I'm at the Center of the Universe!

Okay, boys and girls, it’s pop-quiz time! I’ve inadvertently found myself at the epicenter of the OJ media madness (it’s happening right across the street, but, alas, I have no window) and that makes me think that this is the perfect situation for an exercise in practical legality, ethicality, and morality. The legal aspects are the most obvious, and it’s true that a court of law will have the final say about Simpson’s guilt or innocence, so we don’t have to strain our mental agility on those.

The ethical implications of this whole mess get a little stickier. I reiterate my opinion that ethics are composed of written and unwritten social agreements, whereas I understand the law to be exclusively written. This creates an overlap with which most of us are familiar. If something is legal, does that make it ethical? If something is illegal, does that necessarily make it unethical? Secular humanists, among others, have paid a price for entertaining the notion of situational ethics that are subject to relativism rather than absolutism.

The absolutism certainly becomes more pronounced in any discussion of morality. If there is agreement that morals are composed of covenants/agreements between Creator and creature, then it can be understood how easily one can fall into the trap of knowing with absolute certainty the mind of God. However, when morality is abstracted into an emphasis upon the good of the whole rather than just the individual such absolutism begins to dissolve.

So, leaving the law to the lawyers and courts, your assignment is to compare and contrast the ethical and moral ramifications of the Simpson conundrum. And, since it is not our purpose to pass judgment on anyone, the context of this mental puzzle must be what this situation says about us. What are the ethics and morals of a people that could have their attention drawn from the atrocities of the nation’s occupation of Iraq to a sensationalistic celebrity circus? I offer Paul Tillich’s notion of sin being anything that interferes or prevents us from knowing God’s love as the closing clue.