Professor Elam

Gee lots of news on the ethics front today.  Upset and distraught about your or your significant other’s wayward ways.  Well,  Cheatneutral to the rescue!  This article describes and provides a link to the site.  Now you can purchase an offset to your own cheating.  See, just like a ‘carbon neutral footrpint rendered maenignless by carbon offsets’ you can offset your own lack of fidelity! Purchase your offset here.

This is  of course a protest and a satire over the entire idea of carbon offsets.  Living in 20,000 sf houses and flying private jets around the world (which is typical of the entire global warming bunch Al Gore, Brad Pitt, etc) and rationalizing it by purchasing carbon offsets is ridiculous. 

For those of your rusty on thelogy back in the 1400-1500s, the Catholic Church sold Indulgences.  Sinful, well no problem, just buy your way out with the purchase of an Indulgence.  And all if forgiven.  To his credit, Pope Pius V in 1567 put a stop to this. But too late the Protestant Idea led by Martin Luther was already out of the box.

But my point is that there is nothing new under the sun in this idea of ‘offsets.’  And they are as ridiculous now as then.

Virute is one of the cornerstones of UNT Dallas Values. It cannot be bought or sold, only practiced.