In the 1920s, it began.  The California eugenicists began saying vehemently that mentally inferior or mentally disturbed women should not be allowed to breed.  By the 1930s, thousands of women were undergoing forced tubal ligations to prevent them from conceiving a child.  In the U.S., the eugenicists were unable to force any further concessions from a government still trying to adhere to the Constitution.  This went on until about 1960 (does that surprise you?  Perhaps you were misled in a high school history class).  

Eugenics laws were all the rage in the early part of the 20^th century.  It was felt that over a period of years they (the laws) would create a situation whereby the lower classes and especially the immigrants would be prevented from out-breeding, and therefore replacing, the more meritorious classes – such as the white middle class.  Germany, in the form of the Weimar Republic first, and das Dritte Reich later on, was a subscriber to the concepts put forth by eugenics and in its effort to clean out a corner of the government deficit began to consider the amount of money consumed in the care of retarded and physically handicapped patients and the occupants of its mental hospitals (remember that in the twenties, Germany was subject to inflation that was for a while paced at more than 100 % per day, and there was need to lower government expenses in any way that could be applied).  I have seen a poster from the 1930s depicting a man, a double amputee, seated in a wheelchair with this message in German below the picture:  “It costs more than 60,000 Reichsmarks per year to keep this man alive.” 

When a culture discovers that there is some advantage in death, regardless of the nature of the death, if its moral underpinnings are sufficiently rotted away by hedonistic, self-contradictory or misogynistic philosophies, a situation is created where almost anything might happen.  In Germany and the U.S., it was discovered that the social climate would admit forced sterilization, open racism, and in Germany (although it was never mentioned in public), euthanasia.  If the war had not closed all of Germany’s borders, the Holocaust might have been much smaller than it was.  The Nazis first tried to deport Jews and gypsies.  It was only after the war had sealed them off from this option that the Germans started killing most of the people not considered to be among the Aryan übermenchen, including Jews, gypsies, Freemasons and Communists.  Belatedly, they added intellectuals – everyone from historians to philosophers.  Even after deportation was no longer possible, the German government faked it by moving hundreds of thousands of Poles to camps in little-occupied areas of the country, where it was easier to kill or enslave them. 

Having said that, the news of the massacres occurring had been painstaking smuggled out of the country and taken to the U.S. for publication.  The U.S. government suppressed knowledge of the atrocities, including the Nazi SS massacre of Polish Jews at Lwow, Lubin, Bialystok and a dozen other cities, the atrocities and mass murder committed at camps such as the ones at Sobibor, Auschwitz and Birkenau, as well as the Soviet NKVD massacre of Poles, including Jews, in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk and in Eastern Poland, while they held that part of the country after having invaded it specifically to divide the country with the Nazis. 

The suppression went on until the war was over, with the government not admitting that it had been complicit in these atrocities by denying Jews and Poles permission to immigrate to the U.S. 

Why am I discussing this in a weblog almost seventy years after it occurred?  If you haven’t figured that out yet, perhaps you should go back and read what I have said about consequentialist ethics.  All of the decisions taken to permit massacres of noncombatants and POWs by the Communist government of the Soviet Union and the Nazi hierarchy between 1939 and 1945 were based on one of the forms of consequentialist ethics.  Remember that consequentialists look for the consequences of the act in order to decide whether the decision was a good one.  The Soviets favored bullets for their massacres, but the Germans, conscious of the increasing difficulty of obtaining ammunition pragmatically tended to choose toxic gas as their favorite means of execution.  It was fast, cheap and very, very effective.  It also made no noise, although at Auschwitz, Birkenau and other camps such as Bergen-Belsen, the smoke from the crematoria had a distinctive aroma that was evidently impossible to remove from clothing (in the event that you happened to be downwind from them) without multiple washings.  The Soviets had their own extermination camps and they also gassed inmates there.  All of these things were done with a beady eye fixed on consequentialist ethics. 

Consequentialist ethics were also at work in the Roe v. Wade lawsuit decided by the Supreme Court for the plaintiff in 1973 that legalized elective abortion in the U.S.  It was argued that Norma McCorvey was unable to obtain a legal abortion when she became pregnant and had therefore been denied the right to privacy as stated in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  It was judged that a woman had the right to end an unwanted pregnancy if she chose.  Since then there have been more than fifty million legal abortions in the U.S., and the decision and the reasons for making it were copied by a number of other countries as applicable to their own women, resulting in the passage of elective abortion laws in many countries in the years since the decision. 

The fact is that if you are a proponent or a user of consequentialist ethics, you voluntarily line yourself up with the two most repressive regimes in the history of the world – the Communists and the Nazis.  Between them, these two regimes are responsible for more than 120 million deaths (deaths due to combat are not counted) among their own people and among conquered nations over the course of their rule.  Every death was surrounded by a series of decisions made using consequentialist ethics and thereby justified as both moral and necessary. 

If you are a consequentialist, you may be telling yourself that you would never do or agree to participate in anything like that, and you may be perfectly serious about it.  Good for you.  You should know, however, that almost every person involved in making the decisions referenced above had full assurance that what he was doing was both right and necessary, and that the consequences would be positive.  In some cases the decision was made pursuant to a perceived need or a perceived danger, and second-guessing someone sixty or seventy years down the line is always risky, but of the incidents enumerated above and literally thousands of others, the decision was made simply to eliminate those perceived as inferior, dangerous or otherwise objectionable (e.g., simply being an impediment to the concept of lebensraum). 

One of the things not trumpeted by the healthcare overhaul legislation currently before the Senate is that once it’s passed, all healthcare will be rationed – it will be on sort of a “need to be treated” basis.  If this sounds like business as usual, don’t forget that old people consume more treatment, and therefore cost more money than do younger folks.  The change contemplated will mean that treatment will be rationed for them.  Rationed in the sense that there will be some things that will either not be available to them or will be available on a limited basis only.  It won’t matter how much insurance they have; Medicare will be limited and that will limit what is offered by private insurers, who will follow suit to ensure their expenses keep up with what the government allows for people with Medicare.  If that sounds unfair to you, please remember that this has all been thought through very carefully and it has been decided that in order to keep expenses for the anticipated public option low enough to keep the deficit low.  That’s a good decision, if you’re a consequentialist.  Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz physician, would approve. 

It simply won’t do to claim that your decisions are made with a view to the consequences.  It always turns out that the consequences have not been fully realized and there are unintended consequences that either were not considered or simply could not have been predicted at the time of the original decision.  Consequentialism is simply not a good basis to use to make moral decisions.  It is hampered by its inability to predict consequences accurately or completely and its inherent weakness in that it can always be used to justify almost anything because of the expected consequences. 

So if you can’t use consequentialist ethics for moral decisions, what can you do?  You can’t be a nihilist; to do that would be to deny there was a need for ethics, meaning you could do anything you wanted without fear of contradiction.  You couldn’t be a utilitarian, because consequentialist ethics are the kind used by adherents of that philosophy.  So if you are determined to act ethically, what should you believe?  How about postmodernism?  There sits a problem with postmodernism – postmodernists lack a belief in objective truth, meaning that they do not accept the idea that some things are true all the time – this belief is not specific, but treats all communication as having been contaminated by language in such a way that truth cannot be clearly discerned.  That puts paid to the idea that you could ever discover any abiding guidelines for ethical behavior. 

In fact, if there is no such thing as objective truth, then logical proof is meaningless, there are no maxims on which you can depend to help you and you can’t say that this course of action is better than that one (unless you approach it as a utilitarian/consequentialist and make a decision you don’t know is anything other than arrant selfishness), and you have a real problem trying to figure out what constitutes ethical behavior in any given situation – unless you want to descend to nihilism and just say that you will do any damned thing you want and no one can criticize you because they are no better than you are – and besides, you want it to be this way, and so you are  going to work to make it come out like that. 

A second kind of ethics, called virtue ethics, examines the motivation for ethical acts rather than the results.  Virtue ethics would say that (for instance) to help an old person on crutches across the street is a good ethical decision because helping those who have trouble helping themselves is an altruistic act.  This looks pretty good, doesn’t it?  I mean, if you can ensure that your ethical decisions are governed by such a standard, you should have a good grip on ethical consistency, right?  Well, while virtue ethics is closer to the mark than is consequentialist ethics because it is less subjective, there are still significant problems. 

To begin with, nothing comes out of a vacuum.  If an act is considered altruistic, then there must be a source for the reasoning used to show that.  Here is the problem.  Exactly whose definition of altruism do you use to determine the virtue of any given act or decision?  Furthermore, once this is discovered, how do you know the definition is a good one?  What if it (the guideline) is as self-aggrandizing and unreliable as consequentialist ethics can be?  How would you determine that in an inquiry into the motivation of the person or persons setting the standard?  Is there something to which you can compare the guideline to see whether it is truly altruistic or not?  In fact, could you determine whether altruism is appropriate in any given situation?  Some of the aspects of parenting come to mind here, as do things like casting a play or choosing team members for a pickup basketball game. 

If you bother to examine ethical decisions made by governments and by famous people over the years, a pattern emerges:  some decisions are extremely difficult and no matter what the decision, the result may cause discomfort in the decision-maker that lasts for a very long time indeed.  It’s easy to argue that ethics is the most difficult part of any philosophy to adhere to.  I wouldn’t dispute that.  Ethical problems and the decisions made to try and resolve them are frequently troubling and the decision you make to address any knotty moral problem will like as not lie on your conscience for as long as you live.  Nevertheless, you and I are asked to make moral decisions almost daily, and once in a now and again a moral decision comes along that is, as I stated above, one that stays with you for the rest of your life – no matter what you decide. 

