Where Do Justice and Morality Reside?

On this Easter Sunday, when many turn their thoughts from the secular to the sacred, it is perhaps a propitious time to remember that the elusive goals of justice and morality, so often seemingly absent from the world, can and must be pursued, however imperfectly, only by those living in the world; it is a heavy obligation that each of us must bear, no matter how busy our lives may be, no matter what social or economic tier we may occupy. To simply shrug off that responsibility and let others with baser motivations decide for us is to surrender a major component of what makes us human.

My reflections were in part prompted by an excellent piece by Martin Regg Cohn in today's Toronto Star about the Ontario government's addiction to gambling, or, more accurately, the putative profits that arise from it. Says Cohn,

We’ve lost our moral compass in recent years — not by embracing gambling, but eschewing taxes. We have been contaminated by the anti-tax compulsions of American political culture that prevent governments from maintaining a progressive taxation system. This pathological aversion to taxation has driven the explosion of casinos everywhere, as governments rely on gambling to take money from the poor while sparing the rich.

Something to think about as we contemplate the dismantling of Canadian values and traditions currently underway at both the federal and the provincial levels.