Tag Archives: Morality

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MUST-READ: What worldview emerges from serial hook-up sex?

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This blog post was linked from RuthBlog. And I didn’t even write it! (H/T RuthBlog)

The article talks about a hypothetical woman who hooks up with a man for premarital sex, presumably after a night of drunken partying, and then feels shame for what she has done. Should she feel ashamed? It depends.

Excerpt:

If her shame is telling her the truth, a truth that surpasses all social constructs, then she made a mistake.

[…]But what if a moral thinker steps forward and declares that she is wrong to feel shame, that her bad feelings simply show the extent to which she has bought into a social construct. Ethics is relative; it serves the power elite. She ought to reject her shame for lying to her and promoting the accepted social construct.

[…]Consoling words do not really have much of an effect. Better would be a new group of friends, a new social nexus where everyone will hold her in high esteem for having mastered the art of the hook up, or better, for having fully explored and expressed her sexuality.

Is there such a group? And could this group provide her with a new and revised identity? If being a woman, according to society’s standards, makes her feel ashamed of herself, why would she not transform her identity and become… a feminist. Some feminists do not look too kindly on hook ups, but still and all, feminists are not judgmental. They will welcome her into their midst and tell her that she has done nothing wrong.

[…]If society disapproves; if her classmates look down on her; that is their problem. They are committing one of the great sins of the therapy culture: they are being judgmental!

Note also that this perspective has absolved the coed of all responsibility for her own behavior. Those who are at fault are the ones who look down on her. Now, the new moral thinking holds them responsible for making her feel bad.

But what about those who continue to hold to standards that consider sex outside of marriage harmful to men, women, children and society as a whole, who must pay the social costs of irresponsible sex?

…she will proselytize her beliefs. You only ignore other people for so long. Eventually the numbness will start wearing off. Therefore, our coed must work to transform the culture to make it more attuned to her values. She and her group will work to affect a cultural revolution, a transformation of cultural values.

All of this implies that if you can change the way the culture sees certain behaviors then you can transform the value of the behavior. But, how do you go about changing the way everyone values behavior?

You have probably guessed already, that this way of making our coed feel better about herself contains what I would call a totalitarian will to control the minds, hearts, and speech of everyone.

Feminism isn’t an intellectual framework, it’s an emotional-fueled rationalization of sinful behavior. It becomes the problem of taxpayers when it uses government power and social programs to coerce others into celebrating and subsidizing sinful behavior.

(Note: I am not talking about first-wave “equal opportunity” equity feminism, I am talking about gender feminism – I’m drawing from Christina Hoff Sommers‘ book “Who Stole Feminism?” and “The War Against Boys” for my definitions of feminism)

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How euthanasia eroded medical ethics in the Netherlands

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Joe Carter writing in First Things. (H/T Secondhand Smoke via ECM)

Intro:

For centuries, the Hippocratic Oath, including the admonition against abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia, formed the core of Western medical ethics. While the Hippocratic ideal has been eroding for decades, the most direct challenge has emerged in the Netherlands, with the cultural and legal acceptance of the right to die. The medical community and broader citizenry have so embraced the right to choose death for oneself that the Dutch parliament is currently considering legislation that would allow assisted suicide for anyone who has reached the age of seventy and has merely grown tired of living.

Excerpt:

The Royal Dutch Medical Association has since called for increased reporting to bolster public trust in euthanasia laws. But enthusiasm for following these procedures and standards remains muted, since doctors know that no penalties will be incurred by simply ignoring the law. Prosecutions for guideline violations are exceedingly rare and no doctor has ever been imprisoned or substantially penalized for noncompliance. Even when the government is made aware of cases of non-voluntary euthanasia, no legal action is likely to be taken.

The Dutch have even expanded the scope of protected physician killing to include children. With their parent’s permission, a child between the ages of 12 to 16 years old may request and receive assisted suicide. Initially, minors could obtain an assisted death even if their parents objected, but after domestic and international criticism, the law was changed to require parental consent.

[…]As reported in one Dutch documentary, a young woman in remission from anorexia was concerned that her eating disorder would return. To prevent a relapse, she asked her doctor to kill her. He willingly complied with her request.

[…]Over a period of forty years, the Dutch have continued the search for where to draw the line with euthanasia, shifting from acceptance of voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill, to voluntary euthanasia for the chronically ill, to non-voluntary euthanasia for the sick and disabled, to euthanasia for those who are not sick at all but are merely “suffering through living.” While the initial impetus may have been spurred by a desire to give expanded rights to the person who faces extreme suffering or imminent death, the effect has been to concentrate power into the hands of state-sponsored medical professionals. And while the justification for assisted death is usually the supposed well being of the suffering patient, the Dutch have redefined natural dependency into an unacceptable or unwanted social burden.

This is another concern I have about single-payer health care. The way the system works is that people have taxes deducted automatically from their pay checks when they are working. And when they get older, and stop working, they have to ask for treatment from a supplier that has no incentive to provide treatment or care, since they are no longer socially useful because they can’t pay taxes. Instead of doctors thinking that they have to treat a paying customer, the doctors think that they have to avoid wasting “society’s” money on people who are too old to pay into the system.

So if you don’t pay into the system, and the system needs money to treat those who are still paying, then why would they treat you? You have no value to society unless you are making money.