You aren’t really stuck with consequentialist ethics or the postmodern equivalent, which can be closer to nihilism than to consequentialism.  You aren’t stuck with virtue ethics, either.  You can do what the Jews did between the promulgation of the Torah and the appearance of Jeremy Bentham; you can use deontological ethics.*  Deontological ethics relies on truths already made clear for its strength.  These truths, which are disputed by some, are so old and so well-tested that anyone who actively disputes them either has got an axe to grind, either against them or their source, or is selling something, and perhaps both. 

As I have said more than once, ethics is not the most visible thing in your world or mine, but we must rely on it almost every day.  That said, it would be important to ensure that the ethics you select as the one you will use throughout your life is one that can be defended even a century from now and that your grandchildren will not be puzzling over to explain your behavior long after you have gone to your reward and are no longer able to do so.  In the next post – ethical lapses and how evident they become with the passage of time. 

The House of Representatives has passed their omnibus overhaul of the U.S. health care system on to the Senate, which has now agreed to allow floor debate on it.  Without going into the financial or political ramifications of the bill, let’s examine where the House and Senate want to take this bill, and with it the way health care is both provided and received in America.  The basically unexamined legislation now heads to the Senate floor for debate or whatever might happen next. 

It has to be said that the overall tone of both Congress and the Administration on this legislation, which is certainly the most sweeping change made in anything since I was born in 1943, has left much to be desired.  There are ongoing active attempts to conceal the content of the legislation from the public (that is to say, if failing to identify even the major features of a bill almost 2,100 pages in length is not an attempt to conceal its content, it will probably do until someone with the ability to print the thing in invisible ink comes along), and especially those in the media who might, after discovering its contents either oppose or at least disagree with its provisions.  I can only speak for myself here, but the process has assumed a surreal air for me; it’s as though a group of people I don’t know have chosen to enter my house and simply to take whatever they liked from among my possessions (while refusing to answer questions about why they are there), including things that could not possibly benefit them (my freedom, my self-respect, even my life), but would make my life infinitely miserable. 

I suppose that if one were to insist that when the President said “transparency”, he meant that his motives and not his legislation would be transparent, there would be a certain Kantian rigor to that.  Immanuel Kant believed that there was a genuine difference between a lie and a truth, however misleading said truth might ultimately turn out to be.  On this one, I will have to say that if the President’s intentions were as outlined above, I couldn’t really complain about the word. 

I watch as from behind a panel of impenetrable glass, unable to make them hear me and unable to attract their attention no matter what I do or how wildly I gesticulate, shout at them or beat against the glass.  The next feeling is hopelessness, which at length gives way to an abiding anger – which I have to say is so far the only thing that has lasted from the beginning of this tortuous process until now for me. 

I have to say, partly because you need to know it, that I am not afraid to die.  I am a Christian and I have been prepared to die for at least a decade.  In fact, looked at one way, it would be a genuine blessing to die (and before you label that as so much meaningless posturing, know that I am perfectly serious).  It has some relationship to what St. Paul said in II Corinthians 5:8 – “We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.” – although there are events in my own life and faith that illuminate this concept beyond what I can read from St. Paul’s statement or express in this essay.  “For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain” 

I don’t feel that it is a bad thing to die (death is the great leveler – everybody gets one); I feel that it is a bad thing to be essentially robbed of your life by an uncaring “caretaker” in the name of “fairness”.  The result would be the same at any rate, but in this instance, it is not God who decides the day of my death, but a government bureaucrat who may be less concerned with human life (or in the case of myself as a member of a class – old people) than he is with ensuring that he doesn’t have to work past 5:00 PM today. 

The problems with such an attitude (or the concomitant attitude that some lives are intrinsically worth less than others for whatever reason, and therefore subject to evaluation and a decision) stretch back at least to the Roman practice of exposing unwanted infants to the elements – and the wolves – a couple of millennia ago.  There was also the Canaanite/Phoenician god Moloch who demanded the sacrifice of children (usually infants) – by burning them alive – more than a thousand years before that. 

In order to understand the viewpoint that could produce such behavior, you must first see the source of it.  It’s the idea that in order for everyone to:  be happy/have good crops/avoid invasion by hostile powers/have good weather/sire many children/obtain power of any kind – it was necessary to sacrifice something valuable (and certainly a baby barbecue is no more cruel than a partial-birth abortion, which involves a craniotomy – no anesthetic, of course – of a living baby).  The idea was that it would be a quid pro quo situation:  value given for value received.  It was a frank attempt to control the gods by putting whatever deity was in question in the debt of the people making the sacrifice.  Said deity would then be obligated to give the petitioners what they asked for – hopefully. 

It is significant that the amount of the sacrifice was seen as related to the size of the benefit desired.  Just another indication that this practice involved a certain “let’s make a deal” attitude among those who worshipped Moloch.  That was, in fact, the basic relationship between ancient people and every god except the God of Israel.  He specifically forbid the sacrifice of human beings to Him and the lowest periods in the history of Israel were those in which the Jews forgot or ignored their God’s various statements concerning human sacrifice and obeying His commandments. 

Having supplied a bit of background, the present problem – and it is a problem whether or not you personally agree that it is a problem – is not with human sacrifice to a pagan god, but human sacrifice to something at once subtler and more sinister than a pagan god.  That would be the virtually unlimited capacity of human beings to justify almost anything they want to do as a “good idea,” including what amounts to human sacrifice, not to a god, but to something less intimidating and more prosaic, such as a pragmatic desire to save money or an ill-founded longing to improve the genetic inheritance of the human race.  At the bottom, as with many other important decisions in life, the whole thing arises from ethics and how the various people approaching the problem see ethical decisions. 

The title of this post is taken from a phrase used in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to describe those who were a drag on the resources of society either because they were mentally unfit (insane, autistic, retarded) or physically unfit (physically handicapped, wrong race).  The German phrase is probably most accurately translated into English by this phrase:  lives unworthy of life.  The Nazis have justly been the objects of opprobrium for their attitude about those who are vulnerable and subject to criticism from people who feel that no more money should be spent on them.  The phrase was used by, but not originated by the Nazis.  The concept behind it is a pseudoscience called eugenics, which was very popular in the U.S. in the first forty years of the twentieth century.  In fact, the original major proponents of eugenics were almost all Americans, most of whom lived in California.  Several universities, as well as famous people such as Robert Millikan, Nobel laureate in physics and Margaret Sanger, founder of The American Birth Control League* were involved in the movement in very much more than simply as supporters from the sidelines. 

The fact is that the Nazi eugenicists got their information from us.  This fact was concealed by the press during the Nuremberg trials in 1945-46 in spite of the fact that some of the defendants used materials on eugenics published in the U.S. to support their case.  After the war, eugenics lost its luster (small wonder, huh?) and although there are still people who will make an argument for it, eugenics amounts to very little more than institutionalized racism with Caucasians being the “chosen” ones.  A reliance is placed on junk science and Mendelian genetics to explain how “inferior” people (almost always the darker-skinned races – imagine that) breed without letup and crowd out all the “better” people in so doing.  Eugenics is the reason that Margaret Sanger founded the organization that became Planned Parenthood. 

So, now we’ve had a dose of comparison, with the human sacrifice done by pagans as well as a dose of humility from the California eugenicists of the 20th century.  Now let us look at what is happening with our healthcare overhaul.  There are enough provisions, such as the requirement for older people to have “end-of-life counseling” and a few other things, to be truly frightening.  If all this change will be a way for people to better afford health care, why is there need for a difference in the way older patients are handled or counseled by the health care “czar”? 

If that sounds narrow-minded and suspicious, then why haven’t the Democrats been more up front with the content of the legislation?  For some reason, it is more important to them to prevent us from knowing what is in this bill than to allow us to see how things will be different after it is passed.  Let’s forget, for a moment, that it is the largest piece of social engineering tried since FDR tried his solutions to save the country during the depression.  President Obama has even been compared to him – bravely going against the wind to provide relief from the ravages of the recession and the assorted vagaries of health care that may not include elective abortion or end-of-life counseling. 

Here is where we must conclude that since the President’s agenda does not include letting us know what, exactly he has planned for taking over our health care and putting (eventually) companies like Humana and Blue Cross out of the health insurance business, it might be argued that he has not acted ethically.  The only questions remaining about the President are those that do not deal directly with his ability to obfuscate legislation.  Let’s look at them.  So far, does it seem to anyone that the President has proven to be an ethical person while in office?  If so, are those folks who are suspicious of his actions just being too cautious?  If not, how could he have improved his behavior? 

One thing that seems to have emerged from this debacle* is that Democrats feel perfectly justified in flimflamming the body politic – if what’s going on is important enough.  This is not to say that all politicians wouldn’t do it, but since the Democrats are in control, they are the ones with their collective hand on the wheel.  And I ask everyone to remember that even the Nazis didn’t get around to killing the elderly – unless they were Jews, gypsies or Communists, of course.  Qualms about murder don’t apply to inferior races, you know.  The first person to explain to me how Communists qualify as a “race” or as “mentally retarded” gets five bucks. 

In fact, since there have now been roughly fifty million legal abortions in the U.S., it could easily be argued that we made our choice about the value of life in 1973 and this is what we could logically have expected with the situation in Germany before WWII as a guide.  It seems that it’s all too easy to make life cheap, and equally easy to justify making it even cheaper, once you know how. 

