02 December 1999, 806 words
A moralist is someone who prefers to be righteous instead of right. Moralists are thus often responsible for, or lend tacit support to, much evil.
Take the issue of abortion. In the past few weeks, letters have been appearing in the newspapers condemning abortion as wrong and warning against its legalisation. There is no hope that this issue can attain the status of a debate in this society. For one thing, the government has no intention of legalising abortion and, for another, not even the Family Planning Association has been waging a campaign to get this done. That is why the status quo will not change in the foreseeable future, for ours is a society where moral arguments always win over rational ones.
The moralists do not care that there are several well-equipped abortion clinics in Trinidad and Tobago, where women who can afford it get safe and efficient abortions. They do not care that the consequence of their intransigent lobby is that poor women are condemned to have dangerous operations by coat-hanger abortionists or, more often, bring unwanted children into the world to suffer poverty, abuse and degradation. The moralists do not care about these issues because, as Archbishop Pantin wrote in his column last week, suffering brings people closer to Christ. (Bertrand Russell dissected that argument as follows: "The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.")
I won't even get into the philosophical questions of how we define a human being, or the scientific evidence that a fetus feels no pain before 26 weeks, or the statistics suggesting that legal abortions help reduce crime, or the studies which show that most women do not make the decision lightly but do not regret it afterwards.
Then there's the issue of legalising narcotics. Here, the rational argument is a very simple one. After three decades of fighting the international drug trade, the problem is almost as bad as ever. The drug barons are still as powerful, the trade still as lucrative, the social costs just as high. Logic dictates that if a particular approach to a problem has been tried and has failed, another strategy should be used.
In the case of drug abuse, tackling the demand side has resulted in more success than trying to stop supply. People with relevant knowledge have pointed out that legalising drugs like cocaine and marijuana would instantly destroy the drug barons' income. They also point out that, since people are getting the drugs anyway, better they get them from regulated agencies, whose profits would be used for massive public campaigns about the dangers of drug abuse. Statistics show that legal drugs like tobacco kills 0.9 percent of smokers annually, and alcohol about 0.5 percent of drinkers. But illegal drugs like Ecstasy kills about 0.0002 percent of its users, while marijuana has never been shown to kill anybody.
But the moralists are against narcotics being legalised. So who cares about addiction, violent crime, official corruption, skewed economies, once the righteous have their way?
Which brings me right to the matter of pornography. Moralists believe that they are on firm ground here. They have even managed to take away the right of adults to look at what they want in the privacy of their homes.
But, apart from child porn, the arguments against pornography make little sense. Is it obscene? Only if you consider sex itself obscene, because it would seem obvious that doing the act is more obscene than watching it. (But, of course, moralists do consider sex obscene.)
Moralists say that pornography degrades women. The feminist writer Camille Paglia has pointed out that this argument can be made only by people who have never seen porn. The degrading portrayals of women, she says, occur on the extreme fringes of pornography. Most of the time, the women in the films, magazines or books are the central object of desire (and, as Ally McBeal commented in one episode, "Aren't I attractive enough to be a sex object?"). In fact, it is probably because pornography so clearly demonstrates women's most primal power - specifically, primal power over men - that the moralists deem it "degrading".
The real degradation occurs only when poverty or abuse forces women into the sex industry. But even that could be mitigated if prostitution were legalised. But the moralists, of course, would vehemently oppose legal recognition of the world's oldest profession, although this would allow unionisation, taxation, health care and pensions for women who may have no other choice.
The moralists' stance on these issues has only one common link. Obviously, it is not concern for people's welfare, not concern for truth, not even concern for morals. The moralists' true motivation boils down to this: a pathological hatred for other people's pleasure.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh