I know, Mike Monsoor,” said Lt. Cmdr. Seth Stone, Monsoor’s platoon leader in Ramadi.

Vatican Updates Its Thou-Shalt-Not List:

In the Vatican’s latest update on how God’s law is being violated in today’s world, Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, was asked by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano what, in his opinion, are the “new sins.”

He cited “violations of the basic rights of human nature” through genetic manipulation, drugs that “weaken the mind and cloud intelligence,” and the imbalance between the rich and the poor.

“If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has a weight, a resonance, that’s especially social, rather than individual,” said Girotti, whose office deals with matters of conscience and grants absolution.

Now, in fairness, these are not really “new sins,” as if the church can just declare new things bad that were not bad before. They are applications of the church’s natural law ethic. Still, the shift to more of an emphasis on social sins, as opposed to individual transgressions, does play into the liberal habit of projecting morality out to the fringes of responsibility, playing down individual behavior but emphasizing instead social attitudes as a measure of righteousness and self-righteousness. Hence, the importance of “political correctness” and leftwing posturing.

But it is true that our current technological and cultural context makes possible new ways of transgressing that were not available to sinners before. There is still the same old sexual sin, but now that we have online pornography we have even more ways of committing it.

We can play the same game as the Vatican. What are some “new sins,” in the sense that they are characteristic vices of our particular time that the sinners of the past didn’t have occasion to do?

Who says people today aren’t oriented to liturgies? Consider this article on New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s press conference, which observes that all of these press conferences in which a politician caught in wrongdoing follow exactly the same pattern: Ritual of Repentance .

First, we watch the news conference. There’s Spitzer, with his wife by his side. He says, “I want to briefly address a private matter.” Then he expresses remorse (albeit vaguely) and promises to “dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family.”

Then, we call Mark Geragos, the high-profile criminal defense attorney, who — as it happens — has not actually seen the news conference. He proceeds to describe the news conference that he has not seen.

“You’ve got to have the dutiful wife and you have to have the ‘it’s a private matter,’ ” Geragos says. “And remorse for the past and plans for the future.”

Whoa.

“If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all,” Geragos says.

What are some other secular liturgies?