Raw Emotions Don't Lead To Just Laws

Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert, wants to kill anyone that disagrees with him about assisted suicide.  If you believe assisted suicide is wrong, beware of Scott Adams.  Any politicians who voted against assisted suicide are on his list as well.

Adams blogged late last year, "If you're a politician who has ever voted against doctor-assisted suicide, or you would vote against it in the future, I hate your f- guts and I would like you to die a long, horrible death. I would be happy to kill you personally and watch you bleed out. I won't do that, because I fear the consequences"  Then went on to say, "I'm okay with any citizen who opposes doctor-assisted suicide on moral or practical grounds. But if you have acted on that thought, such as basing a vote on it, I would like you to die a slow, horrible death too." 

It is understandable to get emotional about watching a loved one die a slow painful death, no doubt.  It is understandable that there are people who can relate to his experience and support him.  But, does it justify approval of bullying and demonization?  Adam's rhetoric and lack of civility is dangerous.  We can certainly allow people to burst out in anger over painful matters and to express their grief.  In fact, we should encourage the release of anger in private.  In public we can have a debate, but it is impossible if these kinds of raw emotions are part of the equation.

You might be saying, "But, this is a good thing because it shows how much Adams loves his father."  However, as C.S. Lewis put it, human love "begins to be a demon the moment it becomes a god."  If we make certain things okay, such as killing those who disagree with you, for the sake of love, we allow ourselves to justify evil.

If we allow gross incivility and bullying in the name of love, we have forgotten what the word "love" means.

Dr. Martin Luther King and The Idea of a Natural Moral Law

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a letter when he was incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama.  This is the city where the 16^th Street church was bombed and his home was bombed when his family was at home.  There was a lot of racial tension there.  Blacks were literally being slaughtered.  Dr. King was incarcerated for protesting in his effort to call attention to the injustice.  While he was in jail, he began to ask “where is the church?”.  He once said that 11am on Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in the country.  You had whites in their own churches and the blacks in their own churches and they were not getting together.  While Dr. King was in jail he took scraps of paper and began to write to the conscience of America asking Pastors why their voices were silent.  The pastors never responded to him. 

Dr. King had studied philosophy and wrote about the moral dilemmas we face in our society.  His first audience was pastors.  Who would have the integrity and strength to resist evil?

Dr. King faced having to think about the moral value of a law and whether he should engage in civil disobedience.  He was highly criticized for civil disobedience.  When he found a law to be unjust, he would appeal to the divine law, a higher law, the natural law.  He believed that if a law is unjust, it was our moral responsibility to resist the unjust law.  That was the basis of the civil rights movement.

About Dr. King’s Belief In A Moral Law

Dr. King was operating out of a very long and old tradition of justice and love.  The natural law tradition.  It occurred in a culture that still identified with that tradition.  Dr. King was appealing to the idea that we are all created equal.  He got that idea from the Bible.  It is the idea that man is created in the image of God.  Does that notion depend on divine revelation?  Not necessarily, because King appealed to Natural Law.  St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Augustine appealed to Natural Law.  

In the doctrine of Natural Law there are fundamental concepts.  These things are knowable by reason itself.  This is how Dr. King was able to find an objective moral basis for standing up against the great evils of his day. 

Dr. King didn’t take breaking laws lightly.  When it was necessary to break a law because of its injustice, it must be done openly and not in hiding, lovingly, and with a willingness to bear the consequences.  He realized that law was a condition of freedom.  Respect for the law was important.  Unfortunately a law can be unjust, which puts it in opposition to a law above the law, the Natural Law.  The higher law must prevail.  Dr. King was aware that truth is knowable.  If we are to address our challenges today, we need to agree upon a standard upon which we are going to live.  Truth has to be knowable for there to be ethics.  This truth can be seen as a common thread throughout traditional cultures.  It is universal across all people, regardless of culture, geography, or time in history.  From this perspective we can rely on our experience to an extent to recognize what is true. 

Truth is a correspondence between what we say and what is.  It is the phenomenon of being right about reality.  A moral truth is a claim about what is right or wrong that is true.  We know it is right to love people and wrong to treat them badly.  This is a truth, among others, that is consistent across cultures.  Even children have a keen sense of justice.  We count on truth in courts, in schools, in commerce and in everyday life.  If we didn’t know truth, ordinary life would be impossible.

There is a part of the brain that processes moral thought.  Research has shown that even as a 6 month old baby, we have a sense of right and wrong.  If you were to take a toy away from a baby, it will cry “that’s mine” and want it back.

Our culture has been slowly embracing the idea of relative truth.  What is true for you is true for you and what is true for me is true for me.  We have slowly been rejecting truth in exchange for a lie.  Without truth, we cannot have justice.  We need to return to the use of Natural Law as a foundation for our moral code to guide our legislation and law enforcement, before we lose our sense of justice.

A Crisis In Character

The financial crisis of 2008 is an example of what is happening today in the character of our leaders in both our government and in business.  

When the tech bubble burst, the government was looking for a way to boost the economy.  So they found a way by manipulating the real estate market through Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac.  This created a housing bubble.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government sponsored corporations.  The government funded these organizations lavishly, and then they were also allowed to contribute to political campaigns at the same time.  There was also not much supervision.  There are laws concerning fiduciary duties and fraud, but they were never enforced. 

The idea of home ownership was elevated to a national goal.  Both republicans and democrats were seduced by this idea that everyone should own a home.  This set the stage for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to grow into toxic institutions. 

Wall Street saw a tremendous opportunity with an area that was poorly supervised by the government and made it a tremendously large opportunity to make money.  They would take large bundles of mortgages and sell them to large financial institutions such as pension funds, then at the same time sold them short.  They really hammered them by buying credit default swap insurance.  Then they bought the bonds back after they crashed.  They were deceiving the people they were dealing with at every level.

Almost everyone in financial authority embraced this.  The Federal Reserve “saw no evil”.  The ratings agencies stamped their highest ratings of approval on these debt instruments.  Wall street loved the instruments because of the money they were making from them. 

Alan Greenspan even said that we would never have a financial crisis again because we have an instrument called “credit default swaps” which have taken the risk out of lending.  As it turned out, it magnified the risk instead. 

At the heart of this is a series of unethical acts.  Wall Street acted unethically because the packaged products they knew to be risky which should have made them largely worthless, and then on top of that they sold them short at the same time they were selling them to clients. 

These were mortgages for people who couldn’t really afford the homes.  That made them all risky.  So the general public acted unethically because they were letting the lenders lead them into buying homes they couldn’t afford.  The people borrowing this money knew they ultimately wouldn’t be able to pay it. 

Government didn’t use its moral authority to stop Wall Street from playing their game of selling risky mortgages and then selling them short.  It didn’t stop lenders from making loans to people they knew couldn’t repay.  And they should have warned the public that they are setting themselves up for failure.

Then after the crisis in 2008 happened, our government leaders started telling us we shouldn’t point fingers.  So we were all avoiding accountability.  In this lack of accountability we started swimming in a murky sea of collectivism.  There was no longer any personal responsibility. 

It has become obvious there is a growing lack of personal responsibility and our leaders are failing to live up to the virtues this country holds dear.  What do you think we should do about it?