Dave, how can you say that, when it FEELS oh so right?

The Bible labels interest as usury, sinful income. I’ve read Presidents of the Church denouncing investment income because its not money earned “by the sweat of our brow.” Funny how church types always decry private profts and government taxation while extolling (surprise!) the virtues and blessings of charitable contributions to churches.

Rather than using selective morality to selectively label as sinful someone else’s income (never our own, of course), I think we’re better off to recognize all legally earned income as morally okay; not perfect, but okay. God is not a farmer and there is nothing morally superior about being a farmer or teacher or LDS bureaucrat to earn one’s income. If one has moral sensibilities, apply them to one’s own personal choice of vocation and let God take care of those corporate sinners in the next life. No doubt hell will be full of corporations.

Fundamental differences in the religions? Or (more likely) if/when the LDS Church gets to be that big we’ll run into the exact same situation…

There is a reason why stigmas accompany certain businesses and why many of those businesses, at one time or another, operated on the black-market–we have long recognized them as morally problematic. So trying to draw distinctions between businesses and levels of involvement doesn’t strike me as a useless exercise.

When thinking about this question Jeff benefits from not being a member of the church and so he is freer to level hypocrisy argument and say that it is an aesthetic choice rather than a moral choice. I don’t buy the idea that choosing to live with one evil while excising another is only a matter of aesthetics. On the contrary, it seems to me that choosing between two evils is at the heart of many moral decisions–these are the truly hard ones. Of course it may not be necessary to choose either evil and calling choosing the lesser evil a moral decision runs the risk of becoming a self-important justification, but that is not always the case. And it doesn’t mean that the choice will always be only an aesthetic one. The problem for Jeff, I think, is that he sees neither booze nor porn as an evil and so tends to believe that Mormons who call both evil treat them inconsistently are only being hypocritical. I have always liked and found inspiration in the two or three lines in The Brothers Karamazov where Father Zosima encourages Fyodor to close his bars and then, seemingly recognizing human weakness, tells him that if he can’t close them all, to close two or three.

Loren makes the very good point that it is difficult to find the right place to draw the line, but that it will be drawn for us if we don’t draw it ourselves. Of course one could always say that it is a personal choice and an individual should decide for herself. Certainly. But developing a general framework helps me think more clearly about business decisions. Of course the church itself provides a barebones structure–but the point of this thread has been to see how it can be applied to corporate work in anything other than an ad hoc manner. It seems that most of us see the corporation as an effective buffer between us and sin businesses and it seems like there are some good reasons for this–most obviously we are at least one level removed from the dirty work. We object even less to owning mutual funds that have casino stocks because we are several levels removed. This makes sense at a practical level because in our interconnected world it would be impossible not to be connected to sin businesses in some way. Presumably the closer we get to the actual businesses, the more control we can exert over the business and the greater our responsibility for what happens in tha

Now I’ve never lived in Nevada–maybe someone is going to chime in with a “my sister can’t get a temple recommend because she’s a blackjack dealer” story. I hope not.

The relevant question, it seems to me, is why draw a “moral” line at p0rn, but not somewhere else. Marriott, after all, doesn’t make sure that it’s guests are married. It lets rooms to premarital, adulterous, and gay couples. It also serves
alcohol. Why facilitate these acts but not watching p0rn? In other words, as between illicit sex and booze and being “moral,” Marriott picks illicit sex and booze. Why then would Marriott care about p0rn?

People like Mat who advocate the porn prohibition are making an aesthetic choice, not a moral one. As long as Marriott can bury its head in the sand and pretend that it’s not supplying a venue for, for example, gay sex, it will rent rooms for that purpose (Marriott could, after all, make its guests sign affidavits stating that they won’t have illicit relations). But when Marriott can’t pretend that it’s not complicit in immoral behavior, as when it sells p0rn, then it’s supposed to make an ostentatious show of “doing the right thing.” This is a self-serving rule, and consequently isn’t “moral” in any meaningful sense.

In any event, as in the case of illicit sex and booze, I think Marriott’s just following its wallet. Losses from not selling p0rn will probably be balanced out by gains in goodwill and publicity among those who think such stances are admirable.