Tag: Morality

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And I mean it.

I still am pretty worked up over this post from Katharine Birbalsingh — Britain’s strictest Head Mistress. I wrote a post yesterday but I am still mad about it because she is so irritatingly wrong. Her basic premise is that people used to be better because they taught their kids traditional values. My point was that maybe traditional values also supported a Racist, Sexist, and Homophobic society. So really how good were these traditional values? They certainly didn’t stop people from being mean-spirited to the people they didn’t like.

After thinking about it more, I am inclined to say that Birbalsingh should fold it four ways and stick it where the sun don’t shine. Pardon my untraditional approach here. She uncritically praises the past while dumping on, to me, the much better world of today. How can she praise traditional values when they so clearly failed so many people. The pregnant teenager sent to a horrible workhouse where her baby was stolen. The gay people forced out of their jobs because they were caught in a police raid. The People of Color who were denied entry into jobs and education because they were the wrong color.

The past wasn’t so sunny as she makes out and a lot of it was due to strict enforcement of these traditional values. I ask her would she rather live in the modern world in which Racism, Sexism and Homophobia is seen as wrong or in a traditional society where they are tolerated and supported? I would hope that she would embrace the progress we made and work to make this new foundation a better arrangement. Nothing is perfect.

But until then fie on traditional values.

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Katharine Birbalsingh, Britain’s strictest Head Mistress bemoans the missing morality lessons of the good old days. Parents raised their kids to take personal responsibility. Things were so much better than they are today.

I am not sure what planet Birbalsingh is visiting from but she certainly missed Earth for the past 10,000 years where human beings have been pretty beastly towards one another. If people were so damned good in the past, why do we have to teach children about Hitler, Slavery and Civil Rights. Well, because people in the past weren’t so good and moral. We wouldn’t have to teach children about racism if society had not been racist in the past. Is this the morality she misses?

She talks about the man who was so proud of his 50 years at one company. Bully for him but his moral purity might be overshadowed by also teaching his grandchildren that Blacks are inferior and you shouldn’t live next door to them. Or women should be paid less than men. Or Gay men are perverts and deserve social ostracism. He may have also beaten his grandson from time to time if he felt the child was out of line. If the man was a man of his times, would it be surprising that he would hold those views as well and, I might add, a far cry from being morally superior man.

Hence why people are now teaching about Hitler, Slavery and Civil Rights.

People held much more horrible beliefs in the past than they do today and we are all better for being free from them. Can we be better people? Of course, we can. The answer to our problems will not be found in the past but in incorporating the lessons from our past failures and moving forward from there.

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The recent recopening of war in the Middle East also reopened discussions on what is morally acceptable behavior during a war. It is a difficult topic because people’s opinions shift depending upon what war you are fighting, who is fighting it and whether you are winning. In the Catholic School I attended I received two very different messages about war from the same teacher. Sister Mira thought the Viet Cong were cowards because they hid among the Vietnamese people and fought a guerrilla war. They should fight on a battlefield like good soldiers instead of engaging in guerrilla tactics. She alao admired the ingenuity of the Minute Men during the American Revolutionary War because they avoided open warfare with the better armed British forces. They would attack the British were they could and then retreat into the vast American countryside to avoid being caught. Which sounds very much like the Viet Cong were doing. So your moral decisions about war depends on which side you are on — rebels you like can use guerrilla warfare, rebels you don’t like shouldn’t.

War is a problem ethically. War is violent. War kills innocent people. It is hard to justify killing a small child but, if there is a war going on, there is a pretty good chance that a small child is dying somewhere because of it. It is unavoidable. Now these killings can come in different ways with varying degrees of culpability. There is a difference between killing a child through dropping a bomb on his house and slitting the child’s throat in his bed. But still the child is dead in both cases. An innocent died because of the war you are waging. How do you stop someone like Hitler without killing innocent children. The truth is you can’t.

No matter how just the war is in the general sense, specific acts are going to go wrong. Should you stop fighting Hitler because you want to limit your fighting to actions that won’t kill children? Morally speaking — how many children will die if I fight Hitler and how many children will die if I fail to fight Hitler. It is a horrible choice but one that has to be made.

This is why war is to be avoided it if at all possible. It is a moral quagmire. Perhaps when a nation is considering war, instead of demonizing the future enemy, people should consider the question is this worth killing innocents to get what we want? And if the answer is yes then go into it accepting your soldiers will face this dilemma. Possibly this will make people act better but I doubt it.