Editor:
Brown County is a green bubble in a state ravished by agriculture, and no less unique than the county is its paper. The Brown County Democrat. Few papers ever entertain an op-ed opinion about ethics, which makes The Brown County Democrat unique among papers. The column of Mark Franke (Wed, Feb 21) was thought-provoking.
From government’s standpoint, economic activity is a public good, and governments serve the greater good by promoting the GDP. In the world of business, the difference between right and wrong is dollar-able.
Defining professionalism, an American clergyman, John Hayes Holmes, pointed out that professions follow a code of conduct, as do doctors, lawyers, agronomists or foresters. In his words, a profession is “a group of men voluntarily under pledge to an ideal which supersedes ail money considerations.” Ethics is what separates the self-serving politician from the altruism of the statesman who works for the greater good.
During the 1900’s Roosevelt era, “the greatest good for the greatest number” was the watchword, as if government could make decisions by this measure.
Mr. Franke’s approach to ethics is to ascribe lines of authority. Everyone knows the Biblical behest, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; unto God, the things that are God’s,” which doesn’t satisfy a situational conflict. Mr. Franke looks to the higher authority for answers, which dumbfounds me, because who knows what a higher authority thinks. Mr. Franke is talking with seminary students, and Higher Authority is his allusion to God.
Among the world’s Catholics, the Pope is a higher authority and spokesperson on Earth for God. Protestants rely on the Bible and their conscience in ethical matters.
The original Catholic Bible has 70+ books, including Maccabees 1 & 2, Sirach, Tobit, Baruch, all of which Martin Luther removed from the Bible. His Bible has 66 books. The Mormons have their book of Mormons, the Shakers had their woman prophetess. After the Bible was translated into Cyrillic (Russian), a Russian Czar took note of 100’s of mistranslations
and had them corrected. A schism rose, with conservatives sticking to the old Bible and rejecting the new. The book of Enoch has been banned from the Christian Bible for centuries.
The Bible which says “You will not kill,” also says in Exodus 22:18, “You will not suffer a witch to live,” a decree taken to heart in Salem, Massachusetts, where the fundamentalists took the Bible literally. Folks in aulde-tyme Salem did not know about cell hormones or germ theory – to them, disease was a malady cast by nefarious witches who cast spells to make people sick.
The folks of Salem relied on the inspired word of Exodus, the higher authority, to bum the witches in their community at the stake – during what science has shown to be an outbreak of ergot rot on grain that sickened people.
Now we have an Alabama judge who has ruled that a fertilized cell is a living human being – the same ‘personhood’ status as the courts granted ‘corporations.’ In the natural order of things, some fertilized cells are expelled from the items long before a miscarriage occurs.
Clearly, semantics impacts conscience and ethics. In the 13 colonies that united under one constitution, the Antivivisection Society of Philadelphia laid down the ethical principle “You cannot do evil so that good results.” If we paraphrase, the means does not justify the end.
For many of us in the thick of things, a thin line separates trouble-shooting from trouble-making, and our consciences will not always know which side of that line we stand on. So it is, Mr. Franke appeals to a “higher authority” that I find hopelessly wanting.
Bud Hoekstra
Bloomington
