The newest New York Times feed to catch my attention is Moral of the Story, the self-proclaimed “Ethicist’s take on the news.” His posts remind me of our discussions in Intro to Philosophy, where our professor had a very grounded, practical approach to teaching us abstract ideas.
Anyway, at first I only read the posts themselves, because on very public blogs that are academic at all, comments usually spiral out of control into a big mess of ignorance. In each one, the author later posts a response to the commenters, and almost all of them start with, “Readers disagreed with me about . . . ”
His post on the mortgage crisis is no different. I browsed the comments and laughed at this one:
it’s all about personal responsibility, enough with the moralizing.
Hahahaha. You moron. Morals are our personal responsibility within a society, and one could argue that — if our neighbors chose mortgages too large or even if they accidentally burned down the whole neighborhood — it is the personal responsibility of each of us to forgive and aid how we can. After Hurricane Katrina, did American citizens say, “Well, government, you’ve made your bed, now you can clean it up”? Some perhaps did, but many others chose to travel there to help, support charities acting in the area, and so forth. We recognized the human face of this terrible series of errors and reached out.
Yes, the mortgage crisis is different — these people did choose their loans and homes. But as the Ethicist points out, they trusted skilled bankers to make responsible decisions when they applied for their mortgages. Most of these comments seem borne from neighborly resentment and I-told-you-soism than anything else, and that’s sad.
no responses