This disjunction* made it difficult to concentrate on whatever it was the actual articles were about; hence my superficial commentary.

So: are we in a moral wasteland? Are we less ethical creatures than in the past? Are the moral positions of our youth less finely judged or more generally wrong? Are people being lead astray by social factors or a crusading government? Do we use too many overblown sensationalist headlines for a mainstream newspaper?

In the name of inconsistency I won’t offer an answer, but I will provide some discussion material.

The idea of morality is the idea of an objective standard that says some things shouldn’t be done and, probably, that some things should. Intellectually, I don’t actually see how such a standard can exist, but that doesn’t mean that myself or society could go on if we acted on that assumption.

What that standard says about particulars is the stuff of moral debate.

We can, hopefully, have an ethical argument without accusing our opponents of being evil or amoral. Honestly, my grip on moral truth is as tenuous as my neighbour’s.

To claim that we are less moral these days, as a bunch of individuals, does sound a bit like the regular complaints about student’s spelling and the collapse of social institutions that have had people thinking that the end is nigh since the early Roman empire.

How would we test this? The big problem isn’t people whose moral opinions are wrong, but people who lack practise in the basic moral faculties, like empathy, and don’t have any moral opinions to speak of. Such people are strongly represented in the prison population.

Hearing sound bites of people on offender rehabilitation programmes, one can assume that they’re repeating jargon about facing up to what they’ve done and understanding an taking responsibility. Even if that were all, understanding these ideas well enough to talk coherently about them is progress.

The fact that basic morality can be taught is part of the reason offender rehabilitation programmes work as well as they do. And they do: next time a politician say they don’t work ask if he/she/it is also going to lobby against the less effective use of aspirin to prevent heart attacks.

What doesn’t work, in preventing reoffending, is punishment. Psychology knows that it’s a lousy way to train people, and this is especially true when the punishment is being locked up in a brutalising environment with a lot of psychos. Not that arguing morality from pragmatism is always a good idea, but it often works well, especially if you take long-term consequences into account.

Anyway, if we were overspending our moral capital we might see it in the crime statistics, checking back a few year to allow for when the perpetrator was raised rather than when they broke the law. As the 2001 Crime in New Zealand report has it:

The recorded offence rate rose steadily from 55 per 1,000 population in 1970 to an all-time peak of 132 per 1,000 population in 1992. This rise may be due to a real change in the volume of crime in New Zealand, to changes in recording practises, or to a combination of the two. The offence rate remained fairly steady between 1992 and 1996, before decreasing to 111 per 1,000 population in 2000. However, it remained higher than it was at any stage prior to 1984.

As for the nature of the human ethical sense:

While grabbing research material off the Holocaust shelves of the Lower Hutt public library I picked up Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, also recognised by its subtitle A Report on the Banality of Evil. I've since found the time to read it.

Although basically a report of Eichmann's trial, it is also a deep and thoughtful case study. Which made it one of the touchstones of debate over at least one of the big questions raised by the Holocaust: how could people do this?

The other names to drop in this context are the Milgram Obedience to Authority experiment and the Stanford prison experiment. Between them they suggest that the human moral compass basically orientates to what everyone else is doing, or what everyone else expects, right now.

The most shining examples of resistance to the final solution were entire countries, and definitely not on the allied side. Denmark, Bulgaria and Italy simply didn't take much action against the Jews. One or two others drew the line when they realised what was happening to the deportees. Where the Nazis didn't have the support of the population they had to abandon their efforts.

It's notable that in Denmark and Bulgaria the local German officials also worked to thwart the deportation of the Jews. They had, as it were, adapted to the moral climate.

That's David Irving the alleged historian, by the way, not David Irving the man from Hubbards Foods.

And while there’s a lull in proceedings I’d like to mention that Dr Don Brash helped set up the Freedom Foundation, a group of New Zealand business types supporting Amnesty International (its other patron is the deputy chairman of Transpower). Recently in question time this same Don Brash was taunting the Government for not immediately taking up his offer to help remove prisoners’ entitlement to compensation for human rights abuses.

Which juxtaposition reminds me of another little-known fact. According to my Superior Person’s Second Book of Words (a thoughful Chrismas gift from a family member), ‘brash’ is a euphemism for the process of vomiting.

Stephen Franks’ solution, on the other hand, is to take away everybody’s entitlement to be compensation for human rights abuses. Further proof that ACT will rarely let their campionship of the rights of the individual get in the way of their conservative social policy.

I suppose in Brash’s case it would have helped if the way he asks his questions was less inherently annoying. I’m never quite sure whether he’s merely being pedantically accurate in he phrasing and pronunciation or if he’s also blatantly sneering at the Government benches as well. Of course it doesn’t help that I generally take issue with the content, too.