Is it ethical to allow people to die when there is a way to prevent their deaths?  If you can look at the way the Nazis did it, using eugenics to show that retarded, insane or handicapped people are both inferior and not deserving of further mercy, are your actions after that justified?  You did show that they were consuming an inordinate amount of resources as wards of the state without doing anything to justify their care.  You made a dispassionate, carefully considered decision to rid the country of them because the resources being used by them would be more effectively used elsewhere.  If it’s ethical to abort your baby because the Supreme Court said it was okay, why couldn’t you do this?  Certainly the medical folks in the Weimar Republic had no problems using euthanasia on crazy people or Downs Syndrome folks (usually by the use of some inhalant toxin, like carbon monoxide or later, Zyklon B.  Why, then would it not be to withdraw medical treatment from folks who didn’t get an opportunity to protest your action, why couldn’t you do that to every group that isn’t “producing”? 

What is actually at issue here is that does the true concept of ethics stretch to cover what is called consequentialist ethics?  If it can be so stretched, then all the actions listed above are ethical.  If it cannot be done, then the actions listed above are so much self-justification.  If, on the other hand, deontological prescriptive ethics is the only concept that could be said to encompass true defensible ethics, then anyone who uses consequentialist ethics in their lives is both wrong and at least self-aggrandizing, if not genuinely evil.  Think that over.  Any decision involving a moral choice gives a real clue to whose ethics you are using to make the decision. 

* This organization became Planned Parenthood in 1942. 

* de·ba·cle (dĭ-bä’kəl) n.  1. A sudden, disastrous collapse, downfall, or defeat; a rout.  2. A total, often ludicrous failure. 

 Recently (last week), I have come to realize that I am asking people to read a lot of rambling, not-so-succinct, not-so-logical prose just to get to my point.  That’s no way to run a weblog.  My point is basically the same in every post.  Here’s this week’s contribution.  Let me know if you figuratively run out of breath before you finish it. 

One of the most frustrating things about ethics is that if you are determined to inculcate them you have to decide where you will begin.  I had thought that I should begin at as low a point as possible due to the plethora of consequential ethicists around versus those who teach deontological prescriptive ethics and the profile, if you will, of those ethics.  I believe that I am going to be forced to change approaches if I want people to read this stuff, which I most certainly do.  Here is my first effort. 

Over the past couple of weeks or so there have been several things revealed about the present administration in Washington.  One is that they seem not to realize that everything they do, and very especially everything the President does, is watched with interest by most folks who vote on a regular basis.  Events have revealed that the President and his employees are doing several things that do not necessarily pass inspection as being ethical.  Stay with me here – I realize that my first post said that I would not spend all my time on politics, but over the past couple of weeks there has been so much incredibly rich teaching material provided by politicians that I just can’t pass it up.  I will return to more mundane pursuits as soon as Washington dials back a notch on the juicy teaching opportunities. 

I have already written about the concealment of the details of the health care legislation being formulated in Congress and the fact that very few people involved in that pursuit seemed even marginally willing to provide any details thereof.  That in itself was (to this observer at least) astounding – and I use that term advisedly.  That was one thing that gave me to understand that perhaps the new administration was not necessarily an improvement on the old one. 

I suppose the shock I experienced was mainly connected with what the President said during his campaign and soon after his election about the transparency he intended to bring to American government.  If you have been watching what the White House does, you may be having the same problem.  It’s called cognitive dissonance.  If that sounds like a word from psychology, it is.  Cognitive dissonance is the problem faced by people who perceive two contradictory things.  The things in question may not actually be in contradiction to one another, but that is the perception of the person whose cognition is dissonant. 

In the case of the new Administration in Washington, however, I believe the problem lies not with the person whose perceptions seem to conflict, but with the ethics of the Administration itself.  Take the 1) obfuscation outlined above, about which I have already written, and put it together with 2) announcements stating that the health care overhaul will not involve government-funded abortion,  3) an effort to both muzzle and marginalize an entire news organization – not a reporter or a talk radio commentator, but Fox News.  It didn’t work, but it’s still being used, even though it has been the subject of considerable criticism over the past ten days or so.  Then there was 4) the gag order that prevented insurance companies from communicating with their policy holders about the health care bill, 5) the attack on The Chamber of Commerce (and symbolically, the attacks on absolutely everyone who disagrees with the Administration about anything they want to do, including insurance companies), and you have the makings of some world-class cognitive dissonance. 

Okay, I had the selfsame problem.  However, it took me a while to realize that the new President was a more-than-average ruthless politician.  He uses some techniques that were favorites of Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung and closer to home, Bill Ayers and Saul Alinsky.  From where I stand, it’s truly difficult to figure out whether it’s just the agitprop techniques that the President has learned from Communism and is determined to apply in his presidency, or whether it’s the philosophy as well. 

Communists were the first well-known (and even successful) creators/users of cognitive dissonance that we have for use as examples.  They were for decades the most evident proponents of consequential ethics (the definition is actually longer than this, but consequential ethics can be defined briefly as doing what benefits you the most and calling that ethical) on the planet. 

Suffice to say that the President and those who serve him at closest range – his press secretary, the Democratic leaders in Congress, his “czars” (that term, evidently, can mean whatever the President wants it to mean) and his other highly-placed employees (think cabinet secretaries here), are essentially in the business of ensuring that they have the best chance to get whatever they want by any means that (at least so far) does not involve the commission of violent felonies.  Notice that I did not rule out all felonies. 

If you have cognitive dissonance with regard to the new Administration, I’m with you.  I have discovered that I don’t actually have to be confused, and if you, like me, are having trouble seeing what the President and Congress are doing as being consistent with his promises and you are also thinking that there is something wrong at the White House, I’d say you were in good company.  In the event that you do not feel that what I have said above in this post is an accurate description of the President and his Administration, would you please agree to continue to read here?  You are my target audience. 

If there is any doubt at this point in this post, I do not believe the President subscribes to the deontological prescriptive ethics I described above.  Each one of the red-numbered items is a glaring denial of everything the President said about being open, above-board and even transparent.  If this is a substantive example of transparency, I’m the Queen of France.  Ethics will catch you almost every time.  This time, it’s almost as though the lies and dissimulation are being flaunted, simply because there is at the moment literally nothing we can do about it. 

Okay – some unpleasant things need to be said about politicians (like you couldn’t do that off the cuff every day of the world), and they are about to be said here.  Since our focus is ethics, we will consider whether politicians have any room at all when it comes to moral principles.  To give the subject a bit of depth, let me tell you about my favorite part of Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age.  It’s when the main character’s fiancée tells him that since he is so interested in politics, he should run for office.  The guy – who by now has had ample opportunity to observe politicians in their natural habitat – tells her that he doesn’t feel he could get elected without having to do something that would make him unfit to serve.  So the problem is at least as old as the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 

If you have studied the Empire of Rome, you may be familiar with Cicero.  Some of his writings and correspondence managed to escape burning by the Visigoths while they, along with the Vandals and several other groups were busy burning all the other books in the Empire.  You may have seen translations of some of his stuff.  His entire life was basically consumed in politics – mostly aimed at the restoration of the Roman republic after its takeover by Gaius Julius Caesar – and he was murdered on the orders of Mark Antony in 43 B.C.  Here’s a vignette, written in 55 B.C.  “The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall.”  Hmm.  It does seem that we might recognize some politicians, even that far back. 

These are important things to you, whether or not you “recognize” them at the moment.  In fact, if everyone knew how important they were, people from perverts to politicians would have a significantly tougher time convincing most folks that they were okay.  Instead, it would be more like this apocryphal exchange between a reporter and a constituent: 

“How did you know the senator was lying, Mrs.; Johnson?” 

“His lips were moving.” 

One of the problems that presents itself when you start trying to categorize the actions of politicians is that they (the politicians) have many reasons for doing things that might earn them censure from their constituents for moral or ethical failures.  Some of those reasons may be perfectly good reasons, and some may be totally reprehensible reasons, but there are a few instances when a politician is almost sure to be criticized – among them are:  steering government contracts to a friend/contributor/business associate, using his office to oppress or intimidate another person (typically a staff member or critic), accepting a money bribe for a vote on pending legislation (remember William Jefferson?) and, I bashfully admit, willfully concealing the provisions of important legislation from his constituents.  This last one is rare; not many politicians feel that they can get away with this and few ever seriously try – that is, until this year. 

What has happened is that since one political party has control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency, something fairly unusual has come to pass.  Congressmen, senators and the Administration are trying to conceal the content of legislation from the public.  In addition, when questioned, they either demur, use platitudes “Don’t worry; this will all work out in the end,” or simply refuse to discuss details.  I’ll be sixty-six years old this month and I have never seen anything like this.  Furthermore, they are not only putting the shuck-and-jive on us, they have forbidden insurance companies from communicating with their policy holders to tell them anything the Administration might consider to be negative about the legislation.  This dictum from the Secretary of HHS appears to have been withdrawn over the past few days, but that it was issued at all is, frankly, symptomatic of an Administration that wants no one in their way, and if someone is perceived as being in their way, then they get a label (as Fox News did) stating that they are not in fact what they seem to be, but something else altogether – something quite different, and considerably less trustworthy than they have made out. 

That’s not all.  Even though people are no longer taught how to think and evaluate situations from a viewpoint solid enough to provide good footing for consideration and they can at times be puzzled by things they somehow seem to know are wrong – even though no one within earshot is saying that – they can still find ways to express both concern and anger when they become aware that someone is trying to hoodwink them.  As an aside, one of the few advantages of age is that it’s tougher for someone to have you on to the point of costing you anything – money, time, self-respect – you know the list, simply because it has been tried on you so many times over the years.  So people, and not just old people, can usually still recognize a scam when they see one. 

