Ethics

Ethics: On the Flag

Today's ethical discussion will treat the following video.



(The knife used, by the way, is a US Army-stamped Kabar. Among my small collection of knives, I have one just like it -- I have carried it faithfully around here until yesterday, when I shipped it home along with my footlocker.)

Some background: Once upon a time in Dawson County, Georgia, there was a local business that had a flag display by the highway. One of the several flags on display was an American flag; and one windy day, one of its stays broke and caused it to hang from only the bottom stay. I noticed this while driving past it on my way to work.

Three days later, it was still not repaired. So, I stopped, cut it the rest of the way down, and took it home to hang above my mantle in a place of honor.

Here is the ethical proposition to debate, then: the American flag is not something that can be owned by an individual, like a piece of property. It belongs to all of us, and its care to all of us. While an individual can buy a flag, if he does not take care of it properly -- or if he deliberately insults it -- any citizen is fully correct as a point of ethics to rescue it and restore it to the honor it is due.

Note that I do not say you are legally correct: the law is often unethical. I am interested in the philosophical truth of the matter, not the question of whether or not the law is correct as currently constructed. Laws can change, and if we find that the law is currently out of order with what is right, we can propose such a change.

What I want to know is your thought on the question of whether the philosophical propposition is right. If you think that ethics requires you to conform to the law (as I certainly do not; but that is a separate discussion), assume the law permitted you to do what this gentleman has done (as it yet may; you may find it hard to find a jury to convict him. If he is acquitted by a jury of his peers, that will mean that our system of law has ratified his action -- and the case will then serve as precedent for future cases. This is right and proper: our law has as part of its tradition the appeal to trial by combat, so that a man might prove his right after the fact. We no longer have the physical combat, but a man may yet prove his right before a jury of his peers. This is as much a part of our legal tradition as any other, and as valuable as any other part of it).

Assume that the law were clear on the point, if that is necessary to consider the philosophical question; or, if law and ethics are tied together for you, assume there is yet no law, and we are debating what the law should be.

Does the flag belong to us all, a symbol whose honor we are all concerned with defending? Or is it property, to be disposed of at the whim of the individual who paid for this particular bit of cloth?