Moral conundrum

re: "Bill on media council gets cabinet nod" (BP, January 13, 2022)

Dear editor,

When we read in "Bill on media council gets cabinet nod" (Bangkok Post, Jan. 13) that "the exercise of media freedoms must not infringe on social mores," all who value good public morals will be deeply concerned. This must be so since being a social more never has and cannot of itself guarantee that any belief, custom, or attitude is morally good.

For most of human history, across most cultures, slavery was an accepted social more. That social more never constituted good public morals. Until recently, sexism and racism, the notions that women or members of some ethnic, national, religious, or other group, were inferior in various ways to men or other groups in society was a standard social more. And those social mores were always bad public morals. Today, many things that continue to be social mores, such as homophobia or some tradition of unquestioning respect for religious or other beliefs and sensibilities, deserve to be questioned precisely because they are so commonly accepted. Such questioning is the only way errors can be discovered so that they may be reformed.

If a social more is well-founded on good moral principles, it will stand tall and prove its moral worth when critically questioned.

But not only does  the proposed Bill on media ethics oppose good public morals, it directly contradicts foundational democratic principle. You cannot claim to support democracy if at the same time you deny the expression of ideas merely because they are unpopular, because they "infringe on (existing) social mores."

Good persons who value sound ethics will reject legislation that both panders to unquestioned social mores that may well be in need of correction, and that blatantly contradicts democratic principle.

 Felix Qui

 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on January 15, 2022, under the title "Moral conundrum" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2247847/moral-conundrum