Unifying Theme Article
Ethics and Morals in America; an Endangered Species
By Michael Payne
In America today, there is a great divide between those who still abide by the principles of ethics and morals and those who are determined to make them irrelevant and meaningless. Ethics and morals, quite obviously, are a great hindrance to the power brokers in our government, the financial sector, and the corporate world whose sole objective is the accumulation of money and power.
Let's clearly define the terms ethics and morals and the distinction between them. Ethics and morals both relate to good versus bad or right versus wrong. Ethics involve standards or codes of behavior that have been established within a group of which a person is a member; typically in the business world, the medical profession, or the justice system.
Morals, on the other hand, involve an individual's personal conformance to a body of rules established within a society based on right versus wrong behavior. Said in a slightly different way, m orals define personal character, while ethics stress a social system in which those morals are applied.
So in the following discussion the issues at hand can be considered to be ones involving either ethics or morals or the combination of the two.
As we examine these issues and their impact on this nation, the most obvious place to start is with the U.S. government, that part of America in which the deterioration and unraveling of the principles of ethics and morality are on display for all to see; where greed, corruption and personal interests have now completely set aside the normally accepted standards of group conduct and personal behavior that once prevailed.
A large majority of Americans were brought up to believe that those who inhabit the Congress and the White House generally followed the principles of ethics and morality in conducting the business of this nation. How could we have been so naïve? We now know that is a fallacy and those principles of determining right versus wrong are rarely, if ever, used in making important decisions in this government.
Many of the most critical problems this country faces are not being addressed, let alone being solved, because this Congress no longer follows these principles. This body of the government and a very sizable portion of its members are so intent on pursuing and promoting the interests of those who fund their election campaigns and their own that the thought of adhering to these principles never enters their minds.
So as a result of this absence of ethical and moral considerations in congressional deliberations what we are seeing is a massive deliberate misappropriation of taxpayer dollars in which: