rowyn

That's a term ceruleanst used when I was talking about the protagonist in Ghost several weeks ago, to describe the concept that "enough good deeds will offset a certain amount of evil ones".

I don't think many people subscribe to this idea at any kind of extreme. No one's going to say "Well, you saved 50 people from certain death during a disaster last month, so it's okay that you murdered that one guy today for cutting you off in traffic".

Yet it's still an interesting idea, in some ways. It reminds me of various other sayings, like "the ends justify the means" or "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one". Or an Ursula LeGuin short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas".

Usually, people accept a certain amount of negative consequences in return for desirable things. One could assign a portion of the blame for the deaths from every airplane crash to the Wright Brothers, or hold Henry Ford partly responsible for the tens of thousands who die in car accidents each year. But we don't look at airplanes or cars in terms of the damage they do: we look at them for their benefits instead. And those benefits can be measured not just in convenience, but in human lives, too. Famine in the modern world is not a matter of food production, but of transportation: improving technology in this area has helped tremendously.

It's easier to forgive unintended consequences, though. Plane crashes and car accidents aren't an essential part of faster transportation: indeed, people make changes to them all the time to make them safer. Which is one of the benefits of the drive and ambition of modern society: we're never satisfied.

But it would be different if the negative consequences were not unintended, or if they wasn't even an apparent connection. Rapists aren't the price we pay to have an effective military, and to say that they are is an insult to every man in uniform. The two don't go hand in hand .... necessarily.

But what if it happens that they do? What do you do with someone who is mostly good, who has done great things that few could match -- but who's also done something terrible?

At what point does the hero become a villain? Which flaws can you overlook? Is it okay if the firefighter who's rescued hundreds of people from burning buildings cheats on his wife? What if he beats his children? Maybe he's a chronic shoplifter. Maybe he got a co-worker killed once, by accident, and then covered up his part so he wouldn't get blamed or lose his career. Does the good that he's done make the evils more forgiveable, or less?

What if the events really are correlated? What if that cop really did need to torture his captive in order to find the location of the bomb that would otheriwse kill hundreds?

Or is that a hypothetical case that never matches reality? Does evil ultimately beget evil, even if the intentions were good, so that truly no good comes out of a sinister act?

Sometimes when I think about all the horrible things we hear about people in power, the way no presidential candidate can escape attacks upon his character, and I wonder if they're all true. If that's the way everyone would look if they were put under a microscope to be viewed by 300 million prying eyes. All those flaws, amplified and expounded on and presented in the worst possible light. How would I look, under such scrutiny?

Is the problem with stories that they only present a tiny portion of the whole? We ascribe such weight to the things we know, but in every person we judge, there's a lifetime of experience we do not know.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I don't have any answers, only more questions.

A few thoughts on things about "sexual abuse" reporting that bugs me.

To start with, the term "sexual abuse" has no meaning whatsoever for me anymore. I'll read news reports that call it "sexual abuse" when a 20 year-old man forces a toddler to perform oral sex. I've heard the same phrase "sexual abuse" used to describe far more innocuous acts. Teachers in kindergartens don't hug their pupils any more because if the toddler happens to complain, suddenly that hug was "sexual abuse".

Now, this may just be me, but not only do I distinguish a moral difference between these two acts, but I'll go so far as to say there's a difference between a man who rapes his twelve year-old niece and threatens to beat her to a pulp if she tells anyone, and a twelve year-old girl who thinks she's in love with her thirty-something neighbor and consents to have sex with him.

Neither of the above cases are "right" or "good" in my mind. But the former is considerably weightier as a crime. The girl clearly suffers at the point of the crime and will continue to suffer afterwards. In the latter case, the girl will, very likely, suffer at some future point: she will get older, she will regret her crush, she will resent the man who took advantage of her.

But, even though children cannot give "informed consent," I still think the distinction is meaningful. Both men in both cases have committed reprehensible acts, but while I have no sympathy whatsoever for the first, I have a little for the second.

The media doesn't distinguish. I read about this "rampant pedophilia" in the Catholic Church with "hundreds of reported cases" and "multi-million dollar civil suits" and I wonder: what did these priests actually do?

And if they are serial rapists, moved from parish to parish by bishops who were concealing the evidence of their actions, well, for goodness' sake, why aren't they facing criminal prosecution? Why am I reading about lawsuits against Catholic parishes (and, last I heard, it's not entire parishes that are being accused of mass orgies with children), and not about District Attorneys pressing charges specific individuals for criminal acts, and obstruction of justice? Last I heard, rape, sodomy, and sexual assault were all crimes.

Why don't we ever prosecute people any more? Why is it always organizations? The "Catholic Church" or "Arthur Andersen, LLC" are just words. Just names. Names don't commit crimes. People do. Why aren't we prosecuting them?

About a week ago, Prester Scott wrote about the morality, or lack thereof, of contraception in a Christian context. In response, I posited that, historically, Christianity condemned contraception because, for a variety of reasons, uncontrolled population growth was a positive good. Given that the situation between today and Biblical times -- or even a hundred years ago -- has changed radically on this front, one can argue that the moral ruling on this subject could change accordingly.

This morning, I was thinking about it from the other end: let's say contraception is immoral -- the termination of a potential human life -- regardless of circumstances. G-d wants us "to be fruitful and multiply" and this axiom applies without limitation. It follows that contraception isn't just wrong for me, but wrong for anyone, anywhere. Immorality is bad; the world would be better off if no one committed any immoral acts.

Following this, I'm trying to imagine what the world would be like if no one used birth control. Since I'm imagining a perfectly moral world (by Christian standards), I can further posit that sex only occurs between married couples
( Watch me play fast and loose with statistics! )