It has become quite a tradition in only three short weeks to lecture you about morality. But I’ve covered the Big Three already — not sinning, what to do with found money, and murder — and I think that about exhausts the subject, your patience, and myself.
The rationale for posting these on Friday nights was to enable you to hit the gound running on your Sabbath, no matter what your religion is. In Sunni/Shiite border regions, hitting the ground or running are the only two viable options. Seventh Day Adventists may be less violent, and on a different schedule with their Sabbath judging by their name, but I’ll examine that in due course.
What moral dilemmas remain that require attention? Well, there is an ongoing debate whether the ends justify the means. I won’t go into it, because it’s very complicated, and would probably only make me more exhausted. The short version: one ends up admitting both sides simultaneously — a mongrel position. Unless you are dogmatic; which is one step from being a curmudgeon.
Both sides being arguably right is known as cognitive dissonance. Dissonance, over time, achieves velocity; but that, too, changes over time. Which means (but doesn’t end) that it accelerates. Multiply this by the mass of people in this country, and it becomes a force.
A lot of people say physics and morality are incompatible, but then a lot of people bought a year’s worth of toilet paper when Covid hit. You know what they’re full of.
In The Federalist Papers (no. 44), James Madison — no hoarder himself, though he left behind a giant body of work that Democrats are still trying to bury — wrote:
“No axiom is more clearly established in law or reason than wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power do to a thing is given, every particular power for doing it is included.”
He almost certainly used “f”s for “s”s, but in any case this is now known as the doctrine of “Implied Powers.” Whilst Madison was focusing on the first word, Government gobbled that up and then dined with relish on the second. But Madison was referring only to the mechanisms of government, which are about as far from the definition of morality as one can get; and his axiom has been perverted in countless ways, which is as close to the definition of government as one can get.
Which means, of course, an end is justified.
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Do you have something you’d like to share? A link? A joke? Some words of wisdom? A topic to discuss? It’s our nightly Open Thread, and you have the floor.
