Tag: ethics

Privatized Ethics and Public Immorality

I haven’t been following the county clerk controversy very closely, but I’ve gotten the impression that there’s a lot of confusion about the rights of conscience, and how that relates to resigning, verses refusing to comply.  I am not a county clerk, and nobody has asked me to perform or approve any immoral acts, but I am an Army officer, so I have spent a little time thinking about when it’s appropriate to disobey an order.

So.  Scenario one: Joe the Soldier has a religious epiphany and becomes a pacifist.  From his perspective, all military service, or maybe only combat, is immoral. I happen to disagree with this guy, based on my understanding of Jesus’ conversations with many a Roman soldier, but no one should violate his conscience, so any military service at all for him is a sin.  He should resign, since there is no way he can keep his job and keep his conscience.

Scenario two: Joe the Soldier is a good Soldier, and has no qualms about doing his job, until the day his direct supervisor orders him to commit an atrocity.  He should not resign.  Nothing in his views have changed, but he is being ordered to do something that is unlawful (that is, immoral) for a Soldier to do.  In fact, the one thing he must not do is resign, since in this case resignation gives tacit consent to the unlawful order.  His job, as a Soldier, is to actively resist the unlawful order, and make whatever noise he can, so that the rot can be removed from his unit to the highest echelon where it originated.  He should complain, loudly; he should call the Inspector General.  If the unlawful order is not rescinded, he may be court-martialed for refusing to obey an order.  He should embrace the court-martial, as an opportunity to bring his chain of command under investigation, and he should bring in the media when it happens.

There is a massive difference between resignation and refusing to comply; and in the event of a corrupted hierarchy, resigning in protest is a coward’s escape, because it allows the criminal authority to continue unchallenged.  Obviously, it should be done carefully, and not impetuously, because the authority being resisted has to actually be requiring an immoral act.  Refusing to comply because you just don’t wanna is just a waste of jail time.

I don’t have any real opinion on the country clerk case, whether her decision was right or wrong.  But there are plenty of good reasons for a government official to refuse to implement a new law, when that law is immoral.  It is never appropriate to privatize your ethics, in order to give tacit consent to a public immorality.

Please don’t do this

So, I’m arguing with someone on the internet (because that is apparently what I do with my life) and I keep running across this sort of argument “Science proves that a fetus becomes human when it can survive outside the womb.” Please do not say this. First, science has proved no such thing. But more importantly, the statement itself is confused.

In common language, to be a human is to be a person, and the words are used pretty interchangeably, since everyone instinctively recognizes that to be human is to be a person “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” But when you are discussing medical ethics, the distinction between what is a human and what is a person is precisely the subject under debate, so you have to make careful distinctions.

“Human” is the species. I am a human. My cat is not a human. I did not become human; I have always been a human. If science were to prove that an unborn child can become human, you would have to demonstrate a process whereby two human parents came together, contributed a human ovum and a human sperm, and produced an inhuman embryo. If it is not human, what species can it be?

What is actually under debate is the “personhood” of the unborn. Personhood is an ethical and political category that serves two purposes: to assign to non-human organisms the rights that are normally accorded to humans, or to remove from humans the rights that they would normally have. So, for instance, an animal rights activist might argue for the personhood of dolphins, in order to accord them the rights of life and liberty. You might also argue that, if we ever found intelligent alien life, or elves, that they would be considered persons, even though they were not human. At the other end, when the US constitution was first written, Southern slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of the census. You can see how well that went.

So in the original statement, science has not proved that an embryo becomes human. What the person is really arguing is that an unborn child becomes a person when they can survive outside the womb. It’s a valid position to take, but again, science doesn’t prove it. Science can’t prove it, because personhood is not a scientific category. The ability of a fetus to survive outside the womb is called viability. Medical technology is constantly pushing the boundary of how early viability can be established. So all that “science” can do is reveal the historical data of how early viability has been established.

What you are left with is an unsubstantiated argument that personhood should be established according to the functionality of human organism’s lungs. This strikes me as an extremely tenuous argument.

Sample Army Company Command Philosophy

MEMORANDUM FOR COMPANY LEADERS
SUBJECT: Command Philosophy

1. The purpose of this command philosophy is to identify the attitudes and ideals that I want to establish in this company, as well as the practices I intend to use to promote those ideals. A company can achieve the mission, follow all regulations, and still be a rotten unit. We want a great unit, and to achieve that, I think we should pursue three things:

2. Happy Soldiers. We need people who work hard because they like what they do. To achieve this, we must work to eliminate unnecessary frustrations from the environment. Interruptions and delays come from the enemy, not from leadership. Unscheduled late hours will be considered a leadership failure. Additionally, we should work to recognize extraordinary efforts by our Soldiers in ways that are public and personally meaningful to them.

3. Ethical Soldiers. We need people who do what is right because they believe it is right. To achieve this, we must encourage conversations about ethical reasoning and right and wrong. Formal training events, such as SHARP and suicide prevention training are urgent, but they are not sufficient. Moral values are formed in a network of daily decisions, and I am convinced that keeping an eye out for little things mitigates against bigger ethical failures. Additionally, we need to lead by example. We guide and correct our subordinates across a spectrum of ethical decisions, but in doing so, we must be ready to accept respectful criticism from them as well.

