Just Dumb

The Fruits of a Superficial Education

In John Key, New Zealand has a Prime Minister who is superficial in critical ways.  His analysis and thinking upon some issues barely gets beyond the puerile.  When first elected to Parliament he was faced with a Prostitution Reform Bill--which would make prostitution a perfectly normal and mainstream occupation--you know, like taxi driving.

Key declared that he intended to support the Bill, announcing to the House:

I do not believe, and will never believe, that the government can legislate for morality. [John Roughan, John Key: Portrait of a Prime Minister (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2014), p.111.]

There has been a strong streak of libertinism in his approach to such issues.  He threw his weight behind New Zealand's homosexual marriage private member's bill and undoubtedly was very influential in it passing.

What Key apparently struggles to grasp is the ubiquity of morality.  It is just dumb to assert, "I will never believe that the government can legislate for morality".
 A moment's serious reflection would lead him to conclude that all government legislation is imposing morality upon the populace.  Take something as prosaic as driving under the influence of alcohol.  Key, along with many politicians, has supported lower drink-driving thresholds and more stringent penalties.  Such acts necessarily involve the legislation of morality, demanding that citizens think and act in a certain way and punishing them if they do not.

What Key is sliding away from is an up front and honest position of standing up to say, "I believe prostitution is an amoral, if not a perfectly moral activity, and therefore I am going to support making it a legitimate, lawful occupation."  Like many New Zealanders, our Prime Minister has a "live and let live" approach to life.  "Different strokes for different folks.  Who am I to judge?"  But a shred of intellectual rigour in such matters would drive him to a very different position: namely, the inescapable ubiquity of morals in every human thought, word, and deed.  It would drive him to acknowledge that the state is constantly legislating for morality, which is then pressed down upon citizens.

But that would raise a far more serious issue to grapple with: a critical self-conscious reflection upon paradigms, world views, philosophies, and religions.  By what standard is one thing deemed evil, and another righteous?  Where is my warrant for asserting one thing good, and another bad?

To elide from such a challenge, such a duty, whilst proffering blandishments about the evils of legislating morality upon people, is just intellectually lazy.  It is, also, in a word, dumb.