From: crawford@church.mitre.org (Randy Crawford)
Subject: Re: Fabrikant: keeping a moral perspective.
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 21:43:44 GMT

In article <1992Aug27.000425.22037@newshub.ccs.yorku.ca>, tony@nexus.yorku.ca (Anthony Wallis) writes:
> (From the Mosaic Decalogue)
> Thou shalt
>   [6]  not murder
>   [8]  not steal
>   [9]  not give false evidence
>   [10] not covet
> 
> Our society has a special abhorrence of violations of [6], and maybe
> that is rightly so (who would want to argue against it ?).  It is,
> indeed, extremely rare for an established academic to murder colleagues
> over essentially academic-career concerns.  I know only of this one
> case in 30 years of academic life.  However, violations of [10] are not
> only daily occurrences in academic life, but are in some sense
> structured into the system, reflecting the incorporation of "gown" into
> "town".  Temptations to murder are mercifully infrequent, but it is a
> continuous struggle not to succumb to the endemic and expected
> academically-correct version of covetousness.  Literal legal-definition
> violations of [8] and [9] are uncommon, but intellectual stealing and
> intellectual giving-of-false-evidence are often as much part of the
> infrastructure of our post-secondary institutions as are the campus
> sewerage and garbage collection systems.

After [8] you can replace or return the item stolen.  After [9] and [10]
you can apologize.  But [6] is forever, and amends cannot be made.

> Perhaps the Mosaic Deity had something divine in mind in not putting
> murder into one class of sin and stealing, lying and coveting into
> another class.  Our society seems to have done here what God would
> not.  It doesn't take much to imagine a distressed alienated mind,
> hyper- sensitive to perceived massive violations of [8] [9] and [10],
> to fail [6].

I hope that by "imagine" you mean this figuratively.  If you empathisize
with the murder of people as an even minimally sane response to being
mistreated in your _job_ then you should re-evaluate your priorities.

> What is worse, one murder or a million little lies and deceits ?
> To answer that question would, to me, feel like picking up that
> first stone.

Morality and right-or-wrong is of no concern to a society.  A people's 
protection of their personal liberties arises from a legal system which 
is consistent in establishing and protecting it's own statutes of conduct.

The issue is one of acceptable or unacceptable behavior in the society.
In the case of murder _every_ human collective places a high value on 
human life and recognizes its fragility.  Therefore murder is an egreg-
ious crime everywhere which demands that decisive and effective steps
be taken to limit such behavior. 

Fabrikant chose to live in Canada and abide by the code of conduct set
by that society.  By any objective measure he violated that code, and
can no longer live there as a member of that community.

In response to your question, remember, we are talking about Canada, 
and in Canada, murder is far worse than a _billion_ small mistruths 
meant to respect someone's feelings.

And remember too, you can't freely mix the laws of the old and new 
testaments (commandments and stones).  The new testament was meant,
I think, to supplement and amend the old.
-- 

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