It's All One Big Honor System

There are plenty of things some people do which deeply worry me. One of the big ones, which I've thankfully never personally encountered thus far but have heard of from others, are religious people who believe that atheists are immoral because they have no higher power to guide them. It's not an uncommon viewpoint; a search for "atheists immoral" on Google comes back with six and a half million hits. For some people, the idea is that these rules on living a good, just, and moral life were passed down from on high to the believers, and that someone who has rejected the notion of a higher power likewise rejects the morality ascribed to that power.

It's a hollow opinion, especially since it completely ignores the existence of secular ethics - the idea that someone can do the right thing because it's the right thing, not because a messenger of some deity told the people to do this thing and that it is good, and also that if you don't do it you'll be punished for eternity in the afterlife.

The reason it worries me is because of what's implicit in that argument. After all, people don't tend to agree with things that they know are bullshit, right? When I hear of a person making that sort of statement, I see a person who honestly believes that faith and morality can't be decoupled. I can't help but conclude that if a person who held that kind of a view was somehow convinced that there was no god and no afterlife punishment for sins, they would act in exactly the manner they ascribe to atheists and live a thoroughly immoral life.

Now that I've laid that out, it's time to approach my actual point. Earlier this week, the story broke that TransLink, Metro Vancouver's regional transit provider, has no authority to enforce the payment of the $173 fine you'll be slapped with if you are caught riding on its transit system without the proper fare. For now, it's easy to ride the SkyTrain and the SeaBus without paying; they function on the honor system, much like GO Transit in Greater Toronto, and until those dozens of construction projects are finished there are no barriers to someone who wants to get on without paying. Fare inspections, which take the form of transit police officers inspecting tickets near the station platform, out of sight of the fare-paid area boundary, or boarding a train or bus in motion don't happen too often in my experience - even so, whenever the police come aboard, there's always at least one passenger who shuffles off with them at the next station.

Sure, they'll get a $173 ticket, but once they shuffle off there's nothing that obligates them to pay it, legally speaking. Despite what seems to be a popular belief, ICBC won't even prevent people from renewing their license or insurance if they have outstanding fines.

Faregates: coming soon to a SkyTrain station near you. Unless you don't live in Metro Vancouver, in which case they're pretty much all equally distant.

Nevertheless, ever since TransLink embarked on the faregate construction project, it's been taking flak over the cost. According to its own numbers, in 2010 the fare evasion rate was 4-6%, working out to $18 million per year in lost fares; meanwhile, the implementation cost for the faregates and the Compass system works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of $170 million. Given that criticism, I couldn't help but take this news a bit... conspiratorially. Especially this close to month end, it's certainly a convenient time.

Here's what I suspect: TransLink released this information to the media intentionally, making people aware that this loophole existed, to help determine the degree to which fare evasion might rise once people know they won't be punished for it after getting off the train. I've already encountered people celebrating the "honor system." If fare evasion goes up significantly for April 2012 in comparison to April 2011 or, more tellingly, if pass sales experience a drop, it'll be all the more ammunition for why the faregates and smartcards are necessary.

But it all comes back to that question of ethics and internal morality, I think. The question of who you are in the dark, when no one except yourself can pass judgement on your own actions, is something that people have been wrestling with for millennia. For many people, it's no doubt profoundly disturbing to consider the possibility that such a deep darkness really does exist. We all react to it in our own way.

Still, I can't help but feel there are a considerable chunk of people in Metro Vancouver now who aren't buying passes anymore, because they know there's no punishment for their transit sin. People who are taking up space without paying for the privilege of doing so, who aren't doing their share to help the system deal with the load.

Honest morality, whether it deals with social ethics or two-zone tickets, has to first come from within. If something that's imposed from above abruptly disappears, well... it's not necessarily the sort of world I'd want to live in.

The Trouble With TransCanada

Think of it as the circulatory system of the Alberta tar sands. The Keystone Pipeline System, which presently connects the petroleum town of Hardisty, Alberta with refineries in Illinois, is one of the main ways by which all that synthetic crude oil is shipped out of Snow Texas. It's been in the news recently thanks to dickering over the Keystone XL. This extension of the pipeline, in the works for the last few years, would run south to the United States Gulf Coast, where the oil could be refined and loaded directly onto tankers - much like how the Canadian government wants to ram the Northern Gateway Pipeline through the British Columbia upcountry, to be loaded onto tankers in Kitimat for shipment to China. The difference between the two is that since Keystone XL passes through the United States, it's the United States government that decides whether or not to let it pass.

