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In other words, my right to speak freely is less important than protecting the religious feelings of others. This should ring warning bells for my fellow citizens across the continent. We should all be extremely concerned that the rights of Muslims in Europe NOT to be offended are greater than my own rights, as a native European Christian woman, to speak freely. I am proud to be the woman who has raised this alarm.-Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff1
Ethics can be/is a highly subjective term. Ethics for you might not be ethics for me, and vice versa. How do attempts to define the term accord it a certain degree of objectivity and rein in its evident fluidity? What is ethics? How does freedom of expression meld with ethics? In fact, without the former, there can be no accountability for ethics.
How does ethics thus relate to freedom of expression? Can there be ethics without freedom of expression? What happens when politics and/or other powers seek to define ethics? Indeed, is the ethics defined in Qatar or Iran the same as that defined in America? And is the ethics espoused by the Democratic Party the same as that espoused by the Republican Party (e.g., the wall as immoral ... or moral)? And so, how to define the nebulous? Wikipedia stipulates: Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct."
Well, that does not really help much at all. After all, right and wrong are certainly not objective terms. Is it right, for example, to outlaw female genital mutilation? Well, a federal judge recently declared such a prohibition to be wrong, that is, unconstitutional, and dismissed charges against several doctors for performing it.2 And what about child marriage? Is that ethical? Well, the recent U.S. Senate Report on that subject might lead one to conclude that it is not ethical. The report mentions Naila Amin, for example, a U.S. citizen engaged to be married when she was only eight years old, then married at 13 to her Pakistani first cousin. Her application to bring her husband to the U.S. was approved. Amin stated:
He dragged me about twenty feet-the whole length of the house-by my...