I offer the recent dissatisfaction expressed by a significant portion of the American body politic over some plans laid out by the President involving changes in the way health care is both provided and administered here in the U.S. as an example.  Everyone complaining did not necessarily have a specific complaint, but they were all upset by what they could tell was happening.  The bills before Congress (one in the House and the other in the Senate were very long – like each one was longer than The Three Musketeers (and yes, I have read the book – a damned good book, BTW).  However, no one in either Congress or the Administration seemed to be able to come up with any of these facts concerning the legislation: 

•  What aspects of health care were covered or excluded – for sure
• How much it would cost the country or each individual participant – not even “ballpark” figures for consideration 
• How it would be better than what they already had 
• How it would affect the health care system in the U.S. 
• Details of any kind, in the end 
• Reasons why they couldn’t tell people what was in the bills

In addition, like the White Queen in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, it seems we are being asked to believe “…as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”  For instance, that government control of 14% of the GDP would not add either to the deficit or to the tax burden we already bear.  That abortion is not permitted by the bill.  That people my age are not required to have “end-of-life-counseling”.  All these things were readily discerned as dubious or as lies by millions of people.  Everyone who was suspicious of what the Administration was saying about the legislation, whether they had specific questions or not, knew without being told that they were being shucked and jived.  That tends to generate anger for several reasons, and we will look at only two of them.  First, few things make people angrier than being taken for fools; second, there is an arrogance behind the attitude exhibited by most of the politicians that would have made people angry anyway. 

There is a fraudulent kind of humor that is no longer used in America, but which has its origins in racism.  It makes situations funny by creating a parody of the behavior patterns, the speech patterns and almost always includes parodies of the supposed actions of others who are either already perceived as inferior or that another group of people want to be perceived as inferior.  This humor is, even from a brief glance obviously designed to perpetuate some attitudes that are both morally reprehensible and factually incorrect.  Such humor usually includes portraying the subject as being stupid.  This is the basis for anger in the first instance noted above – that politicians at the national level consider the average voter a fool* and both stupid and ignorant.  For the voter himself, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that he is considered by the Administration in Washington to be a feckless dupe, willing – and perhaps even eager, to believe anything he is told by the leaders of the country. 

The other major reason for anger is that Congressmen and Senators, not even to mention the President, appear to believe that they can do anything they want simply because of the power given them by the Constitution and that the opinions and concerns of the voters, while perhaps not unimportant, are at least secondary to what they want to do in the name of the people.  No need to be old to pick this up – an attitude like this is pretty hard to miss no matter what age you might be.  So, too bad if you have concerns, perhaps even well-thought-out concerns, about the health-care legislation.  It will be passed and then you’ll see how much better things will be.  Just you wait.  Seriously.  I mean it.  Trust me. 

Should such a situation cause concern among voters, who have in the U.S. seemingly adopted a get-along attitude with their elected representatives in Congress over the past few decades?  Perhaps not, unless there really is a problem the politicians don’t see or the voters really don’t want, or what is going on is actually a shuck-and-jive move on their part to impose something the people don’t want simply because it is the moral thing to do – according to the politicians – and is therefore more important than whatever the voters want.  Why, in the end, would the people object to doing the moral thing? 

Let’s get off the political bandwagon now and proceed with an ethical analysis of these two postulates; 1) that voters in the U.S. are feckless dupes and 2) that U.S. politicians are either arrogant and self-serving or more moral than their constituents.  Get comfortable.  This may take awhile. 

Is it ethical, (or even rational) to consider the people who sent you to be their elected representative in the government to be fools, or at best, uninformed and thoughtless while considering legislation before Congress?  One conclusion you might come to in thinking about this is that if they are fools, then you have been selected by fools to represent them.  That’s an area we won’t visit, because it’s a figurative oubliette, and it doesn’t make politicians look good. 

Here, then, comes a tough choice – do you do what the fools voters (we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt, in this case) want, or do you do what you know to be right (always assuming that you really do know this)?  How do you decide between those alternatives?  What if the voters want the right thing?  Should you overtly examine the alternatives – all of them – to help to determine what your course of action will be?  It should be noted here that to examine choices in order to make a decision will at least result in a better understanding of the choices to be made and may result in seeing one choice as preferable to the other(s) either for reasons of ethics or other reasons.  In those instances where this is not the case, even more examination is required.  Once you have exhausted scrutiny as a tool, you may not have a decision yet, but you at least have a direction for further inquiry.  Many decisions come to this point – what do you do if there are no clear moral obligations?  If you accept the metanarratives of religion, then you have a way to judge the morality of a decision after exhausting intellectual investigation.  Your faith will tell you where the moral choice lies.  If you are a postmodernist, you decide based on what you perceive as providing the best advantage for you.  So do politicians have an obligation to listen to their constituents and take their counsel into account, or not?  I would think that if they did not devote a significant portion of their time to this activity, they would find themselves vulnerable at the ballot box, and they might find that they were toast at the ballot box.  . 

All right – how about the aforementioned arrogance of politicians?  It is the nature of politics to deal in compromise; it is an axiom of politics that nobody gets everything they want.  All political efforts involve both negotiation and compromise.  However, when one party has a lock on both houses of Congress in addition to the presidency and the President is particularly sure he wants a certain thing done, it is possible for them together to do that thing without listening to those who want them to desist or even to allow for closer examination of important legislation if they so desire.  In the case of some legislation, they might even choose to do that without specifying what provisions would be in the final law enacted and signed by the President. 

Even if the majority of the country agreed that they also wanted the thing done, the tight-lipped silence maintained by congressional politicians and the White House could easily be viewed by the voters as arrogance.  Is arrogance an ethical attitude for politicians to adopt?  What if it isn’t actually arrogance, but that the politicians really do know best?  Could you consider it arrogance in that circumstance?  Could you be upset about what had been done in your name (because anything enacted by Congress and signed by the President is always done in the name of the voters)? 

Here is the breakdown:

• Important legislation has been brought before Congress and discussed very briefly. 
• Congressmen, senators and the President have not said much about it – in interviews, speeches or anywhere else.  It increasingly looks as though this is part of plan to keep the voters in the dark. 
• All the people mentioned in the previous bullet point continue to hedge about the content of the legislation when discussing it with their constituents. 
• Hundreds of thousands (at least) of people are vocally upset about this. 
• Congress and the President continue to act as though what they are doing is nothing to concern the body politic – they are carrying on the business of the republic as they are authorized to do. 
• Those in opposition to the legislation – for whatever reason – get very little face time in network TV news shows to air their concerns and members of Congress and the White House characterize these individuals as fringe hangers-on, people with a hidden agenda and sour-grapes types rather than concerned voters trying to do their civic duty and keep watch over Congress and the President to ensure they do not overstep the bounds of their offices. 

Perhaps the musical Evita will provide some guidance here: 

One always picks the easy fight
One praises fools, one smothers light
One shifts from left to right
Politics, the art of the possible

In the event that it appears to you that I have set up a straw man here, go back through the news reports of the last sixty days or so.  It may appear that I have done so even more when the last line of the musical excerpt shown above is recognized to be a quotation from Otto von Bismarck.  Trust me, though.  This is no straw man – it’s reality “…right here in River City.” 

Back to the questions – is it moral or ethical for legislators to conceal (or even lie about) all the details of a bill that will change the lives of Americans so completely that there will not be one who is not profoundly affected?  That may depend on one, or perhaps two different things. 

Consequential Ethics (favored by those who do not subscribe to religion):

One – It is only ethical if the result is sufficiently good that it outweighs the ethical wrongness of the lying involved to accomplish it. 

Two – It may be ethical if the opposition to the obfuscation has been only a vocal minority seeking to derail the process for selfish ends. 

Prescriptive Ethics (favored by most other people)

One – the ethics of the decision is determined by reference to a fixed standard (such as the Torah, the Decalogue or the gospels.  With a prescription stating what constitutes ethical behavior, a decision is both easier to make and far easier to defend later on. 

Two – There is no “two”. 

 So, are politicians dishonest, grasping self-directed and greedy?  Not necessarily.  Are voters fools?  Rarely, although some of the ones who are easiest to fool feel they are on top of everything and nothing will surprise them.  Just as in the rest of life,  you must decide, and much rides on your decision.  Choose wisely and then relax – you have done what you could to get to the heart of the matter. 

* fool – noun

1.   a silly or stupid person; a person who lacks judgment or sense.

 2.   a person who has been tricked or deceived into appearing or acting silly or stupid: to make a fool of someone.             

        Definition from Dictionary.com

 I remember when I was mulling the idea of this weblog over in my mind, I thought very seriously about being able to find enough to write about.  It didn’t seem that it would necessarily bless anyone who read it if I could only make five or six posts per year.  Over the past ninety days, that particular concern has evaporated completely.  I figuratively trip over blog material every day now.  Of course, ninety days back, I was not the person I am today, and as phony as that may sound, it’s actually true. 

 I would compare the process through which I have gone in trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with these “bits and pieces” (primarily all this reading I’ve been doing in philosophy – privately, some of the most interesting and compelling reading I have ever done – but also the whole milieu around this weblog thing to the learning, as well as the learning curve I was forced into when I first went to college.  There were days back then (I’m a grandfather now) when at the end of the day I was so full of unaccustomed stuff – not necessarily unwelcome stuff, but certainly new and unexpected stuff that I couldn’t really even think any more.  Have you ever left the table after Thanksgiving dinner gorged to the point that you were sure if you bent over, some of it would fall out on the floor?  As though you were a pitcher so full that any attempt to move you would result in some spillage?  Like that – only mental rather than physical.  Philosophy is like that.  Don’t read it unless you are willing to feel gorged and somewhat uncomfortable now and again. 

 It is true that ethics issues surround us every day, even though they may not be our own issues.  Once you start thinking about ethics, you tend to notice it everywhere – unless my experience isn’t typical.  One of the strangest things about this new awareness is that it literally gives you new insight.  Have you ever wished you could see things from the other guy’s point of view?  Read some philosophy.  Give me an E-mail address and I will send you some links.  I have to warn you, though, knowing a tiny bit of philosophy is not necessarily going to bless you – that’s partly the subject of every post I will make to this weblog.  I may never know more than a tiny bit, and it’s still pretty disturbing. 