4. Professional Soldiers. We need people who are committed to the long-term improvement of the unit and the Army as a whole. To achieve this, we must train Soldiers to think beyond their current scope of work. Thinkers find ways to improve everything. As the mission permits, we will actively promote professional development opportunities that increase the scope of Soldiers’ understanding, and we will make room for individual specialized training. Additionally, we will encourage and actively consider Soldiers’ recommendations for improving our methods within the unit.

5. A command philosophy is only as good as the team that builds on it. I expect each of you to take ownership of this unit, find what’s broken, and take the initiative fix it. Communicate with each other, communicate with me, and let’s all be humble enough to accept criticism and move forward. It’s an honor to serve with each of you.

Kyle B. French
CPT, TC
Commanding

Jeremiah the Liar

Jeremiah 28:27-28 :

Then Zedekiah said to Jeremiah, “Let no one know of these words, and you shall not die.  But if the princes hear that I have talked with you, and they come to you and say to you, ‘Declare to us now what you have said to the king, and also what the king said to you; do not hide it from us, and we will not put you to death,’  then you shall say to them, ‘I presented my request before the king, that he would not make me return to Jonathan’s house to die there.’”

Then all the princes came to Jeremiah and asked him. And he told them according to all these words that the king had commanded. So they stopped speaking with him, for the conversation had not been heard.

So the king fed Jeremiah a lie to say, if anybody asked him about their conversation.  And the people asked Jeremiah, and Jeremiah repeated the king’s lie.

I think we’ve only got two options here.  Either it was a sin for Jeremiah to lie in this situation, or it wasn’t.  The text doesn’t pass any judgment at all, but presumably the book is written either by Jeremiah himself, or someone close to him, like Baruch his scribe, and the lack of judgment has every appearance of tacit approval.  In fact, it would be pretty hard, taking this text into account, to argue that scripture teaches that every form of inaccurate reporting counts as “false witness.”

All Fall Down

It’s interesting to think that, without God, science turns into engineering, philosophy turns into vocabulary, and ethics turns into politics.  With God, all of these fields of study are transformed into subcategories of theology.

For those who want to protest, here’s what I mean:

Unless there is a God, there is no designer for the universe.  Without a designer, there is no design.  If there is no design, then there is no reason to want to discover the fundamental principles of the universe. What makes you think that there are fundamental principles at all, or that such principles won’t change?  All that is left to science is figuring out how to make stuff.  Everything else is storytelling, with the intent of covering up unproductive employment.

Similarly, if there isn’t a God who generated such abstract concepts as beauty, truth, goodness, agency, and happiness, then those concepts are entirely flexible, and they can change from era to era, and place to place.  Furthermore, there’s no real reason to think that they exist at all, or are worth any effort to achieve.  All that remains is careful defining of terms, so that they can be used cogently in sentences.  You have to know exactly what sort of wind you are sewing.

And Ethics?  The answer to every ethical assertion is always “says who?”  And if the reply to that isn’t “God,” then the next reply is always, “Try and make me.”  Trying to make people do things is the bread of politics.

There’s more than one way  that Jesus Christ holds the universe together.

3-leg porridge

When I went to college, it was at a school that had some affiliation with the Presbyterian Church, USA, but for all practical purposes, it was a private secular school with a chapel. It wasn’t as though there was a pervasive Christian atmosphere. Pretty much it was standard-issue multi-cultural liberalism.

A part of the core curriculum to graduate was a class in the senior year on Ethics. Of course, I almost failed.

It was really difficult for me to process their way of gauging right and wrong because they weren’t willing to pin themselves to any particular foundation. It should be pretty obvious that Ethics is the sort of thing that starts from a set of key principles and works the implications out from there. But being the sort of school they were, it wouldn’t do to just assert what these principles ought to be. What if I don’t like your principles?

Instead, they gave us some options. Apparently, it’s a modern pluralist idea to try to present ethics on a 3-legged stool, kind of as a “choose-your-own” morality. So they give you Kant, Mill, and Aristotle to teach Duty, Utility, and Virtue. You’re supposed to choose which system of reasoning best fits the situation and your taste. You’re even told that each form of reasoning has its flaws, so that you have to balance each against the others.

It really got me. Confused the daylights out of me. The problem was that in my heart of hearts, I didn’t believe in morally gray areas. Still don’t. There are things that are hard to do, but it’s not usually hard to determine the right thing to do. So how did they get this perfectly balanced porridge? It took me years to get an answer, and I wish I’d written down who it was that popped the bubble of my confusion.

It’s actually pretty pathetic. Every system has its flaws so long as man is the measure of all things. If there is no standard to hold to, there isn’t even any way to come to a wrong answer. And if there isn’t any wrong answer, there can’t be a right one either. But the very point of ethics is to determine right and wrong. If you set up the system so that the goal can’t be achieved, then there’s no wonder that no one ever achieves the goal.

Sin is determined to tie up moral knots because that twistedness deflects you from judgment. It takes a Champion to take the sword of authority to cut through those knots with a simple standard. Continue reading “3-leg porridge”