Recently I saw an interview with the Dali Lama where is says that President Trump has ‘lack of moral principle’.
Definition of Ethical: “For someone who is honest and follows good moral standards, use the adjective ethical. … Ethical comes from the Greek ethos “moral character” and describes a person or behaviour as right in the moral sense – truthful, fair, and honest.”
I don’t want to get into the politics or character of Donald Trump, but it brought another issue, one that’s been bothering me for a very long time, to my mind.
So for example, many “moral” nations, mostly Europeans, criticize Israel as not being Ethical, or MORAL, by not letting the Palestinians return to their homes which the Jews have taken from them during the 1948 war of independence…
Now let’s look at another event: The Second World War and specifically the expulsion and murder of six million European Jews. Many, if not most owned properties somewhere in that ethical Europe. All those properties were taken over by the eager ethical people of Europe.
Survivors that managed to come alive from the murderous hell and returned to their homes ( my father was one of those) were confronted by the new occupants and told to “get lost” or be killed… You would be hard pressed to find somebody who actually got their home back…
The church, which is supposed to be the pinnacle of ethics and morals looked the other way.
Today, I am quite confident that the sons and grand sons who still live in those homes taken over by their elders don’t feel their parents did anything un-ethical, otherwise they would be doing something to correct it, wouldn’t they?
But yet the same European people are involved almost in every group that condemns Israel for not letting the Palestinian “refugees”, and keep in mind it is mostly the grand children of those refugees, to came back and have their homes…
Hence my conclusion that the words “ethics” and “morals” are very much like the word “moment“:
Nobody knows how long a moment is, but you will get very different answer from the guy who is on the toilet than from the one waiting to get in with diarrhea…