FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Put your thinking caps on folks. A Shot in the Dark is asking some questions.

For the purposes of argument:

Pharmacists have a legal duty to fill doctors' prescriptions (and, their employers might add, to not turn away legal business). Their own moral qualms about the prescriptions have no place in the equation. Right?

OK. So - corporate officers have a legal, fiduciary duty to their shareholders. Yet corporations sometimes skirt or pummel the law. Many of the same people who castigate pharmacists for resisting a legal duty on moral grounds are the ones who lionize corporate whistleblowers whose ethics harm the shareholders they are legally bound to protect.

Perhaps a better example: soldiers have a legal duty to fulfill the terms of their enlistment contract. Yet as we've seen in the news this past year, some servicepeople, after joining the military with full awareness of what militaries do (and, often, after taking their full share of pay and benefits from their services), develop conscientious objections about serving. Some desert - some of them directly to a welcoming media. Many of the people who castigate the pharmacist for standing up for his/her ethics are the same ones that hold up "conscientious" deserters as heroes.

If I were Atrios or Oliver Willis, I'd entitle this post "Why Do All Leftists Hate The Truth And Love Hypocrisy". I'll be a tad less inflammatory and simply ask; is it just me, or is there an inconsistency here? Does the "Conscience" and "Ethics" you're willing to hear out depend entirely on its politics?

Just curious. Discuss amongst yourselves."

Any comments? Anyone?