 Being able to think critically is both a blessing and a curse – you quickly find that you notice things that before were either just puzzling – and therefore quickly forgotten – or that you hadn’t really ever considered.  You also discover that while it can definitely add some color to your life, philosophy is like a foreign language.  It isn’t like engineering or psychology or the liberal arts.  You can’t just remember that physics class or that psychology or history class and carry on a conversation about it – it doesn’t just roll off the tongue.  Furthermore, it’s at least as hard to learn as a second language, and I know that because I have learned a second language.  In fact, if I had to pick which one was harder, I’d have to give the nod to philosophy, although Spanish verbs will probably always give me problems. 

 Almost the first thing I learned while reading was that schools in the U.S. haven’t taught their students to think for at least as long ago as I started to school (that would be 1950, for those of you trying to see that far into the past).  Students are taught to memorize facts, to work equations, to criticize drama and fiction, but not to think.  Critical thinking has in fact (I read up on it) been essentially out of style since just after the turn of the twentieth century.  I did a bit of research on that, and what I found was discouraging, if not shameful, but that wasn’t the important thing.  Not thinking about WHY things are the way they are and about what is real and what is false is likely to cause you to come to some wrong conclusions about what is going on around you – think of having a date with an android that looks and sounds exactly like Megan Fox (or if you’re female, Hugh Jackman, maybe). 

 Ethics is a baseline measure of your trustworthiness.  If you honor your commitments, whether that means giving your boss a fair day’s work for the money you are paid to work for him or just avoiding sexual affairs because you are married, ethics surrounds those areas of your life like air in the room where you are sitting.  If you cannot be counted on to honor commitments you have made, then see above for the android analogy – only in this case, you are the android. 

 For those in search of a common situation to which these things may be related, I offer the problem of the late-night TV host David Letterman in which he was discovered to have been having sex with one of the women on his staff at the network.  For all the fact that such indiscretions are common enough these days to be yawn-inducing, he actually fessed up on the air during his show one evening.  Here is something you don’t see every day.  There may have been more than one driver behind him on this.  The first one the public was aware of was that (always assuming this part is true) one of his producers was blackmailing him over the affair and wanted a couple of million to keep it quiet. 

 The man is married (to a former member of his staff – surprise, surprise) who is the mother of his five-year-old son.  They have been married since last year.  If that sounds a bit odd to you, hang on – there is more to come.  After learning that he had been repeating his former behavior with another woman, his wife evidently demanded that he make an on-air apology so that all his fans would know what a schnook he was (this is the thing that makes me unsure whether he was being blackmailed, and I haven’t heard of any producers for that show being fired, BTW).  This done, he then proceeded to admit that he was having to win back his wife who, as may be imagined – was extremely upset about what he did. 

 Here we have a classic ethical problem.  Something has happened because of the selfishness and unreliability of one individual, and now one or more other people are hurt as well.  Since no one ever lives a blameless life, we will all have a problem like this at some point in our lives, although not everyone is so arrogant as to take a staff member from their office, convert her into a lover, sire a child on her and then several years later marry her – shortly afterward to be discovered doing the selfsame thing again.  If you see a problem with this behavior, then you aren’t thinking the way David Letterman thinks. 

 We are certainly all subject to the temptation of the opposite sex, and we are also subject to our own selfish motives.  Even leaving the opposite sex out of the problem doesn’t help things.  The problem presented by Mr. Letterman is a simple one – it involves ignoring a previous, stated commitment in order to do something self-aggrandizing on the spur of the moment.  There have been enough examples of this in the past to be, as I said before, yawn-inducing.  The problem does not always involve sex, although that remains a powerful temptation. 

 It might involve a bit of embezzlement from an employer, not necessarily including money, misuse of a company vehicle, sneaking out of the house to go drinking with your friends when you had told your wife you would wash the car, breaking a series of promises made to one or more of your children, or just skipping that anger-management class the judge required you to take after you beat up you wife. 

 An ethical decision must involve consideration of previous obligations involved in whatever a person is thinking of doing.  If David Letterman were not married, it would probably not be possible for anyone to blackmail him about having sex with a subordinate.   A married man has promised in front of witnesses that he will keep himself only for his wife and – among other things – that he will not pollute his marriage with a sexual affair.  This is a commitment that in the recent past has cost many men and women their marriages.  The divorce rate in the U.S. topped 50% twenty-five years back.  The most common reason for divorce is money; after that, it is adultery.  If that seems to you an archaic word, any substitute that keeps the concept intact is acceptable. 

 The decision made by Mr. Letterman was, in effect, to denigrate the value of the previous commitment in order to get what he wanted at the moment.  Viewed from the standpoint of postmodernism, such a decision is not really a problem, since every ethical decision is made (as I have remarked before) as a one-off – there can be no precedents, nor yet any standards to which a person might appeal to help with the decision.  So in this case, the decision was made and was costly; perhaps beyond anything Mr. Letterman might have imagined.  He has now admitted to hundreds of millions of other people that he was diddling around on his wife.  Unsurprisingly, his wife is angry – I can’t call it anything else because there have been no statements from her to quantify her anger.  Here is the sequence of events for the decision: 

•  David Letterman marries his main squeeze.  They already have a son. 
• At some later time, he is offered sex by another staff member. 
• He chooses to have sex with her, and does so, apparently on a continual basis, disregarding his marriage vows. 
• For whatever reason, his wife finds out about it and is upset. 
• He admits the affair on the air and twelve hours later, at least a hundred million people know about it.  He seems humbled. 
• The last bullet point is yet to come – what happens to him and his marriage in the end. 

 Ethics is very important in the world.  It’s very important to you and to me.  Large portions of our lives are shaped by its limits and the transgressions thereof.  It behooves us to count the cost very carefully before committing an unethical act.  This is the specific thing that makes postmodernism such a quagmire.  If there is in fact (listen to me; I’m such a modernist) no such thing as objective truth, then there is nothing we can count on in the world.  There is nothing that could help us avoid what happened to David Letterman.  At some point we will all then make a mistake with similar implications, even if it’s not one involving sex. 

 Nevertheless, there is a way out of this.  While ethical decisions are always difficult to make and to keep, they can be made with the largest chance of success by simply not considering each one as a stand-alone decision made without input from anyone else or from experience.  Ethics is best served when supplied with all the information available.  For Christians and Jews, this means an appeal to scripture and consideration of what Biblical ethics requires of us.  For secular humanists, it means essentially the same thing, except they don’t admit that they are resorting to the Bible for their referents when making ethical decisions.  This point will be brought out repeatedly and elaborated upon ad nauseum, so if it bothers you, quit reading now. 

So now that medical ethics are looking good, we are presently examining situational ethics.  Allow me to remind everyone of what I said at the end of last week’s post:

If a woman were in a prison camp during wartime and had a chance to return to her family in another country if she got pregnant, she could get pregnant and when it was discovered, she would be sent back to her family because she was an additional burden on the medical resources of the camp.  This sounds as though it might work, based on an assessment of the situation, doesn’t it?  If you were in prison a thousand miles from home and could be allowed to leave and return to your family by simply getting pregnant, would you do it?  You could ask a sympathetic guard to “help” you get pregnant.  Once it was done, you would be free, and you would not have harmed the guard.  You could be with your family again, and no one would have been harmed.  Remember that? All right, let’s examine the situation.  Here’s what we know:

• There is a woman in a prison camp during a war. The camp is nowhere near her home.

• She wants to go home.

• That could happen if she got pregnant because of the limited medical resources of the camp.

Okay, let’s take this from the hypothetical into the real.

• She talks the situation over with a friendly guard and over a period of weeks, they have sex several times and she does get pregnant.

• It is discovered and she is indeed sent home.

• She confesses to her husband that she is pregnant by a camp guard and that she did it so that she could come home after it was discovered.

• Her husband says that he believes her and welcomes her back. 

He tells her they will raise the child as their own.  He will be a brother to the son they already have.  Back at the guard’s house, things have not gone so well.  His wife has heard about the affair and she is very angry and hurt that he would do such a thing without even discussing it with her.  She moves out and divorces him.  Over the next ten years, she moves from one man to another, not staying with any for very long simply because she no longer trusts men.  Her son joins a gang at the age of fourteen (his mother doesn’t discover it for almost a year) and two years later is murdered by a member of a rival gang.  His father does not find out that he is dead for six months.  By that time, his ex-wife has committed suicide with a pistol because she is so distraught over the death of her son and the shipwreck she has made of her marriage.  The father begins to drink very heavily and dies of a stroke at the age of 43.

But everything is fine at the woman’s house, right?  At first, it did seem that the woman’s method for getting out of the prison camp was a good one.  Her husband was attentive and concerned about the pregnancy and was present at the birth of the baby, a boy.  At about the time the child begins to walk, the husband can no longer conceal his pain about his wife’s affair with a man she hardly knew specifically for the purpose of getting pregnant – if that is actually what happened.  The husband believes that his wife fell in love with the guard and that the story about the pregnancy and about being sent home is just so much hot air to conceal the real reason.  He tells her so. She is devastated that he does not, and has never believed what she told him when she got home.  She withdraws into the spare bedroom almost all the time she is home, partly from shame and partly due to the pain she now has over the problem she has created in her family, and they stop having sex.  Her plan worked; she was sent home for being pregnant and she is with her family.  Why are things not the way she imagined they would be?  Their separation continues, and the woman withdraws from the world so completely that a few months later she is placed in a mental hospital, where she remains for the rest of her life.  Three months after that, the husband murders the younger child in a fit of rage and he goes to prison for thirty years.  The elder son is raised by a foster family who try to help him understand what has happened to his family, and to love him enough to make him feel connected to them, but he never really understands, and one night the boy sets fire to the foster family’s house.  All the occupants, including him, die in the fire.

