Word: morale
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...knows about sex. She's seen videos, watched television, listened to music. She knows what is expected in marriage and knows what, in fact, happens." It was when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, he explained, that all the cover-ups started. "The moral here is, 'You should have stopped talking to the snake in the first place.'" Later he prayed with the family, and before he left, Chelsea said, "I love Dad. I'll handle it." Both women, Jackson said, knew what they had to do: Chelsea's "mission is to lift her dad up." And if Hillary...
...Knowing someone who commits adultery puts flesh on a morally abstract situation," says John H. Gagnon, a sociologist who was a co-author of the Chicago study. "It's morally wrong, but if I know someone who did it, I know maybe they had a bad marriage; maybe it was an accident. Maybe there's a compelling narrative to explain why they strayed." In other words, familiarity breeds moral relativism. While President Clinton has yet to offer a compelling narrative of his own, this phenomenon may help explain the consistent findings in polls that while Americans don't like...
This exemplifies the moral principle that if you are asked an immoral question you can answer with a lie. The Philosophy 101 example of this is, if the Nazis came looking for a family of Jews whom you were hiding in your attic, you would be permitted to lie in order to protect them. Most people would say such a lie was an act of virtue. Not 19th century philosopher Immanuel Kant. He was an absolutist who believed the prohibition against lying was a paradigm of a "categorical imperative," an unconditional moral law. Kant was cruel; he would have turned...
...presidential scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, "tell the truth selectively." Bill Clinton has been accused of telling the truth slowly. This is not the same thing as lying. It's a sin of omission, not commission. It's like the difference between lying as a legal issue and as a moral one. The definition of perjury is far narrower than what your grandfather would have considered a damned lie. The legal bar of truth is awfully low. Bill Clinton can be "legally accurate" and still be lying through his teeth. "Religion and law are fishing at the opposite ends...
...justice something like what NutraSweet is to sugar: a modern substitute with all the taste but none of the troubling calories. A term from psychology, not law, closure refers to a general sense of emotional completion about a matter, not to the formal righting of a moral or ethical imbalance...