In Good Conscience (Updated)

Thus it is that people who see themselves as the soul of enlightenment can in good conscience support a proposal to, in effect, cleanse the public sector of much of its existing representation of religious (and, not coincidentally, ethnic) minorities.  It is human nature: where the self-image and the facts conflict, the facts must be made to fit the self-image.

 - Andrew Coyne


Sweet irony.

History is full of it.

We say to these Brazilians we can supply you with cotton goods cheaper than you can buy them elsewhere.  Will you buy them?  By all means, say the Brazilians, and we will pay you with our sugar and coffee.  No, say we, your sugar and coffee are produced by slave labour; we are men of principle and our consciences will not allow us to consume the product of slave labour.  

Well, anyone would imagine that the matter ended there, and we left the Brazilians to consume their own sugar and coffee.  No such thing.

We are men of principle, but we are also men of business, and we try to help the Brazilians out of their difficulty.

We say to them: Close to us and near at hand live some 40,000,000 industrious and thriving Germans, who are not as conscientious as we are; take your sugar to them; they will buy it from you, and you can pay us for our cottons with the money you thus receive.  

But the Brazilians represent that there will be some difficulty with this.  The Germans live on the other side of the Atlantic; we must send them our sugar in ships; now our ships are few and ill-fitted to cope with the waters of the great ocean.  

Our reply is ready.  We have plenty of ships and they are at your service.  It is true that slave-labour sugar would contaminate our warehouses, but ships are different things.

But the Brazilians have another difficulty.  They say the Germans are particular and have a fancy for refined sugar.  It is not easy to refine sugar in Brazil, and these Germans do not like the trouble of refining it themselves.  

Again we step in with an expedient.  We will not only carry your sugar but we will refine it for you too.  It is sinful to consume slave-grown sugar, but there can be no harm in refining it, which in fact is to cleanse it from part of its original impurity.  

The Brazilians are at us again.  Say they, we produce a great deal of sugar more than the Germans will buy.  

Our goodness is infinite; we ourselves will buy your surpus.  It cannot be consumed at home, because the people of this country are men of conscience, but we will send it to the West Indies and Australia.  The people who live there are only negroes and colonists, and what right have they to consciences?  And now that you may plauge us no more about these matters, we tell you at once, that, if the price of our own sugar should rise above a certain value, we will buy more of your slave-grown sugar and we will eat it ourselves.

- The Viscount Palmerston

It's surprising what people can do, in good conscience, when they create a bit of distance between themselves and the results of their choices, isn't it?

UPDATE: Again, courtesy of the ever-illuminating Andrew Coyne:

So: nobody did anything wrong, and everybody is covering it up.  Except it's not quite exonerating, is it?  Duffy's defence on the housing allowance issue is that, yes, he declared as his principal residence a house he barely set foot in, and yes, he claimed expenses for "stays" in Ottawa that, having lived there for decades, he did not incur, but it was all right because several senior Tories told him he could, the rules did not not say he couldn't, and other senators had done the same.

They keep using that word, "conscience," but I don't think it means what they think it means.

UPDATE SEPT 7, 2014:

They are also happy to announce sanctions against Moscow - as long as those sanctions don't harm their own businesses too much.

All in good conscience, I'm sure.



A king may move a man, a father may claim a son, but that man can also move himself, and only then does that man truly begin his own game.  Remember that howsoever you are played or by whom, your soul is in your keeping alone, even though those who presume to play you be kings or men of power.  When you stand before God, you cannot say "But I was told by others to do thus," or that virtue was not convenient at the time.  This will not suffice.

Remember that.