So that’s all good, right? No one was really hurt by what happened and the situation worked out just fine.  If you are beginning to wonder just how you got into this gothic horror story, I have news for you; you walked right into it.  The fact is that situational ethics is little more than a stab in the dark in the direction the person making the choice thinks is the correct direction – and that is assuming that the person deciding is actually trying to make an informed, honest and selfless decision.  Without the ability to predict consequences, or even a serious look at the possible consequences, almost anything might happen, and this doesn’t even take selfishness on the part of the decision-maker into account.

Fr. Joseph Fletcher, author of Situation Ethics: the New Morality would perhaps be surprised to learn that love, as defined by him and subsequently exhibited by people, is not a firm basis for ethical decisions.  Even though Fr. Fletcher is clear that the love involved is agapé (the Greeks have four words for love; eros, or romantic love; philia or brotherly love; storge, or parental/filial love, and agapé or what has been called “Christian charity” – it means the love that God has for us and the love that we are to bear to everyone who is not a member of our family – assuming that we are Christians), the analogy, and it can truly be called nothing more than an analogy, does not hold, because people, even if they know what agapé is may not know how to truly express it.  Add selfishness to this problem and you have a poor basis for ethical decisions.

So in the end, you get not a new morality, but a very old one indeed – almost as old as the race, in fact.  Most of the time you do get a decision that makes you feel good, and this is so important to some people that they will make major changes to their ethics to be able to feel good about ethical decisions.  That is probably the major driver keeping situational ethics afloat, because if the people who use the system took the time to examine their decisions in light of the consequences thereof, many of them would be appalled.

My friends are probably very, very tired of hearing me say this, but it describes a real situation; those pesky unintended consequences will get you every time. It’s difficult enough to make and live with ethical decisions using guidelines provided by philosophy or religious faith; in those situations the decision maker knows that at least he or she has done what was possible to ensure that the decision was not made just to affect the outcome of the situation to their advantage.  Without this, it would be difficult to label any moral decision as ethical, period.  Lacking points of reference, people always decide in the direction they want things to go, even if they know that things probably won’t go that direction anyway.

There are good and sufficient reasons why this is the case, and I may address them at some later time.  At the moment, suffice to say that that is the case; people are inherently selfish and they often do things that are self-aggrandizing for the most trivial of reasons.  In fact, they sometimes do things that are selfish without even considering that they are acting selfishly.  One of the things at which human beings are very experienced is self-deception.  People are not and have never been inherently good at heart, for all the fact that altruism seems to be popular.  Please remember this.

So having investigated situational ethics and found that such a code of ethics is even more prone to deceitfulness and narcissism than is a code based on moral precepts from just about anywhere, including ancient Babylonia and the Aztec Empire, let’s examine postmodernists, who consider themselves to be so free of interfering influences.  They are so iconoclastic that they regard physical science as being too observer-dependent (in other words, they regard the physical sciences to be rife with both experimenter bias and outright fraud) to be a reliable descriptor or recorder of the universe and its phenomena.

This is truly a unique position, and in my personal view equals or surpasses the government of Cambodia under Pol Pot for idiosyncratic excess, in addition to missing the “mark” (which for every branch and quirky backwater of philosophy has always been to be able to nail IT – meaning discovering what is real and what is not) by such a wide margin as to seem to have been aimed in a different direction entirely.  Once you have rejected objective truth of any kind, the precepts of large concentrations of different human cultures, physical science and even the ability to actually be sure that you know anything, then culturally and philosophically, my friend, you live alone on a desert island.  You are infinitely more alone than Robinson Crusoe or Tom Hanks in Cast Away.  You are not only alone and lonely; you are that way willingly and willfully.  Furthermore, you have intentionally, painstakingly cut yourself off from anything that might redeem you, redeem your situation or make you whole again.

To use an historical term, you are a sophist.  You are, figuratively at least, the follower of a Greek philosopher named Protagoras.  Since there is no way actually to know anything, all you are interested in is the deconstruction (for those people unacquainted with postmodernism, feel free to substitute the word destruction here; deconstruction is just a word that postmodernists use to make themselves feel better about what they do) of everything you come across that is already solidly in place in the world – cultures, institutions, family, ethnic identity, national patriotism, religion.  The list goes on and is exhaustive. No metanarratives are exempt.  You may now feel that such a movement could not possibly last long, given its propensity for shooting itself not just in the foot, but in every part of the body, perhaps including the brain, but since it has already lasted more than forty years in the total absence of anything to counter it (well, okay: there has been some effort to counter it, which might better be characterized as an effort to subvert it – more on that later), it’s as durable as you like.

One problem that surfaces here is that in the West, philosophy has gone the way of the dinosaur.  That would make it difficult to counter any argument, no matter how self-contradictory and self-defeating.  I am a prime witness to this.  This weblog actually began a bit more than a year ago with the idea in my own head that there were people in the world who could not see the truth because they had somehow been convinced that it lay somewhere else despite objective evidence that it was right under their noses and obvious enough to be scary if they only looked down at it.  Then later I discovered that there were others, mostly young people, who rejected what I considered to be truth for more than one reason.  First among the reasons seemed to be that we, the older people of the world who were responsible for inculcating the precepts of culture and society, were lying to them.

Many of them seemed to believe that they would not survive to be as old as we already were and it was primarily our fault that this was so.  The reasons for this impression among young folks seemed to be that we had been using up the resources of the planet as fast as ever we could and not thinking at all about them and their needs when they would be adults.  After thinking that over for a while, I had something that I wanted to say, but (please don’t laugh – not yet, at least) I didn’t know what it was.

Since the idea of rejecting everything in our world and essentially telling everyone that they are full of it is so contrary to what parents typically want their children to believe, I began thinking about these problems and their importance to me, and ultimately to all of us.  When I was growing up, I was led to believe that I was only limited by physics and the contents of my mind in what I could do when I grew up (I couldn’t, obviously, be Superman or become a vapor (and retain my faculties), or travel in time, because there were physical [and physics] problems involved that prohibited that).  If today’s children are being told thy may die because we haven’t taken care of the world, then there is going to be hell to pay when they find out that ain’t gonna happen.

I knew that children these days were taught in school that the world was in danger from climate change, and I wondered how this had been phrased to make them believe that they would die unless drastic measures were taken immediately to save the planet.  However it was phrased, those doing the phrasing certainly deserved to be pilloried in the stocks for unnecessarily lying to and frightening the children.  The earth has already been a good deal warmer than it is at the moment and all it did was to open up more land to settle and farm and open new vistas for exploration.  It was about a thousand years ago, or perhaps a bit more (around 980 A.D. or thereabouts), and during this period there were trees growing in Greenland.  The Icelanders, Danes and Norwegians who colonized Greenland used them to build houses.  In the end, I realized that everybody is not speaking the same language any longer.  It’s still English, but word meanings and the import of certain statements were changed and even ignored in the newer interpretation of the language.  After looking afield a bit more I discovered that some of those who were foremost in the movement to stop humans from generating so much carbon dioxide (CO2) were either couching their statements in the most inflammatory language they could muster, or they were frankly lying about what was happening to our planet.  It’s difficult to describe my feelings at that moment. I was ashamed and angry; I was determined and fearful; I was confident and I was nothing of the kind.  Basically, I had no idea what to do. 

Before we go any further, I should say that because I am a Christian, I am of the opinion that we as a race, could not do anything to the planet, including global thermonuclear war, that would trash the place so thoroughly that we couldn’t all still live here (or at least that the survivors couldn’t live here, assuming nuclear war).  In addition, I am prepared to defend my position against all comers, so if you are among those who believe that we are doomed as a race, then send me a comment and you may have an entire post dedicated to your comment.  If there is a way to reply to your comment, I will E-mail you my argument.  Having said that and laid my own cards on the table, I can go on with what I was working toward.

Without putting too fine a point on this, and without making it look more important than it should be, one thing I must say here is that while science has not failed us, some, in fact I believe I should say many, scientists have indeed failed us.  Science and truth are not altered by misstatement, misuse or misfeasance although such is not the case for the perception of science and/or truth.  Today, science is perceived by many, perhaps most as having failed the human race because of many things scientists have either done or not done, depending upon your viewpoint.  Since it is my opinion that science has been done a grave disservice by all the things that have been said in its name over the past forty or so years, I will spend some time trying to show that science is not responsible for the problems; people – unscrupulous people (remember that scruples are for those who believe in metanarratives; postmodernists don’t see the point in being scrupulous, especially if the situation warrants some overstatement according to them to make their point.  Postmodernists are big on ensuring that they make their point.  Please remember that what I am trying to get across here is not that postmodernists are after your soul, but that they all have their own agendas, and said agendas may conflict with what the rest of us would regard as truth, or if not truth, at least with bare statements that were made by scientists in decades past that laid out the situation without interjecting personal or political agendas.  There is one other thing that should be borne in mind here, in addition to the postmodern stuff; there are those (not necessarily postmodernists) who shot their conscience years ago for talking too much.  You may have a bit of difficulty telling these folks and postmodernists apart.

One of the problems with research is that the results have a tendency to turn out the way the researcher thinks they will turn out.  That’s called experimenter bias.  It describes a situation in which everything looks okay and research is progressing well, but every study or data reduction brings the result expected by the person in charge of the experiment.  This is the reason that there are now what are called double-blind studies, in which neither experimenter nor the subjects know which of the subjects have received the medication and which have received the placebo (forgive me for using medical research as the example here, but the medical profession was the first to discover experimenter bias.  According to a study done in 1979, there are fifty-six discrete types of experimenter bias that can contaminate a study.  Experimenter bias contaminates a study unintentionally.  It still ruins the research, but it is not an act of volition and it is not strictly the fault of the experimenter.

