Harvard’s Pinker often writes about the shifting moralization and “amoralization” of issues. Smoking went from a social activity with a personal health risk to a moral issue of second-hand smoke. Food became an ethical minefield, “with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has travelled from farm to plate.” Meantime, once-loaded issues like divorce, children outside marriage, homosexuality and marijuana use have largely shaken off the bonds of immorality.
As for contraception, it’s made a conversion from sinner to saint. A recent report by the London School of Economics, titled “Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost,” concludes that money invested in family planning not only helps women in the Third World, but every unborn child lessens the eventual production of greenhouse gases.
Perhaps Canadians, with our low birth rate, already knew that. We’re a pragmatic bunch—as moral as possible, under the circumstances.
Angus Reid Strategies conducted online interviews with a representative sample of 1,003 Canadian adults on Oct. 7 and Oct. 8, 2009. The margin of error for the complete sample is 3.1 per cent.
