Word: oughtness
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Rather than argue from the same stalemated positions, Americans ought to read Randall Robinson's new book, "The Debt, What America Owes to Blacks" (Dutton, 262 pages, $23.95) - an extraordinarily eloquent work that places the reparations discussion in the larger historical framework of 246 years of slavery and another hundred years of Jim Crow and racial discrimination. Robinson, president of TransAfrica (which did much to fight apartheid, among other battles), declares: "...the black holocaust is far and away the most heinous human rights crime visited upon any group of people in the world over the last five hundred years." Elie...
Last Monday, troubled by the fact that so many people on death row in his state had been proven innocent, Illinois Gov. George Ryan issued a moratorium on executions. Though commendable, this action presupposes that capital punishment is a method we ought to use, that perhaps, if we could change the way it is administered, it would be a desirable method of crime control. However, it is not the potential for racial bias or the risk that people on death row may actually be innocent that makes capital punishment a less than ideal method of crime prevention...
Some people say, however, that moral considerations such as these should not be a part of our political debate. This has never been true in American politics, and never will be. When we argue about how to help the poor or how the United States ought to behave in the world, we are making ethical judgements about how we as Americans ought to act. These are indeed fundamentally moral and ethical judgements that in many cases revolve around the dignity of human life...
...contend that human life is valuable, that we ought to preserve it and that people ought to be punished for taking it or maltreating it, then we cannot and must not allow our states or our federal government to employ the death penalty. We must tell all candidates for public office that, though we must punish our criminals, we cannot make our punishment into vengeance, for then we begin to destroy our laws and ourselves. We have too often seen in the far too recent past the disastrous effects of a culture that breeds violence and death...
...Ford's competitors may not be able to afford it." The most immediate beneficiary of the scheme, of course, is Hewlett Packard, which is now expecting an order equivalent to 4 percent of its 1999 worldwide sales. Corporations with money to burn - Ford has $23.6 billion in cash reserves - ought to expect calls from Compaq, Dell, Gateway and Apple...