Following is a post I did in February of 2006 - the passage of a full smoking ban here in Fargo got me to thinking about this post, so I re-read it and figured now’s as good a time to share it w/ my new audience here at SAB. Enjoy...
A funny thing happened on the way back to my office today. In part to celebrate my new job title (a semi-promotion, if that’s not too self-congratulatory), in part to relieve a bit of job-related stress, and in part just because it sounded good, I eschewed the downtown Minneapolis skyway, lit a
semi-cheap but uniquely-flavored cigar, and walked from an off-site meeting back to my office via the outdoor route, despite the 15-degree temps. While waiting for the “walk” signal at a street corner, a man in an H2 rolled down his window and yelled at me, “Put that f’ing thing out, I don’t want your second-hand smoke!” His light turned green before I had a chance to get into a verbal spar with him, and I didn’t think too deeply about it - as a cigar smoker I’ve become fairly immune to peoples’ spoken desires for me to extinguish my stogie.
Upon getting back to my office, I donned my headphones and listened the last few minutes of the
Dennis Prager show. Dennis was lamenting today’s vote for a
complete public smoking ban in Britain. In doing so, he mentioned something to the effect of, “when I was a kid and I went to baseball games, everybody smoked and no one swore; today, nobody smokes and everybody swears” and “we’ve traded in moral character development for a nearly religious commitment to physical health” (I’m paraphrasing, not quoting, but it was something like that).
I chuckled to myself, thinking about the f-bomb the the H2 driver had dropped on me, and then I started thinking about the incident a bit more. Let’s forget for a moment about the most obvious irony: that a guy driving a vehicle with EPA-estimated miles per gallon in the single digits would whine about the size of
my carbon footprint. The bigger irony to me (and I’m guessing, to Dennis Prager) is that a guy who had the windows completely closed on his H2 would take the time to roll them down and chastise me for contributing tobacco smoke to the environment. My secondhand smoke was obviously not going to get into his lungs, and I was alone on the street (did I mention the 15-degree temps?). The questionable notion of me jeopardizing someone’s respiratory health was obviously not at issue here.
(big change of subject here - I promise to bring the loose ends together)
I taught Business Ethics last quarter, and one of the (very easy) questions on a quiz that I gave was “Do corporate codes of conduct tend to be highly detailed or fairly general in their outlining of acceptable behavior?” The answer, for those of you who don’t care to think deeply about it, is “fairly general”. Why, though?
As anyone who pays attention to ethics breaches in the corporate world today can tell you, it’s nearly impossible to ennumerate all of the potential ways that business agents can err in terms of their ethical behavior. Lists of what to do in specific situations would not only be impossibly long, they would also be hopelessly incomplete. Thus, organizations draft codes of conduct that are somewhat general, giving
guidelines for what is deemed to be ethically acceptable, and giving occasional examples to illustrate those guidelines.
Today, we live in a politically correct society that equates political and/or social stances with being moral or immoral, without much thought given to what moral principles lead to that chosen stance.
For example, to the politically correct crowd, opposing affirmative action means you’re racist (i.e., immoral), because you’re opposed to giving ethnic minorities specific advantages to level the proverbial playing field. If you’re opposed to it because you believe that such policies necessarily presume that ethnic minorities need such advantages, and that giving those advantages means placing members of an ethnic majority who, as individuals, personally did nothing to place the minority in a relative disadvantage, who cares? You’re still a racist to the PC crowd.
If you drive a car that runs on E-85, you’re automatically moral to the politically correct. Forget the fact that, given the current state of ethanol production in this nation, it takes more than a gallon of diesel and/or gasoline to bring one gallon of ethanol to market - it’s still green (and thus good - a.k.a., moral) behavior!
And if you smoke, you’re immoral not because it’s unhealthy to your own self, but because of the second-hand smoke it releases. Forget whether or not you’re alone on a street corner on day cold enough that no one in the passing cars has rolled-down windows. Forget whether you’re in a British pub, with other adults who came to said pub of their own volition, served by wait-staff who make the decision each day to come to a smoking’s-allowed-workplace. And, most ludicrous of all, forget whether you’re in a theater watching an Arthur Miller play that calls for the protagonist to smoke a cigarette during the performance, the
anti-smoking zeolots can still get the play re-written in 15 minutes, simply because not smoking is more important than the art itself. The very fact that you’re smoking means that you’re releasing second-hand smoke; whether or not someone breathes it in is irrelevant. It’s immoral.
This is the same PC crowd which cries foul when the sitting president refers to nations like Iran and North Korea as evil. The same crowd which seeks to “understand the natures” of Islamic terrorists who killed 3,000 people in the 9/11 attacks, while condemning as evil America’s decision to seek vengeance and to pre-emptively defend itself from an enemy which has promised more, similar attacks. The same crowd which calls the cartoons mocking Islam “abhorrent” and “hate-filled” while calling Che Guevara “dashing”.
Our society today is in a state of moral confusion, and the reason is simple. To too many people, holding the (politically) correct position on an issue is much more important than understanding how one came to that position in the first place. Schools are to blame, parents are to blame (Dennis Prager often cites the survey that said more parents would be upset if their child was caught smoking than cheating on an exam), the media are to blame, and society in general is to blame. It’s high time we started holding our underlying values in higher regard than the resultant positions that we take. If we do, the world will make more moral sense.
