Because it's WRONG! (Part 2)

(Stan writes:)
Bill,

In the previous post on Right and Wrong, are you indulging in sarcasm or are we to take you literally? There are several places in this post where I had that question. I'm not saying you need to make it clear, as such ambiguity fosters thinking.

Stan

(Bill's response follows)

Dear Stan,

I meant it literally; the problem with Tom Harris's article, like many "conservative" commentators' writings on "morality", is that he makes moral declarations without any bedrock of seriously considered principle to give them credibility.

Consider his sentence:

Teenage girls shouldn’t choose to have babies as an alternative to getting an education and a career. Why? Because it’s wrong.

This statement by itself is obviously silly beyond belief; it condemns a large percentage of our mothers, grandmothers, etc. It is wonderful that modern teenage girls have far more opportunities than their ancestors. But what about those who have no aptitude for or interest in formal education, especially given the abysmal quality of secondary school qualifications in Britain? There is nothing "wrong" in the serious moral sense, about choosing to have children at an early age. It might be a misguided, ill-advised or short-sighted decision.....but that's part of the risk of being alive. For some girls it might actually turn out to be a very worthwhile choice.

Of course, if there were radical reforms in education to make it more relevant to deprived young girls' lives you might get some of them going for careers rather than diapers. God knows, Labour has poured more than enough money into state education to make some difference even in the worst areas. But Tony B Liar's mantra of "Education, education, education" doesn't seem to have reached the grass roots, at least in Tom Harris's constituency. What about a voucher system to promote new schools and draw educational innovators into providing for families who have never known the dignity of choosing their own private schools? Well, Tom's fellow Labour education bureaucrats and the teachers' unions would never stand for it, so I think we can forget that one.

And if he is condemning young girls only for having children out of wedlock at the ever-luckless taxpayer's expense? Well, that IS doubly wrong in a serious moral sense, both as an abuse of sexuality and recklessly making yourself dependent on the public purse. But Tom will have to do some serious arguing about the correct use of sexuality within the context of marriage and he's going to sound like the Pope, despite his unconvincing protestations that he is not promoting Christian morality. Or we are all going to suspect that he is picking a soft target for cutting public expenditure.

You can make a very convincing and purely rationalist case for encouraging people to have children within stable marriages by pointing out the terrible statistical outcomes for children born to single mothers. But these arguments always seem to lack practical effectiveness in the face of the libertines' ideology and their assertions that people are free to indulge their sexual preferences in any way they want.

In fact Tom almost endorses the libertines' position:

Don't interpret this as any kind of "back to basics" crusade; I'm not remotely interested in what adults do in the privacy of their own homes, and I'm not sounding the rallying cry for Christian or religious morality. But when the actions of others has such a debilitating effect on the rest of society, it's time to stop being polite. It's time to stop worrying about how people's feelings might be hurt if we question the choices they've made.

If he is not interested in what adults do in private, why does he regard it as wrong for young girls to be sexually active - unless he is hiding some religious agenda?

Tom gives a superb exhibition of delicate figure skating on very thin ice where he describes the grandfather whose immature daughter had just given birth. He did not want to condemn the father or daughter; after all, he is a politician and does not want to offend too many potential voters or seem to be religiously judgemental. But how are we going to reduce the incidence of illegitimacy unless it is again regarded as a target of serious social disapproval? The complacent acceptance of illegitimacy is plainly an important support for a girl's decision to get pregnant.

In short British politicians, even the sincerely well meaning like Tom Harris, are too compromised in too many ways to act as credible contributers to any serious debate. Merely lamenting the eyewatering expense of single mothers looks ludicrous when the Government and Opposition are united in continuing public expenditure at its present crippling level and in refusing to abandon anything: useless defence projects, useless computer systems, hordes of parasite consultants and Public Relations liars, expensive schools with appalling exam results, the 2012 Olympics, countless building programs which run way over budget.....and that is barely scratching the surface.

As for objecting to the killing of little children....well, some of us have problems taking any British politician seriously, given the scale of abortion in Britain and the near-impossibility of even reducing the number of weeks at which a baby can be aborted.

[More on the next post.]