The one who learns from doing or the one who learns from others?
Ethics
Moral Dilemma
How is this for a moral dilemma? (See the comic below.) Oddly enough, I was thinking along these lines just yesterday when I read a story about the new black hole discovered which mentioned how many millions (hundreds of millions?) were spent to bring us this discovery. Is that really the best use of our money? Of course these decisions are rarely down to a cost/benefit analysis, if so we would not have the aggressive medical research that has led to so many improvements in living, it is far cheaper to let people die. That is one aspect of the healthcare debate that rarely comes up: something like 80% of healthcare expenses occur in the last month of life. If we want to save money we should simply stop trying to live so darn long. So it is never a simple ledger sheet decision. I have no penetrating or insightful observations here, just pointing out that we often make decisions, even moral ones, for very visceral and personal reasons (like wanting to live or learning cool new stuff).
I should add that my father was a NASA engineer for most of his career and anyone who has read this blog knows that I like tech, but… Such things always remind me of the lyrics from Adam Again’s “Inner City Blues.” The song begins,
Rockets and moonshots
Spend it on the have-nots
Money, we make it
Before we see it, you take itMake me want to holler
The way they do my life
Make me want to holler
The way they do my life
This ain’t livin’Inflation and no chance
To increase my finance
Bills pile up sky high
Send that boy off to dieMake me want to holler
Throw up both my hands
Make me want to holler
Throw up both my hands
You can listen to it here. And the comic from Too Much Coffee Man that started this train of thought today:
Ethical? UPS and iPad delivery shenanigans
As most of you know I have ordered an iPad and like all the other 250,000+ early adopters I am eagerly awaiting my delivery. On Monday I received notice of shipment from Apple and it showed the shipment had left China. By Tuesday at noon UPS said that it was in Louisville, KY and by midnight it was in State College, PA. Great! I knew that Apple would likely make arrangements with UPS to keep delivery from occurring before April 3rd (or the 5th in my case since it will be delivered to the office), but it was nice to know that it was in the neighborhood. Then things got curious.
By Thursday morning the UPS tracking system had reverted back to the original status on Monday, showing “origin scan” in Shenzhen, CN. Today, Friday morning, it now shows it is leaving China from Guangzhou.
UPS is busy reassuring the Apple faithful that their precious is in fact close by and will be delivered on time. I was sharing this with my folks and my grandmother yesterday who said this was “unethical.” At first I laughed at the notion and said that Apple has a right to determine when their product would have initial delivery, allowing them to make a big splash. And I still think that is true, but…
When I saw the tracking information this morning and that it now showed that it was just leaving China this morning, even as I knew it was in my town and the UPS folks were reassuring us all that their tracking information was wrong, I reconsidered my view.
The UPS system has been manipulated to present me (and every other iPad recipient) with false information. They are lying to us. If that is not unethical, then it is at least very poor customer service. They are harming their credibility and demonstrating that if you are powerful enough (Apple) you can force UPS to alter their tracking system to suit your needs.
So my conclusion is that UPS has, if not behaved unethically, behaved in a way that undermines their credibility. What do you think?
Bad lessons from good movies
Wired’s Geek Dad has a Top 10 list that I have often thought about, “Top 10 Bad Messages From Good Movies.” I actually don’t agree with everything on his list, but his #2 is one that I have often asserted, albeit from a slightly different angle. (His take is below.) I despise The Little Mermaid because it is fundamentally a story about a girl who throws a tantrum and does whatever she wants, jeopardizing the world in the process and causing her father and friends to be made into seaweed, BUT in the end she gets what she wants. With no repercussions for her actions. Moral? Do whatever you want and someone will be sure to pick up the pieces after you.
2. It’s OK to completely change your physical appearance and way of life for the person you love, even if he makes no sacrifices at all (from The Little Mermaid). This movie has the single most appalling ending of any Disney movie ever made, which is a shame because, apart from that, it’s a great film. I just cannot comprehend how anyone could make a movie in the late 1980s with this message, which is not exactly subtle: Ariel gives up her home, her family, and BEING A MERMAID because she loves Eric so. And he gives up … nothing. Yeah, that marriage is off to a great start.
