Author of "Rediscovering Values" Rev. Jim Wallis

Transcript.

Morality and Mortgages

Last week in the New York Times, Roger Lowenstein asked whether there are moral implications of failing to pay one's mortgage.

C.E.O. of the Mortgage Bankers Association... said... homeowners who default on their mortgages should think about the “message” they will send to “their family and their kids and their friends.”

Indeed it is sometimes thought to be a moral obligation to live up to your end of a contract you've signed; and maybe therefore people should not walk away from their mortgages. And yet, as Lowenstein points out, corporations will walk away from their debts if it can be calculated the economically rational thing to do.

... the housing collapse left 10.7 million families owing more than their homes are worth. So some of them are making a calculated decision to hang onto their money and let their homes go. Is this irresponsible?

Businesses — in particular Wall Street banks — make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral — perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with.

What do readers of the Parr Center blog, Ethics in the News, think?

Matthew Yglesias (a Harvard philosophy B.A.) at Think Progress writes:

[Imagine] my friend says he wants to meet for a drink at 8PM, and I say “are you going to show up 15 minutes late as usual?” Then he says “No way. If I’m late, drinks are on me.” [If] he shows up 20 minutes late, but follows through on his promise to pay the tab I think it’s fair to say that he’s still open to moral criticism. Similarly, a person who drives all around town blocking fire hydrants is doing something wrong even if he willingly pays all applicable fines in a prompt manner.

While this is a nice example, Yglesias shows that there is a difference:

... my mortgage is an agreement I’ve made with Bank of America which is a publicly traded for-profit corporation. Companies like that, unlike people ... or other kinds of institutions, don’t recognize any kind of goals other than monetary ones. Under the circumstances, any relationship you might have with Bank of America is a purely transactional, purely commercial one and if you treat it as anything other than that you’re being a sucker.

... families that think it serves their interests to default on mortgage payments shouldn’t feel morally obligated to avoid default.

Comments?

The Ethics of Food

Here's an interesting New York Times piece called
Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too:

“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said.

Read it for yourself. In an earlier New York Times piece, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued that...

...people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” ... avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,”... [an] “eternal Treblinka.”

These articles are a mix of "is" and "ought". By "is" I mean the articles describe facts and make empirical claims about the nature of plants and animals that we may not have thought about before. Just what we ought to do in light of this information is a problem for philosophical ethics and ethical reasoning.

“I’m amazed at how fast some of these things happen,” said Consuelo M. De Moraes of Pennsylvania State University. Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues did labeling experiments to clock a plant’s systemic response time and found that, in less than 20 minutes from the moment the caterpillar had begun feeding on its leaves, the plant had plucked carbon from the air and forged defensive compounds from scratch.

Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

February 23rd, 2010 the Parr Center for Ethics is conducting a panel discussion:

How Should We Eat? Policy and Ethics. Factory farms. Immigrant labor. Sustainability. Food democracy. World Hunger. Access. Environmental impacts. Nutrition. Genetic modification. Organic vs. Conventional. How do we navigate the food industry and make ethical choices about our food consumption? How do we prioritize our ethical concerns? Join a panel of food experts to discuss these questions and determine the issues at stake. This event is free and open to the public. Location: TBA, 6:30 pm.