Article September 28, 1987 Issue

Second Thought

Looking again at news and commentary

Newsweek

From Newsweek, July 28, 1986

"There has been an awful lot of talk about sin, crime, and plain old antisocial behavior ... drugs and pornography at home, terror and brutality abroad. ... What strikes me is our curiously deficient, not to say defective, way of talking about them. We don't seem to have a word anymore for 'wrong' in the moral sense, as in, for example, 'theft is wrong.'

"Let me quickly qualify. There is surely no shortage of people condemning other people on such grounds, especially their political opponents or characters they just don't care for. Name-calling is still very much in vogue. But where the concept of wrong is really important—as a guide to one's own behavior or that of one's own side in some dispute—it is missing.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

Why moral courage?