Fire and Knowledge

Because most drug offenses carry mandatory sentences and exclude the possibility of parole, other prisoners are having to be released early to make room for all the new drug offenders pouring into the system.

In consequence, the average convicted murderer in the United States now serves less than six years, the average rapist just five.

Moreover, once he is out, the murder or rapist is immediately eligible for welfare, food stamps, and other federal assistance. A convicted drug user, no matter how desperate his circumstances may become, is denied these benefits for the rest of his life.

—Bill Bryson, I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Broadway Books: 1999), p. 91.

According to a 1990 study, 90 percent of all first-time offenders in federal courts were sentenced to an average of five years in prison. Violent first-time offenders, by contrast, were imprisoned less often and received on average just four years in prison.

You are, in short, less likely to go to prison for kicking an old lady down the stairs than you are for being caught in possession of a single dose of any illicit drug.

—Bill Bryson, I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Broadway Books: 1999), p. 90.

I just found out that there are more people in slavery now than at any other time in human history:

In its 400 years, the transatlantic slave trade is estimated to have shipped up to 12 million Africans to various colonies in the West. Free the Slaves estimates that the number of people in slavery today is at least 27 million…. Three out of four slavery victims are women and that half of all modern-day slaves are children.

And if you think it’s just “out there” and not in the US, think again:

Estimates by the US State Department suggest up to 17,500 slaves are brought into the US every year, with 50,000 of those working as prostitutes, farm workers or domestic servants.

According to the CIA, more than 1,000,000 people are enslaved in the US today. Thousands of cases go undetected each year and many are difficult to take to court as it can be difficult to prove force or legal coercion.

Perhaps the most famous inflation of the twentieth century occurred in Germany during the 1920s, when 40 marks were worth one dollar in July 1920 but it took more than 4 trillion marks to be worth one dollar by November 1923. People discovered that their life’s savings were not enough to buy a pack of cigarettes.

The German government had, in effect, stolen virtually everything they owned by the simple process of keeping more than 1,700 printing presses running day and night, printing money. Some have blamed the economic chaos and bitter disillusionment of this era for setting the stage of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

—Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (3rd Edition, Basic Books, 2007), p. 350.

Put yourself in this situation.

You are at a train track and see five people tied to the track ahead. A switch is in front of you which will divert the train, but as you look down you see a man is strapped to that track and will be killed. Is it permissible to flip the switch and save the five people at the expense of one?

If you are like most people, you said yes.

Now imagine in order to save the five people, you have to push a stranger in front of the train to stop it. You know for certain it would stop the train in time to save the five people tied to the tracks. Is it permissible to push the man and save the five people at the expense of one?

You probably said no. But the results are the same — the only difference is the method (passive vs. impassive). But in both cases you sacrifice one life to save five.

So why do we see one as moral and the other as immoral?

Here’s the answer Michael Shermer gives:

In the first one the subject is emotionally detached by being one step removed from the killing process—to save five lives by killing one person, one has only to flip a switch to detrail the trolley car. The trolley killed the individual, not the subject. In the second scenario the subject is emotionally involved—to save five lives by killing one person, one has to be directly and viscerally responsible for killing another person.

Moral judgment is not calculatingly rational. It is intuitively emotional. (The Science of Good & Evil, p. 177)

Do you agree?

It may be that the presence of nuclear weapons in the world serves notice that the command to love one another is an absolute practical necessity, such as we never dreamed it to be before, and that our choice is not to win or lose, but to love our enemies or die.

—Wendell Berry, “Property, Patriotism, and National Defense” in Home Economics (1986), p. 111.

I’m not much for wearing t-shirts with messages anymore, but I did get a kick out of this shirt:

If ethics represents a genuine sphere of knowledge, it represents a sphere of potential progress (and regress).

—Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 171.