However, there are other situations where either research or compilation of historical data are not contaminated unintentionally, but on purpose.  In fact, some of the “research” that has been done was worse than junk science – it was a bald-faced lie from beginning to end.  I can’t think of any nobler term than deceit to describe it.  Everyone should be acutely aware that science is ill-served by those who do not use it for the public benefit, but crowd all their eggs into the same basket and say to themselves that it’s okay to do that because this is important, and they have to make people believe that their conclusion is correct because it’s their conclusion and it’s the right one because everyone can see that things are tending that way and it might even be worse, so why not make it look like an emergency?   People like this would be easier to dismiss if so many of them were not highly placed in either government or science, or both.

Unfortunately, I can’t help you past that rather complicated warning.  There are just too many self-aggrandizing, narcissistic money-and-notoriety-hungry scientists involved in this climate change thing.  In addition, they’re starting to emerge elsewhere.  If it didn’t sound so postmodern, I would tell you not to trust anyone.  Fortunately, you can trust some people.   There are teachers, counselors, relatives, acquaintances and even famous people all over the place who still make a genuine effort never to tell a lie to anyone.  See you next week.

 I spoke about medical ethics in my first post, and it seems to me that in order to be fair and to keep the thread of discussion going, I need to make my points clear before moving on.  I said some things that would appear to be uncomplimentary about medical ethics, and I need to ensure that I have said everything I have to say about medical ethics before leaving that subject. 

Medicine has always had ethics – it seems to go with the territory.  If you are dealing with (and sometimes, in effect, in charge of) people’s lives, you have a burden on you that non-medical folks do not have.  If this sounds simplistic to you, then stay with me.  Your problem may be similar to mine – your concept of ethics may be narrower than that of most people today.  This was the problem I faced after doing a bit of research and reading some of the much-discussed healthcare reform legislation before Congress at the moment. 

Medical ethics may have changed in some ways since Hippocrates wrote the medical oath that bears his name.  One thing that actually does not appear in at least one modern version of the Hippocratic Oath is the restriction against giving patients “any deadly medicine”.  I was pretty surprised at that, but there you are.  I suppose nothing stands still.  Herewith the above-referenced statement in both the ancient form and one of the modern forms of the Oath: 

t form:  I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

One Modern form:  I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know.  Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death.  If it is given me to save a life, all thanks.  But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God. 

          If the above is a surprise to you, then I suggest you think about it.  There are other modern forms of the oath, many of which I have read and so far this is the only one of them that removes the proscription against euthanasia or abortion (ever ask yourself why, when we need a word for something we would rather not think about at all, we nearly always seem to go to the Greek language to look for it?), and I am certainly not saying that the Oath is lightly regarded by physicians.  Among this group I have discovered people who have the spectre of death constantly before them and yet are not overawed by it and would never either surrender to it or guide a patient closer to it.  Physicians and osteopaths face death often, and although it is not their own death, it is always an occasion for reverent consideration, along with the therapeutic considerations that are in place or are under review – notwithstanding the faith or lack thereof in the heart of the doctor.  Facing a patient’s possible death tends to bring determination to the fore and in this area, doctors can be very determined indeed. 

The last thing I would have you believe is that physicians are self-aggrandizing, uncaring and have a God complex.  For one thing, most doctors get regular demonstrations that they are NOT supplied with magical powers.  This tends to keep them humble, at least most of the time.  For all the fact that some physicians are very self-aggrandizing and some do indeed have a God complex, those are not normal attitudes for doctors to exhibit, and if you crowd a doctor into a corner and breathe on his glasses, he will more than likely tell you that he is acutely aware of his shortcomings. 

Nevertheless, the modern version of the oath excerpted above is quite serious; it is intended specifically to shield the doctor from something in the event that he or she decides to euthanize a patient – not litigation (at least in the U.S.), but guilt.  You may be wondering why a doctor would even consider taking a patient’s life when treating him.  I would normally wonder that same thing; it’s just that I’m so, well, cynical.  The fact is that doctors are not that different from you or me – they typically have more education than the rest of us and they spend their days with sick people, but inside, they are very similar to you and me. 

What should also be said at this point is that the Hippocratic Oath is not the only ethical code to which doctors subscribe.  Many national medical organizations have them The Ethical Code of the AMA may be found here (http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/physician-resources/medical-ethics/code-medical-ethics.shtml), that of the Canadian Medical Association here (http://www.cma.ca/index.cfm/ci_id/53563/la_id/1.htm) and that of the British Medical Association here (http://www.bma.org.uk/ethics/index.jsp) (the BMA ethics write-up is an 800-page book, and you must purchase it to read it).  Here is a link to the ethical statement of the World Medical Association, along with the Declaration of Geneva:  http://www.wma.net/e/policy/c8.htm

  There are specific codes of medical ethics that have been developed by rabbis and Jewish physicians to guide practitioners who are Jewish, one of which is called The Prayer of Maimonides*.  Privately, I am very fond of this prayer, and it fits both Jewish and Christian doctors about equally well. 

It may be found here:  http://www.library.dal.ca/kellogg/Bioethics/codes/maimonides.htm

Doctors are subject to the same confusion and pressures that plague the rest of us and they have the same stresses on their lives that we all have – plus those engendered by their profession (you think you have hassle during your workday?  What if some careless decision or even an honest mistake you made caused someone who depended upon your knowledge and expertise for their health to die?).  Doctors are subject to the same kind of temptations as the rest of us.  It’s very possible for a doctor to make a mistake, to give a patient’s case inadequate consideration, and even to believe that a patient would be better off dead when that is not the case, although that is not common, nor is it an attitude that many physicians in the U.S. have. 

Having said that, I consulted a physician about medical ethics and received some materials from him by E-mail that shed quite a bit of light on the subject and which taught me that I had been too myopic to see that doctors think about, discuss and revise their codes of ethics on what over the years must be considered a frequent basis.  I read the materials he sent and then went back to the Internet for more instruction.  I got it.  Doctors are at some pains to ensure that their ethics are useful, and that means they must examine the codes of ethics to which they subscribe now and then to determine whether they are still as useful as they were when first written.  If they are perceived as not being thus, they are changed and the changes are then voted on and agreed to by the association’s members.  The average physician has ample occasion to refer to his ethics while treating patients. 

The oath taken (or the code subscribed to) by a doctor is the thing in the professional life of a doctor that he cannot deny – he agreed to it when he graduated from medical or osteopathic school and in some cases agreed to another essentially similar code when he joined the professional association to which he belongs – and its purpose was, as it has always been, to give him a boost in figuring out what the ethics of a healer should be.  There have been many redactions of medical oaths and ethical codes over the past couple of centuries.  In every case I have investigated, the reason for the change has been one of two things; either the ethics needed restatement because times had changed and they were no longer as easy to understand as when they were written (in some cases, new ethical challenges had arisen), or medical technology had advanced to the point that restatement was needed to cover new diagnostic options or therapeutic regimens. 

The fact is that medical oaths and ethical codes wouldn’t be all that noticeable if we were not in the postmodern era (or at least there wouldn’t be a postmodern version of it to contemplate [see excerpt, above]).  Since we are in the postmodern era, let me lay out some things that you may not have considered so far.  To begin with, the only relationship you may have that is as intimate as the relationship most people have with their doctor is the one you have with your spouse.  Your doctor may know things about you that you have not told your husband or wife, and that you do not intend to tell them.  Such a relationship should be (from both sides) as frank and open as any relationship you have ever had.  So since this is the case and doctors know it, the excerpt quoted above is designed to remind the doctor he is not really at fault, nor is he lax in not telling the patient (or the patient’s family) about it when administering that syringe containing 250 milligrams of morphine to a terminal patient.  It would also nicely exempt him from the necessity to consider whether a government directive delineating treatment under certain circumstances (e.g., the Liverpool Pathway in Britain) were actually ameliorative treatment that were morally acceptable or might, on the other hand, be considered murder. 

No one must read these words and then believe that their own doctor might someday kill them if it was felt that they could not live much longer and were in severe pain or had suffered a brain injury so serious that they would never speak or regain consciousness again.  Far from being accepting of euthanasia, most doctors in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries (Britain excepted – see Liverpool Pathway, above) oppose it, although there are some who might suggest it to the family of a patient if his condition were as described above, assuming it were legal.  And in the Netherlands, it is reported that physicians euthanize patients in spite of the fact that it is technically illegal, absent the use of certain guidelines.  It is also reported that not all doctors follow the guidelines, but sometimes use euthanasia without consulting either the patient or the family. 

However, in English-speaking countries (except for Britain), physicians tend to be overwhelmingly against euthanasia.  The Medical Associations of Canada, the U.S. and Australia have in the recent past issued statements indicating that (in the case of the AMA in the U.S.) that euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide were “fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer.”  Some doctors see this as knee-jerk stance-taking, but the AMA could have issued a much milder denunciation and still have been thought to be on the side of the patient.  This may be contrasted with a 2002 Gallup Poll showing that 72% of the American public favored euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide.  One of the reasons why so many Americans were in favor of euthanasia is rooted in the wide reach of postmodernism, the philosophy currently most in favor in the U.S.  Perhaps it would now be appropriate to say a few things about postmodernism. 

