10-02 Moral Dilemmas

From my years of involvement in public life I have witnessed political leaders time and again confronting moral dilemmas. Often when they lie to the public there may be a good defensible reason. Often it is just a matter of selling perception rather than reality. Reality is complicated.
Here is a good example: A meeting with business leaders when politicians are given access to private and confidential market information. In this situation politicians have no choice but to lie to the public about what was discussed.
But do they have to lie when they sell a tax grab as tax reform? They just never stop playing that game.
And has there been a war since WW2 when you were sure about the moral imperative? Or about being told the truth?
Since most major moral dilemmas are faced by political leaders and become part of the public discourse, the public must get the impression that the great issues of right or wrong do not apply anymore. Like the cartoon suggests.
But in my family life, I saw real moral dilemmas being faced and learned the importance of a moral compass in challenging these dilemmas.
I spent years as a child trying to understand why my mother’s father volunteered for active service in WW1 when he had a wife and two young children. My mother was the oldest. He did not like to talk about the Great War.
But he was dealing with a huge moral dilemma, at the time, because he felt he owed something to Canada for giving him a home. As a young teenager of 16 he left Britain with his older brother to seek a new life.
My grandmother told him to do what he felt was right and that with “Eaton’s”, her employer, sending work home because of her young children she could manage financially. Grandma Halter was a skilled alteration tailor.
On the other hand, grandpa Halter sold magazines and confectionaries working for Canada Railway News. He brought no skills to the army, except that he was an exercise fanatic and became a sergeant responsible for physical training.
Today, of course, Canada Railway News is called CARA and has about 40,000 employees. At ten years of age I can remember working with my grandfather, and the President of Canada Railway News, Patrick Thomas Phelan, making hundreds of ham and cheese sandwiches which were sold on the Toronto-Winnipeg run.
The other great moral dilemma for our family was linked to a decision my father made to join Plymouth Brethren. It was 1945. But the leadership of the Brethren told him he would have to dissolve his partnership with my Uncle Jack who was Jewish. They said that he could not be equally “yolked” with an unbeliever.
Mother and dad discussed this issue together for days with me present. He decided the only way he could deal with this dilemma was to turn over John Bulloch Limited to uncle Jack.
But uncle Jack was just as moral a person and said that would not be right since my father was the founder. Instead, he said he would take his interest in the business and invest it in a wholesale woolen business. He had been in that business in the UK before the war. I remember dad helping uncle Jack paint his new store.
My lesson from life is that the bargains that must be made in politics result in compromising principals. But this does not mean that moral dilemmas cannot be faced based on clear concepts of right and wrong in our personal and business lives.
I learned that from my grandfather and my father.
That’s the way I see it anyways.