What is right?
Dear Editor,
Many see an increasing need to update the concept of vice and virtue.
Rigid and inflexible rules on what qualifies as right and wrong are becoming more and more outmoded, like small-town customs. For instance, stealing has long been labelled a criminal and unprincipled offence, yet there is, in recent times, a growing need for revisions on the concept of stealing. If a man breaks into a bakery and steals a loaf of bread because he is hungry, does his reason mitigate his crime? If the gravity of theft can be amended by the circumstance in which it occurs, why may it not also allow for embezzlers and hackers to empty bank accounts under the pretext that the swindler is in dire need? Even regular scammers could be extended this concession under similar circumstance.
The same adjustment for ethics and morals also allows for conditional abortion. Because, while someone will agree that having an abortion is wrong, that wrong can become exculpatory or allowable when having that abortion is based on extenuating circumstances. In other words, there is really no independent standard of right and wrong — much like the way a red traffic light could mean stop, only if you’re not in a rush to use the restroom.
For politicians and some merchants alike, this malleable nature of what is right or improper becomes an asset in plying their trade, for the deception that consumers and voters often buy into becomes justified by expedience, finesse, and the need for the survival of the fittest. To be right is to make it through at any cost, as long as you make it through.
This may explain why the countries who are now at war see no ethical or criminal violation of propriety amidst the continuing loss of innocent civilian lives as long as the nation survives.
And yet, if there is no benchmark for what is considered good or evil, it seems all moral standards would undermine themselves. Maybe that is what is currently happening.
Homer Sylvester
h2sylvester@gmail.com