After what seemed like an eternity of back and forth, with people in town halls speaking out for it or against it, environmentalists trying to raise the word against and the oil industry attempting to stack the debate in its favor with things like the "ethical oil" claim, the State Department yesterday denied TransCanada the necessary Presidential Permit to build the Keystone XL. Among its opponents, cheers and celebration all around.

TransCanada, of course, was ready for this contingency, and didn't waste much time in shooting back - though in this case "shooting back" takes the form doing pretty much the same thing they already did, since they're just re-applying for the permit. What really got me about this is the memetic angle they're using in their pursuit of the Keystone - though, to be honest, it's not really surprising in light of the "ethical oil" angle. In fact, according to them the Keystone XL is the democratic choice, because otherwise American oil will come from "countries who do not share democratic values Canadians and Americans are privileged to have."

TransCanada CEO Russ Girling put it bluntly, saying that "the U.S. will continue to import millions of barrels of conflict oil from the Middle East and Venezuela" without the pipeline - wait, WHAT? Did he seriously just utter the words "conflict oil" with what was presumably a straight face? I know exactly what he's trying to do here, draw a line connecting oil from the Mideast and Venezuela - in other words, current American rivals - with the conflict diamonds of Africa, mined in war zones and sold to finance wars or revolutions or insurgencies.

I found the sheer cheek in that statement to be despicable - how dare he? Sure, Saudi Arabia isn't exactly a hotbed of democracy and Hugo Chavez has spent the last thirteen years steering Venezuela onto a course that doesn't simply parallel the United States. Neither country is currently involved in a war or experiencing an armed insurrection. They just aren't assured providers, the way Canada is. Venezuela and Saudi Arabia can always take their balls and go home. Canada, thanks to the decisions of the last twenty-five years, lacks that option. Canada is trapped in an American orbit with insufficient delta-v to achieve escape velocity.

I wouldn't be as irritated about this, I suspect, if it wasn't so transparent on TransCanada's part. A society-wide push for "ethical products" would, if done correctly, do a lot of good for worker's conditions and the health of the North American economy; I mean, is it even possible anymore to buy something that wasn't made in some Pearl River Delta factory sweatshop, the sort of place where workers are threatening suicide over the conditions? For some things, like consumer electronics, it pretty much is impossible. Focusing just on "ethical oil" is a particularly narrow view, where "ethical" does not mean "the right thing to do" so much as it means "the right thing to do for those with an economic stake in the tar sands." The way I see it, an honest appraisal of ethical oil would include strong actions to minimize the use of it and switch over to other sources of fuel, because isn't it ethical to minimize the environmental impact we're going to leave our successors? Isn't it ethical to ensure that future generations have access to the same resource we did, so that they can get good things out of it as well?

Unfortunately, that kind of thinking is vastly out of step with the modern world, "ethics" and all.

Brother, Could You Spare a Cite

If there's one question that people have been struggling to answer conclusively ever since it was asked for the very first time, it's this: "how should we live?" Through the ages, thousands of religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines have been tested to destruction as we've searched for an answer. Personally I think it's a question that will never be answered, at least not to the satisfaction of everyone; life is too big, too unique, to complex to be boiled down into a simple answer. The best we can do is find an answer that works for ourselves while at the same time fitting into society. That's the crux of it, really - the question would be better posed as "how should we live with each other?" Or possibly "without killing each other?"

Yesterday, the Brisbane Times - of Australia, for all you geography majors - reported on the latest noises issuing from the Liberal National Party of Queensland, a state-level party that is described by Wikipedia as being a party that combines "conservative liberal" and "liberal conservative" ideologies, somehow. They seem to be backing the continued prominence of religious instruction in government schools as a means for ethical education of students, in exclusion to secular ethics classes of the sort that started being rolled out in New South Wales' education system recently so that non-religious students could have an option aside from opting out and "studying" in the library.

Why? Because the party, according to its education spokesman Bruce Flegg, "believe[s] that the overwhelming majority of Queenslanders want their children brought up with a Judeo-Christian grounding in religious education. In many cases this applies to people who themselves may not be particularly religious. I am sure this also applies to the increasing number of Queenslanders who identify themselves as Islamic."

