There is often a significant difference between an ethical action and a legal action. Under current U.S. law, it’s obviously not illegal to raise the price of a drug that a child needs to stay alive from $40 to nearly $40,000, but is it ethical? I’d say it’s not, especially given the record level of profits reaped by the pharmaceutical industry. I’d even claim it’s a form of medical/health blackmail.

Is it legal for police to be stricter in enforcing the law on minorities than on Caucasians? So far, in most cases, it’s been held to be legal, but is it ethical?

Is it legal for a professional basketball team with a losing record not to play as hard near the end of the season… and possibly gain a higher draft pick? Again… so far it appears to be.

Is it legal for members of a given faith to prefer hiring those of the same faith? Or giving preference in promotions or bonuses? While discriminating by race is illegal, discrimination by faith appears to be alive and well, at least in certain parts of the U.S.

The list of such instances in the United States is long, and from what I can see, it’s getting longer. So why do I care?

Because ethics are the foundation of a healthy society. All one has to do is look around to see that. One of the reasons why tens of thousands of immigrants struggle out of certain central and Latin American countries is because of corruption and violence, and that corruption and violence are the result of totally unchecked greed on the part of governments, so-called law enforcement agencies, and even of large corporations and wealthy individuals.

One cannot instill law-abiding behavior through law enforcement. The police should represent and personify ethics through their actions, and I believe the majority do – but far from all of them. Even so, with a few exceptions, the best that law enforcement can do as an institution is to catch and remove law-breakers.

When legality is the rule, rather than ethics, more and more people do what they can, rather than what they should, and this leads to more and more corruption because no code of law can cover everything.

As a side note, this is a particular problem with corporations, because law has essentially held that a corporation’s greatest obligation is to maximize profits for the shareholders, within the confines of the law, regardless of the impact on people, on society, or on the environment. And when corporations use their revenues in support of political actions to whittle away legal protections on health and environment, in order to increase profits that are already at historical all-time highs, isn’t this greed a form of corruption?

When people see that the wealthy and the powerful can get away with anything, why should they be ethical and obey the law? And when the wealthy and powerful get more wealthy and more powerful, and it gets harder and harder for the poorer segments of society to make a living, there’s an ever-growing temptation for the non-wealthy to follow the example of the wealthy. And in countries like Honduras or Guatemala and a score of others, there’s too much violence for underpaid law enforcement to handle, partly if not largely, because the poor don’t have enough money to pay taxes, and the wealthy control the system and ensure that they’re not taxed enough to pay for public services.

Aren’t we already seeing those sorts of trends here?

Equally important… if your standard for ethical behavior is what the law allows you to get away with, you may consider yourself a law-abiding citizen, but are you really an ethical individual?

Some readers may recall that in 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the major U.S. publishers because, as a group, they refused to discount ebooks to Amazon, and that practice was considered a restraint of trade [it was far more complicated than that but since that’s not the point of this blog, that summary will do], and all of them eventually capitulated, even Apple, and paid fines of various amounts, none of which were insubstantial.

At that time, I wrote a letter to DOJ protesting the Department’s action because I felt that DOJ was in fact enabling not only a monopsony but a monopolistic practice where, in the end, after Amazon drove out or weakened a great number of brick and mortar bookstores and bookstore chains, Amazon would essentially replace them and prices would rise.

And what happened? The entire Borders chain went out of business; Barnes and Noble has been closing stores and cutting back on books in stock in the remaining stores; and a great number of independent bookstores closed, far more than have opened in a recent small resurgence of smaller bookstores. In addition, in effect, Amazon is also now effectively dictating some terms of sale to the publishers, which it is able to do because it’s the single largest sales outlet in the book business, and that, in effect, illustrates that Amazon is in point of fact the textbook case of a monopsony.

Even more interestingly, Amazon now has brick and mortar stores and is planning more, although the Amazon experiment with “pop-up kiosks” just ended with the closure of all 87 kiosks and an Amazon statement to the effect that Amazon would be concentrating on the more permanent Amazon bookstores.

As a result of all this, publishing margins dropped, and when those margins fell, publishers stopped publishing, or published less frequently mid-list authors or authors who had something new or different to offer but who did not sell as well. Even the incomes of many best-selling authors dropped, particularly those without an “outside” media presence.

Through its marketplace, Amazon is also doing much of the same thing to retailers across the entire United States, using lure of lower prices in the present to obtain a market position that enables it to eventually control the market and raise prices.

But that’s what Americans get for always focusing on price… even when it’s clear they’ll pay more in the long run, both in consumer prices and in jobs.

The latest edition of Scientific American printed a table from the Silencing Science Tracker, created and maintained by the Columbia University Law School, which listed almost 200 actions by the federal government to cut off scientific research and muzzle the reporting of scientific findings.

The federal agencies most involved in muzzling science were the U.S. EPA, the Department of Interior, the Department of Energy, HHS, and the Department of Agriculture. The forms such actions took include distorting or destroying data, restricting government scientists from attending conferences, closing down science advisory groups, removing scientists from such boards, and replacing scientists on science boards.