If he showed up to Parliament more often it might be enough to stop me listening to National Radio in the evenings.

The clauses lumber into place like puntillious hippopotami, each punctuation mark observed by a pause. It’s as if he wants everybody to interject.

I haven’t had a chance to try this out, but the listening might be less annoying if one thinks of it as perfomance poetry:

to the prime minister:
is she satisfied with the performance
of her acting minister of justice
who yesterday
rejected a national party offer
to facilitate urgent legislation
removing the entitlement of prisoners
to compensation from the department of corrections,
in light of news reports that
eighteen
new compensation claims
have now been lodged;
if so,
why?

Selah.

Well, technically it was an email, and by 'letter to the editor' I mean one intended for publication - I have corresponded with the editor in question in the past. Not that I'm trying to make excuses.

I've mentally composed any number previously, including a good few pointed missives for Morning Report or Nine to Noon, but what finally had me writing down and sending was a news article in Critic about trees.

A couple of them died in one of the more paved parts of campus. This reinforced my worry (dating back to when I was actually in Dunedin) that sealing trees' roots away from the air with paving or burying them under more than a foot of clay (in the course of raising the lawn) will not be good for them.

Because it was Critic, I also included the inference (rather unhelpful as it turned out) that this constituted a deliberate tree-killing programme.

The publication of my letter (scroll down to "Tree murdering") made a rather disappointing follow-up to my thoughtful monograph on holocaust denial the previous week. It's not that I retract the letter's general point (I did call a walnut tree a chestnut, but I never claimed to be an expert). It's just kind of embarrassing to see something I wrote printed in a space mostly associated with various flavours of militant campaigner, flake, and unfunny attention seeker.

I was pleased when I found that blogging had put me in touch with my inner opinionated person, but if I'd understood the risks I might never have started.

I had the honour of being replied to by the University's Property Services Director. His previous appearances of the Critic letters page had been mostly to argue against people who thought the proposal to build a new bridge across the Leith was a waste of money. When the new Vice-Chancellor came in the bridge project was immediately scrapped. So I feel somewhat vindicated by the way he didn't agree with me.

He made a convincing case that the University doesn't hate trees. He also said the ones I'm most alarmed for are expected to be fine. Though it's still not clear to me why. It think that feeling welling up from my bowels is the urge to counter-reply. Barry, old pro that he is, has already deflected this impulse by including the name and phone number of the University Grounds Officer. He knows that there's nothing that a letter-to-the-editor writer fears more than direct interaction with a live human being.

And fortunately, I've been published in more prestigious (though possibly less read) parts of the magazine before, so I don't feel the need to consolidate any new-found fame by writing more letters.

Might be a short feature article in it though.

And of course, all of this paving (and plenty of building) has been at the expense of grassed area. Don't even get me started on that.

As I recall, when Judge Young found that prisoners had been kept in conditions that violated their human rights (specifically, kept in a special, nasty solitary confinement for months on end), it was generally recognised that this was a bad thing.

There are are of course plenty of people who are disappointed when they discover that prisoners' human rights aren't routinely violated, but I'll assume we're in agreement that when someone's sentenced to jail time, the punishment is no more than that enforced deprivation of liberty. Prisons in themselves are horrible enough as a punishment, and more than brutalising enough to get in the way of rehabilitation.

Anyway, the reaction was different when it became know that these people were to receive compensation. At up to $55 000, about $2500 a month, which isn't that exorbitant considering the violation in question was going on continuously, and is peanuts compared to what the lawyers cost.

On the radio, Phil Goff was genuinely outraged. In fact, it's the most emotion I've ever observed in a politician. He argued that the people responsible for the breach should be punished (he didn't respond to the prisoners' lawyer's claims that they had been no disciplinary action and that the methods decried in the judgment were still being used) but that there prisoners shouldn't receive compensation. And I can see it sucks that these people are to be compensated (at up to $55 000) while their victims, or the families which survive their victims, have received nothing.

The painful truth is that criminal acts are treated as offenses against public order and are prosecuted by the Crown, not the victims. And the response is to punish the perpetrator, ultimately by the combined expedient of depriving them of their freedom and isolating them from society (though this does have the unfortunate effect of locking them all up with each other).

You may get an inkling here as to why victims are so rarely satisfied by the court process.

On the other hand, when the state violates somebody's human rights, this is typically dealt with through a civil process, with the victim taking a complaint. If real harm was done to them they can expect restitution, inevitably in the form of money.