There isn't a [CITATION NEEDED] big enough.

The stained glass window represents religion.

Those are pretty big concepts - "believes," "I am sure," and likely more that aren't quoted in that snippet from the Times - and full of truthiness. There's no evidence brought up to support the case for why the LNP has reason to believe this, there are no studies or surveys or quotes; there's just what the party claims to know from the gut. It's the sort of intellectual viewpoint I'd expect from the Conservatives up here, or the Republicans in the States... more and more, it seems like right-wing parties across the Anglosphere are working out of the same playbook.

Now, I'll admit that Flegg's stance isn't totally out to lunch - there are people who send their kids to religious schools without being really religious themselves in order to get what they perceive to be a moral grounding. I know because I went to high school with one such dude, who had gone through Ontario's Catholic elementary school system for that reason... though I do only know one such dude. Ultimately, it's a choice that should come down to the family, and not to the government.

But it should also be a choice. The availability of secular ethics courses does not diminish religious ethics courses; only in the minds of people who can only be secure when they have an ideological monopoly is that so. To claim that secular instruction is unnecessary because you believe without evidence that people are sufficiently satisfied with it to not need an alternative is not only doing a disservice as a political party - it's intellectually dishonest.

After all, religion is not the only way to ethics, not the only possible path to answering that age-old question. I know because you won't find my footprints on that road.

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Laundry

Ten years ago, universities were at last taking an interest in Barrie Central Collegiate's class of 2001. I remember that time well - it was stressful, trying to figure out where to go, weighing the advantages of one university against another, and hoping that the one you wanted wouldn't reject you. Nevertheless, the fact was that for an OAC student at that time, if you had the means there was one university that would absolutely take you: Carleton University in Ottawa. I clearly recall the time in Writer's Craft class where Expressposted application packages from Carleton arrived for everyone in the class, no questions asked. I don't know if it's changed in the last decade, but back then the joke was that the only thing you needed to attend Carleton was a pulse... and even that might have been negotiable.

It's been years since I thought about Carleton - the only reason I am now is because of an article on CBC News which demonstrates that a sense of ethics is another thing you don't necessarily need to go to Carleton. But I'll admit that's a cheap shot, though - not to mention unfair. This sort of thing could have happened anywhere.

Money can be exchanged for goods and services!

This sort of thing was the abuse of a computer glitch in the dorm's laundry - as a result, one particular machine would process payment for a load without actually deducting it from the student's card, and the system was set up in such a way that students exploiting this glitch could then use any machine for free. To say that it caught on is understating the situation a bit; before this loophole was noticed, students ran up $28,000 in free laundry charges - charges that the university is now charging back to them.

The CBC News story reports that some students "are furious with the university's decision to nail them with an unforeseen fee." The way I see it, they should be furious with themselves, their teachers, or their parents for not instilling them with ethics or an awareness of what "free" is. All too often, people don't stop to consider that free is just another way of saying "someone else paid for this."

The story also provides a student quote that nearly bowled me over from the sheer entitlement of it - "As a student you just gotta kind of go for the cheapest route. And if that comes down to kind of screwing the laundry machine for free laundry machine services … then of course why wouldn't you, right?"

Because it's wrong. Because it's unethical. Because, if you really need some reason that can be denominated in dollars and cents, the university will be forced to jack up its tuition fees to cover the money it loses from students abusing the system - or it would have had to, had it not put the responsibility back on those who created it in the first place.

It's true that people steal casually - because they don't bother to worry their pretty little heads about what they're doing, or they chase themselves around in circles justifying it. Back when I was in university I worked as a gas station attendant for some extra bucks, and there were times where people would glug down $5 or $10 or $15 worth of gasoline and then drive off before I could get their license plate number down. Maybe they really were desperate - or maybe they just didn't care, or told themselves they were stealing from some big, faceless corporation - which, as The Simpsons tells us, makes it okay. But that money came out of my paycheck, one that was never very big to begin with.

Maybe we need more of an emphasis on basic ethics in education. It's sad that this sort of thing doesn't seem to be emphasized in many families, and we can see the results now - how much of the Wall Street antics that led up to the economic crash would you quantify as ethical?

TANSTAAFL!