Situational Ethics

I remember that the conservative Christian fundamentalists in my youth railed against a term I had never heard before: situational ethics, wherein certain deeds are not always wrong or always right. Instead, the verdict of right or wrong depends upon the situation. For instance, murder is wrong, but in war, killing may be right. Killing may be right to defend a loved one from immediate violence, or to punish and dispose of a convicted murderer, or to alleviate the pain of a dying person, or to abort an unwanted embryo. Some religionists reject situational ethics, and maintain that there are absolutes, such as this one, that killing is never right in any situation, which seems an extreme position, yet is one taken by several religious minorities throughout the ages. I'm afraid the roughness of our world prohibits nonviolence from gaining a majority footprint. Yet if every being were endowed with an inability to commit violence, then the world would be a better place, sure.

I believe situational ethics is right, because what is usually a right can also become a wrong, and vice versa. I believe in adaptable absolutes rather than unshakable dogmas. I believe the spirit of an ethical law is more important than the literal word. One would be too lawyerly to interpret rules as unbendable. It seems a failure to have a deeper and more meaningful understanding of ethics. But I think the explanation for absolute ethics is that some believe Scripture to be the literal word of God, infallible in every way, a hypothesis neither I nor any of my family ever accepted. I don't think many Christians believe the Bible is the literal word of God any longer.

However, a valid criticism of situational ethics is that many intelligent people subscribe to it, but use rationalizations to find exceptions for just about any conduct at all, such as spying on Americans. I am sure all those Congressmen and bureaucrats really believe that they are doing right by spying on everybody. They dismiss any concerns as paranoia. They point to various cases where spying helped improve the efficiency of this or that law enforcement agency. Well, you know, the Gestapo was a very efficient organization in its day, too. Sure, if you spy on everybody, you're going to catch some bad people. The trouble is, a lot of information gets uncovered by this spying, and that's a very tempting treasure trove of private and personal data. Sooner or later, it's going to be abused, and I think sooner rather than later.

I think all this spying is contrary to the spirit of our republic, that it is a relic of tyranny, and that a powerful tool has been placed into the hands of--who knows? Really, who knows who's tapping into all that data? Do tens of thousands of people have access? How many are psychopaths? How many are working for another government, for the mafia, or for a drug cartel?

I was in the grocery store yesterday and saw a depressing sight, the books and magazine section. There were hundreds of magazines, but not a single news magazine. Hundreds of magazines had to do with sports, handguns, rifles, machine guns, sex, celebrities, entertainment, or making money. The closest thing to a news magazine I could find was National Geographic. As for the books, they had bestsellers and faith-based inspirational books and that's all. At the check-out line, I did see one news magazine, TIME, as thin as a dime nowadays and consisting of charts, graphics and pictures, a mere shadow of what it used to be.

Visiting the grocery store gave me the impression that no one cares about what's going on in the world. But perhaps there is a feeling, which I think more likely, that ordinary people can do nothing about what's going on, that we are powerless, and so to read about world events is pointless and depressing. That, I think, is a consequence of what Noam Chomsky called the atomization of America, wherein people no longer are affiliated with large organizations that can indeed create political change. I remember that all the right-wingers out at work used to harshly criticize unions, as though unions were the enemy, preventing them from achieving what they wanted. I wonder how they like being without unions? I'm sure they must have a feeling of living in Paradise, that everything is roses and butterflies now.

My grandfather would be considered a right-winger today. He was conservative in every sense of the word save one, that he believed in education for women, which was fortunate for my mother. On the other hand, he was racist and anti-Semitic, which was usual and conforming for his people, place and time. I have no reason to suppose he would have been anything but homophobic as well. However, he was a union man throughout his entire working life. I don't know how it came to be that the right-wingers turned against the unions. There were bad unions, corruption, poor leadership in some cases, but I think the unions lost to free trade, which pitted Americans against low-paid workers overseas. Americans lost, of course, which was inevitable in hindsight.