The postmodern era and its adherents reject all things that cannot be demonstrated, and postmodernists consider the underpinnings for such things as physics and chemistry to be observer-dependent, and therefore unreliable.  Postmodernists do not deal in religion of any kind, which they consider to be little more than mythology.  In fact, they regard national identity, religion (any religion; not just Christianity), ethnic identity and “colonial attitudes” (defined as the undue influence of one country or a hegemony of countries over the affairs of another, or several other countries, or an entire continent) to be metanarratives, of which postmodernists are deeply suspicious.  This being the case, it tends to be difficult for them to find something to which they might pin their ethics to make them sturdy and consistent.  Therefore, postmodernists do not use teleological kinds of ethics.  They believe that there is no way to discover ultimate truth, and they are incredulous at the presentation of metanarratives (see above [religion, national identity, etc.] for clues as to what these might be) and so they give up and settle for the here and now.  Imagine an existentialist who suddenly discovers that his mother and father are actually robots with human form and who haven’t a clue what his origins actually are. 

It isn’t exactly difficult to see how this might affect medical ethics.  The thing that so far has prevented the medical profession from flopping over – as a body – into postmodernism is that doctors, either singly or as a body, are not what you might think of as pliable in the area of ethics.  Ethics surrounds the medical profession in much the same way that the room in which you are sitting is filled with air.  Medicine is not really given much to philosophy, except for ethics.  Doctors don’t spend much time thinking about the disagreement between Parmenides and Heraclitus – about whether men are being or becoming.  They have a job to do that is part public service, part public trust, part self-actualization and part something that would be difficult to define in a single blog post.  Medicine is alternately paternal and deliberative, although doctors dislike the word paternal.  It is alternatively argumentative and artistic.  It is an art, a craft and almost a metanarrative in itself.  It may be the most completely absorbing profession that there has ever been. 

In rejecting what most people would consider to be the essential underpinnings of the world, postmodernists also give up any way to make an ethical decision, or at least  they give up making ethical decisions the same way every time.  This means that postmodernists use what is called situation ethics or situational ethics.  If that seems a bit confusing (not to mention unfamiliar), it works like this:  when a postmodernist is faced with an ethical decision, he looks at the situation in which the decision is to be made and he decides based on what seems good to him in that situation.  Every decision is a stand-alone, custom-made decision.  He can’t say to himself, “I had one of these last month and I decided this way….”  Every decision has to be considered as though it were a one-off, with no others to follow – ever. 

The reach of Postmodernity is so pervasive that it has even crept into churches, synagogues and mosques to puzzle and confuse those therein.  I have no idea how long it may have been in mosques, but its appearance in synagogues and churches was about a century back, or perhaps a few years more.  The whole thing concerned what some theologians regarded to be either error or gross misinterpretation of some passages of the Bible.  Their interpretations and writings led to a sort of “loosening” of the restrictions of both ethics and epistemology, both of which were notably more chaotic afterward.  By the time Fr. Joseph Fletcher published his book, Situation Ethics:  the New Morality in 1966, the die was basically cast. 

After this it was common for people to make ethical decisions based on what the situation looked like.  One example given was this one:  If a woman were in a prison camp in wartime and had a chance to return to her family in another country if she got pregnant, she could get pregnant and when it was discovered, she would be sent back to her family because she was an additional burden on the medical resources of the camp.  This sounds as though it might work, based on an assessment of the situation, doesn’t it?  If you were in prison a thousand miles from home and could be allowed to leave and return to your family by simply getting pregnant, would you do it?  You could ask a sympathetic guard to “help” you get pregnant.  Once it was done, you would be free, and you would not have harmed the guard.  You could be with your family again, and no one would have been harmed.  Think that over until next week. 

            I have used the pronoun he to refer to physicians and osteopaths in this post, and since some doctors are women, and people do not always agree that the male pronoun includes the female one for the purposes of general statements, let me say that such is the case in this weblog.  You can complain if you don’t like that, but I probably won’t change it. 

*Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon, or in Greek, Maimonides, was the most important Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages. Maimonides was born in the Spanish city of Córdoba around 1135.  He was a physician and his writings are known today to most observant Jews.  He wrote both an oath and a prayer for physicians, both of which are still in use today.  Late discoveries have come to attribute the prayer to another Jewish physician from the late 18^th Century, but both documents continue to exhibit considerable force in Jewish medical ethics.

A thing has been building inside me for what now seems like a considerable time.  The thing was hard to pinpoint at first, and it’s still so new that I don’t know if I can articulate it in a way that will show what it is, other than in the way I perceive it.  In the beginning, I was attracted to a certain kind of article, excerpt from other document or blog post of what at the time didn’t seem to have a common theme at all.  It’s a bit easier to see the wall through the haze now, and I can now tell that what I was drawn to was conflict – inner conflict.  I was drawn to it whether it created inner conflict in me or whether it showed inner conflict in the writer(s). 

After a time it was obvious that the conflict that interested me most was ethical conflict.  I began to see things in the world around me that I had either missed or, more likely, had simply ignored.  One of the things that I found most fascinating about ethical conflict is that there isn’t much said about it these days.  During an evening when there wasn’t much to do around the house, I did a little Net surfing and discovered that ethics is a subject that has disappeared almost entirely from the landscape – at least in the form in which I (naively, as it turns out) had expected to find it.  Ethics, always concerned with either acts or decisions, and largely with both at the same time, is perhaps most easily defined in shirtsleeve English as the way you act when you are absolutely sure no one is going to find out how you acted or what you did. 

That discovery was something of a shock.  It was not too different from finding that someone had made off with your lawnmower while you were in the back yard picking up sticks on the afternoon you had set aside to cut the grass.  I couldn’t find a reason why it had disappeared, and in fact, I couldn’t tell whether it had in fact disappeared or I had just not looked in the right place for it.  I found offers to teach me business ethics and pages with opinions on, or more commonly, pages of hyperlinks on the ethics of things like abortion, euthanasia, morality in warfare, business dealings, Christian behavior and other things that looked fairly familiar, only they weren’t familiar once I looked into them.  I gave up the idea for more than a year.  It was frustrating because I couldn’t figure out why I was stymied.  I couldn’t find anything about the subject that was cogent and clear – but something very recently has drawn me back to it. 

Ethics is something we deal with every day in our lives, and to put it mildly, not many people spend any time thinking about it.  Ethics is what keeps you from stealing your neighbor’s mail on the day when her Social Security check arrives – it keeps you from cheating on your taxes (although to be fair, another component of the honest tax return is the vigilance of the IRS) and it makes you admit that you broke the vase your mom liked so much on that day when you helped her clean the house. 

However, that’s not all it does.  It also affects decisions as varied as which car to buy, what to tell your son about your own teenage years and which candidate to vote for, or complain about once he or she is in office.  Ethics pervades our lives so thoroughly that even if we were the kind of people who thought about it a lot, we still wouldn’t notice all the ways it affects our lives. 

In our world today, there are different branches of ethics; there are personal ethics, business ethics, military ethics, medical ethics, bioethics (perhaps the most recently-coined branch), along with some others that I think would just muddy the water at this early stage.  All these are under the banner of what is called applied ethics, which is concerned with how things are done as well as which things are done and which are avoided. 

Here is a definition of ethics from Dictionary.com.  Overall, it’s a fairly complete one:

eth-ics

–plural noun

1.     (used with a singular or plural verb ) a system of moral principles: the ethics of a culture.

 2.     the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group, culture, etc.: medical ethics; Christian ethics.

 3.     moral principles, as of an individual:  His ethics forbade betrayal of a confidence.

 4.     (usually used with a singular verb ) that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions.

 Therefore, it’s not exactly a tough concept.  At any rate, I already knew a bit about ethics, and although, as I remarked earlier, I don’t think about it much and I don’t believe anyone else does either.  Something about some stuff I was hearing on TV and seeing on the Internet piqued my interest.  It was being reported that the new healthcare bill being debated before Congress had a provision in it that allowed the government to withhold medication from the elderly essentially because they were elderly, and that the money thus saved could then be used to treat younger people who were more productive and who had longer to live.  Hmmm.  I have been to England several times and some of the people at the company where I work are British, so I was aware that the British National Health Service had been refusing certain kinds of care – expensive care – to old people. 

While it wasn’t especially surprising to hear things like this, some other things were very surprising indeed.  It was reported that everyone would be forced onto this new government-administered plan and their privately-purchased insurance would just go by the board.  Since there doesn’t seem to be a way of determining what the politicians intend to do with our lives in the future, it’s probably not a good idea to project problems into this situation that do not as yet exist, so I won’t be commenting on something so nebulous. 

Okay, so now we’re talking about medical ethics.  Obviously, that would have some impact on what legislation was passed, would it not?  It actually turns out that I have not been very observant of medical ethics lately, because current medical ethics does not necessarily have a problem with allowing older people to languish if there is a choice to be made between who receives care (which must be paid for) and who does not.  This was a genuine surprise, and contained in that surprise (ultimately) was the germ of the idea for this blog. 

Don’t hang up yet.  This is not about old people – it’s about ethics.  The old people (yes, I am in that number, and I’m absolutely certain that my age had something to do with the thinking I did once the ideas started to come, but that’s not why I’m sitting here typing this) were nothing more than the latest example of what I have come to see, and to think of, as ethics on the wane.  What occurred to me was something I had seen in an E-mail newsletter a few weeks before.  The quote went like this:  “If all human life is not sacred, then no human life is safe.”  The gist here is that unless all people are protected equally, the wolf is at the door for humanity. 

Through the next few weeks, you will see arguments that I have made to myself and thoughts that have occurred to me concerning ethics and the dominant thought patterns visible in the West today.  Suffice to say that if you believe things are as they should be in the West, and more especially in the U.S., you may have a surprise coming.  Moreover, if you believe that philosophy has little or nothing to do with the way you run your job, your family and your life, then you are as blind as I was several weeks back.