I have to say, I take issue with this issue. Vice, eh? When I think of vice, I think of police — the vice squad, busting organized crime and cracking down on prostitution. But what is vice?
The word stems from the Latin “vitium,” meaning “fault.” The definition my dictionary offered is “moral depravity or corruption.” Depravity means “the state of being corrupt or bad,” and “corrupt” means “to change from good to bad in morals.” And “morals” generally refer to socially sanctioned definitions of good and bad.
I don’t know about anyone else, but this is sounding terribly subjective. Some people’s sanctions are different, but my moral compass tells me that harming others is bad.
In that way, some people might say vice is when a CEO sells his stock as fast as Pee-Wee Herman memorabilia moves on eBay, while simultaneously freezing his employees’ 401k plans so they can’t sell theirs.
One could argue that vice is when a president and attorney general use the deaths of thousands of Americans killed by terrorists to advance a stale conservative agenda.
But in many places, the label “vice” is still being attached to sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Gosh, that’s so 1985, in a Nancy-Reagan-“Just-Say-No” kind of way.
We should ask, who is being hurt?
If I smoke a bowl, snort a line or pop a pill instead of marinating my liver in fermented hops or rotting my teeth with simple sugars, it isn’t vice — it’s recreation, unless I let it destroy my life.
When I willingly spend eight hours throwing away $500 in a loud, neon-covered casino in Nevada, it isn’t vice — it’s entertainment, especially if I get a lot of free drinks.
And were I to log on to the Internet and spend $29.95 per month to view a live, digitized feed of three 19-year-old men engaged in all sorts of consensual activities in the confines of their home, that would be little more than pathetic — and certainly not vice.
The things standardly labeled as “vice” today are nothing more than throwbacks to biblical prescription on human behavior. Godly disapproval is fine for some people, but I’m much more concerned with the damage done to others. In a secular society, we should be engaged in prevention, protection and harm reduction.
Where are the unions for sex workers, the needle-exchange programs for drug users and the warning labels saying how deadly alcohol use is? The government should get to it.
And in the meantime, we should focus on eliminating the real vice: the temptation to tell everyone else how to live.
E-mail copy chief Michael J. Kleckner
at [email protected].
His opinions do not necessarily
represent those of the Emerald.