Oscar Wilde, Philip Davies, morals, ethics and how we read the Bible
On this date in history I was born. And in 1882 Oscar Wilde was ridiculed in Harper’s Weekly. One of the quotes in the NYTimes’ summary of Wilde’s trip to the US caught my attention.
“It is not increased moral sense your literature needs. Indeed we should never talk of a moral or an immoral poem. Poems are either well written or badly written. That is all. A good work aims at the purely artistic effect. Love art for its own sake and all things that you need will be added to it.”
I have read it before, as I am sure many of you had, but had you noticed the allusion to Matt. 6:33? I had not. “But seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” (The ASV sounds about right in this context.) It also brought to mind Jim West’s reference to Philip Davies’ essay on ethics in the Hebrew Bible (is there any? he asks). Jim shared a snippet from Davies’ essay.
Western civilization … does not get ethics from the Bible (and I would say, not even from the New Testament, but I don’t have room to argue that. Go figure.) Ethics develop in a society where individuals have to make their own moral judgments about intrinsic goodness.
Joel Hoffman takes up this quote and rightly questioned Davies’ suggestion that ethics are developed simply when a society decides upon a set of moral principles is a rather dim and limiting view of ethics, and certainly very relativistic.
What Davies was actually addressing the broader question of whether or not atheists can also be ethical since, the straw man says, ethics come from religion.
I repeatedly hear advocates of religion asserting that it is religion that gives humans ethics that bestow value on human life. I have rarely heard anything so ridiculous in my life.
Davies then considers whether the Hebrew Bible contains ethics, presenting the laws and commandments (in quotes for some reason) as the prime examples. He asserts,
this is what much of the biblical “ethics” are — rules that are imposed and expected to be obeyed.
But that is not what ethics is at all, in the Bible or external to it. Rules, laws and commandments may be governed by ethics but they themselves are not ethics and, of course, may not be ethical.
Non Sequitur by Wiley
This brings us back neatly to the theme of the last week or so, how we read the Bible. Davies is reading the Bible very superficially to make a particular point. One of the great joys and challenges of the Hebrew Bible is that we have to read the narrative carefully to glean from it the message and meaning the authors wished to impart. The laws are there yes, clear and concise. But as I said before, they are not ethics in and of themselves. Ethics may incorporate simple dicta of what is right and wrong, but it is also the broader ethos in which decisions are carried out, whether or not a prescribed ruling already exists for such a decision or not.
Davies offers a number of examples, including a critique of Proverbs. He concludes that Proverbs (and biblical wisdom literature in general, it appears) is fatally flawed.
Yet the more serious flaw is the tendency (mostly outside Proverbs) to equate this “wisdom” to “torah” (divine instruction), and then, to make it worse, to define “torah” as a written corpus of commandments. Hence the wise person, as Psalm 1 has it, is one who meditates on this continually, rather than the one who thinks, reads, or reflect. Ethics out of a can.
I can’t help but wonder if there is a typo in the penultimate sentence. Did he really mean to say that Psalm 1 is advocating “meditating” on Torah as somehow different and of lesser value than “thinking, reading, or reflecting”? If asked for a definition of meditation both abstractly and as an explanation of what was meant in Ps. 1 I would say just that; it means to consider deeply, thinking, reading, reflecting on the meaning of Torah. And this is precisely the kind of reading of the text that is required in order to understand the Bible as conveying ethical guidance for the community of faith.1
Finally, I should say clearly that I am not one of those who believes that an non-religious person can be (or behave) in an ethical manner. Of course they can! Just as much as a Christian can behave in a wicked manner (see Jim’s many “total depravity” posts). The Bible is rich and complex and requires careful reading and exposition, from both its proponents and critics. Yet if we believe in a God who created this world and placed it in order, then yes, I do believe that ethics, however one prefers to describe its origins, ultimately derive from the divine.
- My favorite example to offer my students of an ethical text in narrative is Ex. 1:15-21. Anyone care to discuss this passage in light of the preceding thoughts? [↩]