The vast majority of these actions appear to have been taken to suppress scientific information or expertise contrary to the political agenda of the White House, such as air pollution health data, occupational health exposures, climate change data, and pesticide exposure data. Apparently, when the White House cannot find studies or data to support its political agenda, it just restricts the dissemination of data, muzzles government scientists, or replaces scientists with industry lobbyists… and then ignores any scientist – or anyone else — who suggests that the administration’s actions were motivated for business or political ends.

Those who agree with the administration’s actions seem to believe that scientific findings can be changed by wishing otherwise, or ignored with no impact. In addition to that, it seems as though almost no one outside the science community seems to care about the need for impartial scientific findings, or that science is being muzzled or distorted… and that public health, education, and the environment are being sacrificed to political expediency on the largest scale in U.S. history.

There are many ways to classify knowledge, but, in the end, what each of us knows is based on one of two methods… and sometimes a combination of both.

The first way of knowing is through observation, including experimentation and evidence-based and peer-reviewed knowledge gathered by others.

The second is belief based on faith.

Now, admittedly, if I accept the conclusions or findings of a historian or a scientist, there is an element of faith in the individual and the field, and sometimes a great deal of faith is required, especially if it’s a field with which I have little experience. In science, however, virtually all theories and findings are scrutinized by a great number of other scientists, as are the facts employed, the various kinds of supporting evidence, and the methodologies.

So… when someone says, “I don’t believe in global warming,” or “in human caused global warming”, or “I think vaccines are more dangerous than the disease,” that belief isn’t based on knowledge, but on belief… and upon the conviction that they are right against the weight of evidence and expertise. Now, as science has advanced, some older theories have been modified, and a few even disproved, but in the last century, very few of the current theories have been disproved outright, although a number have been modified or extended as technology has made it possible to test theories and theorems to greater extents.

I’ll also make the point that, at least so far, in areas where science and religion have conflicted in the material world [I’m not discussing the metaphysical world], religious faith has an abysmal record as far as being accurate.

As an interesting aspect of the fact/belief conflict, a recent article in New Scientist pointed out that, after massive river floods in Europe over the past millennium, after two generations, people went back to building houses and structures in the areas that were bound to be flooded – generation after generation. The study concluded that once those people who had suffered the devastations died off it only took another generation or two before their descendants disregarded the historical accounts. The study authors also suggested that the same lack of first-hand experience might explain why there is now a growing number of anti-vaxxers in the U.S. – because these individuals have no personal experience of the ravages of “childhood diseases.

I’m old enough to remember those diseases. I had contemporaries who suffered through polio and who ended up wearing leg-braces and/or in wheelchairs. A young woman I knew was born without a lower arm because her mother had measles when pregnant. Someone in my family had severe vision damage from measles. My uncle died from long-term complications from strep. And even now, over 1,100 children have died from measles so far this year in Madagascar.

Yet we have people in the U.S. who absolutely know that measles is a comparatively harmless childhood disease.

So… why do some people insist on holding to beliefs that are proven inaccurate? Is it because those beliefs are so central to their religious faith or their self-image that they cannot accept something that goes against facts and evidence? Or because they cannot believe something that goes against those beliefs unless or until they personally experience something drastic that changes those beliefs? Or because changing or adjusting their beliefs will alienate them from their faith or “tribal affiliation”? Or because they just have to be “right”?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the local university is transitioning to a trimester system so that students can theoretically obtain their bachelor’s degree in three years. This is a bit of a misnomer, because there are certain degrees where that’s likely to be impossible, given the technical content and other requirements, and the university is soft-pedalling those possibilities for the moment.

One of the other aspects of this “degree speed up” that bothers me, and more than a few in the higher education community, is that the push for getting degrees faster represents the commodification of higher education and the fact that the emphasis is getting to be more and more upon the degree as a credential. In turn, these forces represent a growing mindset that having that degree is a guarantee of a better job and higher income.

While statistics show that this correlation was true in the past, there’s an old saying that correlation is not causation.

The fact is that higher education represents an opportunity for economic and personal improvement, but even in the past it was not an absolute guarantee of either, or necessarily of economic success. Today, and in the years to come, with the growing glut of college degrees among the younger generation, blanket economic opportunity for degree holders is certainly not guaranteed. Some studies indicate that, today, there are twice as many college graduates each year as there are jobs for them that require a college degree. After WW II, by comparison, only about ten percent of high school graduates received a degree, while now seventy percent of all high school graduates go to college, and four in ten Americans have at least an undergraduate degree.

The one guarantee that does exist is that those Americans without either higher education or specialized technical or trade training will be largely frozen out of decent-paying occupations, but with the growing number of college graduates, the increase in computerization and automation of many former white collar jobs, the number of higher paying jobs is not growing nearly as fast as the number of graduates seeking those jobs.

And that means that a college education isn’t nearly the guarantee of economic and professional success it once was, and far less of a guarantee than people now believe. It’s more like a high-priced gamble where the odds are only slightly in favor of the degree holder.