And the Ethicist Says: Walking Away from an Underwater Mortgage is Not Unethical

Image by Butte-Silver Bow Public Library via Flickr

You and your lender buy the house together. Your agreement with the lender is that if you do not want to continue paying the lender for the right to own the house outright someday -- and own whatever value it gains in the meantime -- you give your ownership rights in the house to the lender. That's the risk the lender undertook: that it might end up stuck with the house if you decided to exercise an option specifically recognized in the loan documents. Moreover, the lender should have more expertise in predicting future real estate values than the average home borrower.

Bottom line: It's just business. Walking away from a bank loan secured by collateral is not unethical.

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Arnie's Anti-Paparazzi Law in Toto

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God is Dead, and Santa Has a Suspicious Rash

From Al's Morning Meeting, a feature of PoynterOnline. Can't believe I missed it.

Al Tompkins Story ideas that you can localize and enterprise. Posted by 7:30 a.m. Mon-Fri.

Why It's Difficult for Journalists to Report on Santa Claus This week, the Chicago Tribune published an online column by health and fitness reporter Julie Deardorff, but decided not to publish it in the paper. The reason: The column was titled "Mommy, is there a Santa Claus?," and the paper didn't want little kids to read it. The column tells the struggle of Deardorff and her husband trying to come to terms with what they should tell their son about Santa. The online version of the story begins with a warning in red font. Read on to find out more about reporting on Santa. Read the Entire Post

What I Meant Yesterday

That there are no aesthetic absolutes. When it comes to art, our standards are culturally determined. They are aspects of our evolved human nature.

That does not necessarily mean there are no aesthetic universals -- by which statement I do not concede standards that somehow exist beyond humanity, independent of humanity or previous to humanity.

There are aesthetic universals just as there are moral and/or ethical universals, the latter having nothing to do with the existence of god or some other overlord. Human ethics are a survival adaptation. (I think. Others don't, obviously.) So are aesthetic universals, though I am not sure exactly what such universals might be other than that they would certainly be broadly drawn and neither granular nor authoritative.

All universals are irreducibly human and broad to the point of caricature and thus, in application, individual, particular, idiosyncratic.

This assumption must change the tone of a good deal of criticism, would it not?

Possibly apropos, I think of the last lines of the Yeats poem "The Circus Animals' Desertion," written near the end of his life as his powers failed.

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till.

Now that my ladder's gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.