There was a good article on socialized medicine and euthanasia by Richard Miniter in the Wall Street Journal a few years back that explains my concerns more.

To deal with his point about doctors changing to view their purpose as ending suffering instead of getting people well, I think that this is scary because it shows how far we have come with our hedonism. My concern is that people are viewing the purpose of life as hedonism.

People want to have happy feelings all the time, and they don’t want to be burdened with the needs of anyone else. There’s no longer any moral dimension to life that makes taking care of others worthwhile. No one sees the experience of self-sacrificial love for others as an opportunity to imitate Christ.

UPDATE:

More horror. Patients in the Netherlands are suing to require that sexual gratification be part of the “medical services” that nurses should perform. I can’t even begin to express my revulsion at this story about health care in the Netherlands. Women were not made to be treated like this, they’re made to love and to be loved. I’m so scared of the future. It’s things like this that put me off of wanting to pursue marriage and children. What kind of world will my children grow up in? What will the government force them to do that will destroy their willingness and ability to follow Jesus? I can’t re-make the whole world.

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Fiscal and social conservatives unite in new free e-book “Indivisible”

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There’s a new book that just came out from the Heritage Foundation, my favorite think tank.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction by Jay Richards:

To listen to media and political strategists is to get the impression that American public life is a checklist of issues. Some are known as “social” issues (marriage, family) and some are known as “economic” (international trade, wages). There may be some good reasons for this distinction, but when we itemize and divide these topics into two separate categories, we fail to convey the underlying unity of the principles behind the American Experiment in ordered liberty. In reality, the two groups of issues are interdependent. For instance, a free economy cannot long exist in a culture that is hostile to it. The success of free market economic policies depends on important cultural and moral factors such as thrift, delayed gratification, hard work, and respect for the property of others. A virtuous and responsible populace derives, in turn, from strong families, churches, and other civil institutions.

Conversely, economic issues have a strong influence on culture and the institutions of civil society. High taxes, for example, put pressure on families and force parents to spend more time in the workforce, leaving less time to devote to their spouses and children. When government expands spending and control in education, it crowds out parental responsibility; when it expands its role in providing social welfare services, it tends to erode a sense of responsibility among churches and other groups doing good work to help neighbors in need.

The connections are such that the individual issues rarely fit neatly and exclusively into one set or the other. An “economic” issue is rarely exclusively about economics. For instance, poverty in America is often as much a moral and cultural problem as an economic problem. Reducing such poverty depends on civil institutions that inculcate virtue and responsibility as well as policies that promote economic freedom and discourage dependency. Most poverty among children in America is not caused by a lack of jobs but rather by factors such as family breakdown, negligent or absentee parents, substance abuse, or other social pathologies. To consider American poverty in strictly economic terms is to fail to see the full scale of issues involved in this problem.

[…]The following essays are intended as a concise exploration of the link between liberty and human dignity and of the policy issues that tend to cluster around these two themes in American life. This collection brings together a number of well-known social and economic conservatives. To encourage cross-fertilization of their ideas, those known as social conservatives have written on themes normally identified with economic conservatives, and vice versa. The authors highlight economic arguments for issues typically categorized as “social” and social/moral arguments for “economic” issues. Each author focuses on a single topic, briefly summarized below, that is associated with either social or economic conservatives or, in some cases, both.

That’s also one of the main purposes of my blog, to show how fiscal conservatives and social conservatives depend on each other.

Here are the essays and authors:

  • Civil Society: Moral Arguments for Limiting Government – Joseph G. Lehman
  • Rule of Law: Economic Prosperity Requires the Rule of Law – J. Kenneth Blackwell
  • Life: The Cause of Life Can’t be Severed from the Cause of Freedom – Representative Paul Ryan
  • Free Exchange: Morality and Economic Freedom – Jim Daly with Glenn T. Stanton
  • Marriage: The Limited-Government Case for Marriage – Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D.
  • Profit: Prophets and Profit – Marvin Olasky, Ph.D.
  • Family: Washington’s War on the Family and Free Enterprise – Stephen Moore
  • Wages: The Value of Wages – Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr.
  • Religion:  Why Faith Is a Good Investment – Arthur Brooks, Ph.D., and Robin Currie
  • International Trade: Why Trade Works for Family, Community, and Sovereignty – Ramesh Ponnuru
  • Culture: A Culture of Responsibility – Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D.
  • Property: Property and the Pursuit of Happiness – Representative Michele Bachmann
  • Environment: Conserving Creation – Tony Perkins
  • Education: A Unified Vision for Education Choice – Randy Hicks

Seeing the names of people paired with these topics just blows my mind. It would be as though William Lane Craig were suddenly to write a book defending free market capitalism or the war on Islamic terrorism. It’s just WEIRD. And you’ll notice that many of the Wintery Knight’s favorite people are in there; Paul Ryan, Michele Bachmann, Jennifer Roback Morse.  I also like Stephen Moore’s writing a lot.

The entire book is available for free as a PDF download, or you can order it from the Heritage Foundation. I ordered 10 copies of everything at the store, because I wanted a bunch to give away to all my friends. I think this is the perfect gift to give someone who doesn’t see the relevance of public policy to Christianity, marriage and parenting. There is no such thing as an informed Christian who is fiscally liberally or socially liberal.

Oh, and by the way: Ryan/Bachmann 2012 for the win!