Unfortunately, the king I woke up feeling like is King Canute. I was reviewing the trends in the past ten years of ethics posts, and there is no question that the nation’s ethical bearings are worse, not better. Fewer people read the blog than five years ago.
Ethics blindness in national and political matters seems more advanced among my neighbors, colleagues, friends and relatives than ever before (although almost none of these read Ethics Alarms or have ever read it, which says something about me, though I’m not sure what,)This was a particularly depressing week from the ethics perspective, but then they’re all depressing. The unfolding Joe Biden document scandal kept getting worse, and rather than admit Biden’s hypocrisy and the dangerous double standards applied to Trump, partisans invested in a weak, corrupt, mentally deficient President shifted into denial mode. Evidence of Virginia schools deliberately sabotaging superior students in pursuit of “equal outcomes” for those who don’t do their homework, come to school stoned and disrupt classes kept on coming, and the DEI-converted dealt with the matter by denying it. A Democratic Congressional leader introduced legislation criminalizing not just speech, but thought. Facebook chilled MY speech because its bots didn’t understand what I posted.
The signs of rot were (are) everywhere, in matters large and small. I learned that a lawyer received professional discipline because a judge thought “Gadzooks!” was a dirty word, or something, reminding me that we rely on judges who have the same level of literacy as Michael Steele.
I received the always welcome “Bill James Baseball Handbook” for 2023, and a featured article by Joe Posnanski, much revered as an intellectual giant among sportswriters, demonstrated that the intellectual giant among sportswriters is as ethically inert as all the others. There were lots of outbursts like this one, by a much-honored African-American writer whose work has appeared in the The Atlantic, New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, ESPN, NPR, CNN, and more:
It’s worth mentioning, I guess, that the way we use the tale of King Canute the Great (985 to 1035) who was real king of England and a successful one, is unfair to him, making him out to be an idiot. If he did have his throne placed on the banks of the Thames and futilely demand that the rising tide subside (and there is some evidence that the incident really occurred), it was not because he was arrogant or a fool, as the typical telling of the story implies. As “the rest of the story” shows, as related in one of the earliest accounts ( by Henry of Huntingdon in his “Historia Anglorum”):
“But the sea carried on rising as usual without any reverence for his person, and soaked his feet and legs. Then he moving away said: “All the inhabitants of the world should know that the power of kings is vain and trivial, and that none is worthy of the name of king but He whose command the heaven, earth and sea obey by eternal laws”.
The ones who should heed King Canute are the allegedly smart people like John Kerry (Sorry, I couldn’t write that without giggling) at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 
There is a little more to it than that:-
– On the legal maxim of “nemo dat quod non habet”, of course the Turks couldn’t convey title. But they didn’t, they offered a quitclaim, as it were; they removed themselves from obstructing.
– As regards any original owners, there simply weren’t any left. The last remaining ones were ended by rounds of persecution of pagans, centuries earlier.
– As far as any generic claims of common heritage of western civilisation go, and those claims only go for want of better (there being no direct heirs), what better place to put the items than in a museum furthering that common heritage? Are the British somehow less heirs of that than are the Graeculi? Particularly considering how much safer the items were in that museum(those not taken have suffered horribly from war, corrosion, and what not). And, of course, the very word “museum” proclaims that furthering that common heritage.
Now, none of that conveys title to the British Museum, but adverse possession in the years since does – adverse, in that no better claimant came forward. Just as today’s Greeks feel an understandable connection to these items, as they do to the Lions of St. Mark’s, so too do today’s British – and as today’s Venetians do to the Lions of St. Mark’s. They are as intertwined with the histories of each place as of the other.
The Solomonic solution would be to sand blast the items to the condition of those not taken if any effort to transfer them were ever made. But I expect the Sir Humphreys will loudly assert ownership while underhandedly arranging a loan in name only with no means of foreclosing, just as they have with foundational documents that ought to have remained in British archives. That would satisfy none but the Sir Humphreys.
Continue reading →