Education, Ethics, and Equality
The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Our morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.
To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education.
– Albert Einstein1
While at university, I was once required to write an essay on personal ethics to guide an educator. Of course ethics entailed respect for the rights of all humans, but mere respect for rights is insufficient.
Each person must decide on which principles they hold and abide by them as much as possible.
- I propose the following as a simple basis for making decisions that have ethical consequences.
1) Respect that others abide by different principles. Therefore, before rendering any decision, the reasons held by others for or against any action must be heard and considered.
2) Principles must be open to scrutiny. If a superior conception of a principle exists, then an inferior
Prisoners Have Nothing to Gain By Eating
Prisoners risking death by refusing food in the Pelican Bay supermax, and those hunger striking in solidarity in prisons around California are a judgment of our sickness. “The degree of civilization in a society,” said Dostoyevsky, “can be judged by entering its prisons.”
Civilization is something we no longer seem to aspire to. The United States locks up more people and a greater percentage of its people than anyone else. We lock them in training centers for anger and violence. We subject them to rape, assault, humiliation, and isolation. We throw the innocent in with the guilty, the young with the old, the nonviolent with the violent, the hopeful with those who’ve lost all interest in life.
And we routinely subject large numbers of prisoners to the torture of near-total isolation. We lock human beings in little boxes for 22 or 23 hours per day. When it’s done to an accused whistleblower like Bradley Manning, we protest. But what about when it’s done to thousands of people, many of them baselessly accused of being