For a population whose juries (as I've noted before) can't seem to grasp the legal definition of murder, this distinction may be annoyingly fine (if so, we could always balance things by locking up the people responsible for the "Behaviour Management Regime"). But wait, there's still more.

There's no significant legal (or, for administrative purposes, moral) connection between the crimes these people committed and this compensation. As punishment for their crimes, they serve prison time. End of story. Except that, in the course of prison discipline, they were treated in a way which, according to the court, breached both the Penal Institutions Act and the Bill of Rights - treated in a way which New Zealand law says no human being should be treated.

What the objections to compensation boil down to is that, having committed a serious crime, people don't deserve to be compensated for abuses of their human rights. Or don't deserve the human rights, and 'having done their time' be damned. Which tallies nicely with the mood against convicted criminals doing things like studying or boxing or living somewhere. Also with the political race to see who can be tougest on crime. But, in much the same way that freedom of speech is patently unfree if you can't offend people, human rights are only human rights if they apply to everybody.

I'll add that this approach has also given New Zealand the second highest rate of imprisonment in the western world, despite having one of the lowest crime rates. It doesn't help with that thing called 'rehabilitation' either.

Goff's proposed solution, to make a law passing a bunch of any compensation which prisoners receive to their victims, is a blatant instance of legislating over single cases. Which is known to be a stupid way to make law. In this case it's also a deliberate undermining of the Bill of Rights.

He also intends to appeal.

I had cause to call the IRD that morning, but I didn't have the courage to ask if they'd already had people demanding to know why the pay taxes if the money's going to criminals. Personally, I object to the appeal so I guess we're even.

I can't see the crown substantially improving its position here. They should buy me one of the new iMacs, which would be a more beneficial use of the taxpayers' money (even allowing that I've just bought a new eMac) and about two hundred times cheaper.

The issue in law is between the State and the abused prisoners, with, admittedly, humanity on the sidelines. If Phil Goff has a problem with the fact that it ended in compensation (and an even more expensive lawyerfest), he and Paul Swain should see to it that we treat our prisoners properly.

After Goff, there was an interview with the man who was supposed to be running the Stanfordprison experiment but turned into a psycho prison warden. You may have seen this experiment fictionalised in the film Das Experiment. He talked particularly about Abu Ghraib, and lamented that nobody anywhere had implimented what was needed to prevent abuse of prisoners. Not just rules, but real independent monitoring.

That said, and I know it's a lot to ask, I wish we could have had happy opposition to moral conservatism.

It did after all, allow the Dominion Post to ask "Are Liberals Fascists?" in big letters on the front page of their Saturday magazine section (not a very helpful question, a theoretically possibility on the political compass). The accompanying picture shows a shaven-headed, tatooed - if I may be permitted to guess - dyke shouting at a row of wary faces (mostly brown) in black shirts. I presume the photo was chosen because it looks vaguely like she's doing a Nazi salute with the wrong arm (she's actually pointing).

Under the headline was a lot of useful discussion on the idea of hate speech legislation. Which was preceeded by a discussion of the counter-protest to the Destiny march which I found annoyingly smug.

I can't help suspecting that David McLoughlin has never been bullied - certainly he's got no grasp of subtext. I would submit that just because one side was angry and abusive doesn't mean they were doing all the intimidating. He doesn't even pretend to understand what the gay community found so alarming in Destiny's platform (I can't be bothered explaining, David, but this may help a little). "In contrast" to the accusations of hate-ridden fascism from the left corner, one of the Destiny banners he quotes is "We prefer God's laws". I don't know about you, but that strikes fear into my heart.

We do need to recognise that this was a meeting of two groups who, deep down, don't respect the other's right to exist. And this is not a good thing. But the way Mr McLouglin allocated the intolerance made me want to commit a hate crime against him.

At least he didn't rub in the fact that liberals are in the unaccustomed position of being implacably opposed to a large-scale Maori movement.

This may be symptomatic of a wider problem.

My impression is that, as a group, Maori are more morally conservative than Pakeha. And you only need to look at the Broadcasting Standards Authority's TV-good-taste-and-decency research to find that Pacific Islanders and significantly more conservative than the population overall.

It's been noted, particularly in response to Don Brash, that in order to support our aging baby boomers we urgently need to bring the expanding Maori and Pacific Islands populations on board, both in terms of skills and education so they can contribute to the economy, and in terms of political and social processes.

Put it all together and we might be facing a plateau - I don't wish to entertain thoughts of a reversal - in the moral liberalisation of New Zealand.

And a future containing hordes of progressive types writing to newspapers venting their frustration about "them damn Māori".