Ethics in America are improving but appalling.
Surely the majority of Americans now don’t care what consenting adults do in private. They don’t use racial epithets. Women are living in something nearing approximate equality. What’s wrong? Don’t get me going.
A lot of people seem to care little about human suffering abroad. If we cared more, we would stop being so fast to go to war. And we’d have more empathy for foreign casualties.
Plenty of intelligent people I’ve met feel that whites are being discriminated against and that the poor just want free handouts. Really?
Many value our “right” to bear arms more than the lives of our children.
Have you decided to torture animals for cheap food? People are aware of the shocking practices in factory farming. Well-to-do Americans, in general, have chosen not to care enough to make significant changes in their buying habits. This attitude also causes ethically sourced clothing to be virtually unavailable.
We are still executing innocent people even after the Innocence Project.
Our elderly often sacrifice everything for prescription drugs that are much more expensive and less covered by socialized medicine than in any other developed country.
If you don’t think we need to take actions on global warming, you don’t care nearly enough about what Pope Francis calls our common home.
True ethics are never a list of rights and wrongs. They don’t come from believing any book. Call me nuts, but isn’t that pretty much the message of the Sermon on the Mount?
Of course, everyone’s first responsibility is to themselves, their friends and their families. And every human falls well short of the ideal. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re now, as always, a nation of the well-intentioned, the biased and the self-deluded. And to be even more honest: many moral shortfalls are unique to this self-aggrandizing culture so many consider to be exceptional.
Rick Walker
Snohomish
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
