I have to get this one in before I forget.
“See? The bad part is that little light blue section at the top! What are you making a big deal about it for?”
In the interest of non-partisanship and fairness, I resisted the temptation to call 21A “The Planned Parenthood Excuse.” It was a close call, for it was a Planned Parenthood debate that made me realize that this rationalization was missing from the list.
Opponents of Planned Parenthood who want to see the organization defunded believe that abortion is morally and ethically wrong. In 2013-2014, Planned Parenthood performed 327,653 abortions. Arguing that this should not cause even abortion opponents to seek to defund the organization, its defenders inevitably argue: “Abortions are just a small part of what Planned Parenthood does.”
The Washington Post’s factchecker examined various claims about what proportion of Planned Parenthood’s activities involve abortions, which misses the ethical point entirely. If abortion is wrong, indeed unnecessary homicide in most cases, then it doesn’t matter what else an organization does in addition to 327,653 abortions, or what proportion of its total activities taking 327,653 innocent human lives is. “Abortions are just a small part of what Planned Parenthood does” is a ridiculous defense, except to those who believe that abortions are nothing to get upset about, and the equivalent of removing a polyp. That is not, however, the perspective of those who oppose abortion, so the argument isn’t an argument at all.
For someone who accepts that abortion is a legal but unnecessary and therefore unethical taking of life, “Abortions are just a small part of what Planned Parenthood does” is a pure rationalization: a lie that makes people feel better about their own wrongdoing, or the wrongdoing of someone else.
In the interests of not getting social policy mixed up with the rationalization, however, we’ll describe the new entry without reference to abortion.
Rationalization 21A. The Criminal’s Redemption, or “It’s Just A Small Part Of What I Am!”
21. Ethics Accounting (“I’ve earned this”/ “I made up for that”) holds that someone can eliminate or mitigate wrong doing by loading up the good side of the ethics ledger so that the bad side looks puny by comparison. Unless, however, those virtuous entries include measures to undo the wrong on the bad side and to make any victims whole, the imagined justification is just that: imaginary. Good people have no more leave to be unethical than anyone else, and nobody earns the right to be unethical without consequences.
21A resembles its parent by using unrelated activities as counterweights to clearly unethical ones. It’s delusion, however, is that unethical deeds shouldn’t be measured by their own content but by the proportion of an individual’s total activity they represent. Imagine a defense attorney arguing to a jury in a case where his client has been proven guilty of a single, calculated, gruesome murder. “Yes, my client killed,” she intones…
“But he is so much more than a murderer. Indeed, this single, admittedly horrible act is a tiny part of his life! He is 45 years old! He has been a loving son, a devoted brother, a faithful husband and a wonderful parent! He has been a community leader, a successful businessman, an animal lover, a donor to many charities! He has been a good and loyal friend to hundreds of people in this an other communities! He is an author, an inventor, a funny and clever companion who makes all around him happy. This one, single murder is an infinitesimal portion of who he is, the least representative portion of them all. It is unjust to judge him, indeed to disproportionately punish him, his family, and his community by preventing him from doing all the other things that characterize this 99.99999% good citizen and honorable human being, because of something that doesn’t fairly represent who he truly is.”
The response to this should be: baloney (but nice try, Counselor!). Murder is murder, and someone who commits it is a murderer, 100% The percentages don’t matter. Even Genghis Khan, Hitler and Mao spent didn’t spend the majority of their time killing, and so what? The fact that someone’s unethical acts don’t dominate their lives in terms of time, expense or dedication does not and cannot alter, improve or mitigate the unethical nature of the act itself.
Ethics Alarms 
No, BUT, I have heard arguments for parole or clemency to the effect of “this person should not be defined strictly by his offense.” To that I say baloney, you lied, you’re a liar, you stole, you’re a thief, you beat someone, you’re a thug.
It reminds me of Dan Turner’s comment regarding his son Brock Turner’s sexual assault of an unconscious woman:
“His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.”
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2852614-Letter-from-Brock-Turner-s-Father.html
The irony of Turner’s comment is that the father indicted himself with the assertion. What was the dream, and the work, if the boy was willing to act in this manner? Could it be that Brock thought he could get away with it? Why would he think so? Based on how he was raised? Or was this act simply a part of the dream?
Either way is a cancer on society.
As it should. I could have named the rationalization after Turner.
Hopefully Proposition 62 will not pass in California which abolishes the death penalty. But considering Hollywood’s pension for making murderers sympathetic characters in movies it just might!
What was the most recent movie that made a murderer a sympathetic character?
The remake of the Magnificent Seven is still playing.
X-men Apocolypse maybe? Who doesn’t sympathize with Magneto?
Well, he is a magnetic personality.
Stop that.
I found him fairly irredeemable in that movie, actually, and his constant flip-flopping between good and evil was laughable. He can literally just decide to go back to being a genocidal maniac whenever he has a bad day, as long as by the end of the movie he decides to be good again, and the “heroes” accept that. Ridiculous.
I don’t really understand Wayne’s complaint, though–“Hollywood” makes murderers sympathetic characters because that’s what stories have done for thousands of years. It’s certainly what the Greeks did. I’m not sure there’s any correlation between a culture’s popular fiction sympathizing with murderers and that culture’s tolerance of capital punishment, but it would be interesting to study.
This is a weak rationalization because there are a lot of assumptions that go into creating the Planned Parenthood rationalization itself. I would have used an example where everyone agrees; for e.g., Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, just about any comedian, etc. — people who are inherently flawed but have contributed to arts and culture greatly. How the heck do we deal with these people?
The fact that Woody makes good movies, however, does not make him less of a child molesting asshole. Nor does his child molesting make him less of a movie director. However, if he was a continuous and continuing child molester, his artistic talents should not make his punishment or condemnation as a rotten human being less severe.
21A: You screw one goat
A young man was backpacking across the highlands, when he came across a small village where he decided to spend the night.
Upon entering the local pub that evening for some drinks with the locals, he found himself in a conversation with one particularly drunk and indignant individual.
“Ya see that fence out there?” The old man asked the backpacker. “I built that fence with me own hands. But ya think they call me MacGregor the fence builder? No!”
“And that church out there. I hoisted the bell up to the top with me own hands. But ya think they call me MacGregor the church builder? No!”
And that bridge. I put it together stone by stone. But ya think they call me MacGregor the bridge builder? No!”
“But ya screw one goat…”
This rationalization isn’t directly about reputations, which your joke is about.
And the joke is a farce anyway, everyone knows that Scotsmen haven’t the technical wherewithal to build churches or bridges, let alone wooden fences.
Well . . . no TRUE Scotsman would have the technical wherewithal….
–Dwayne
This could also be called the Lance Armstrong rationalization.
True. It’s a versatile one!!!