Moral Engagement and Moral Disengagement

Do you have Verizon as your telephone service provider? Do you want to resist the federal excise tax on phone service? Then you’ll probably be interested in Ed Agro’s write-up of how to navigate the Verizon bureaucracy so that they’ll credit your bill for the resisted tax.

Ed also turned me on to a series of articles on the Engaging Peace blog concerning moral engagement and moral disengagement:

• Moral disengagement — Introduction
• Moral engagement: Introduction
• Moral engagement, part 2
• Pseudo-moral justifications (Moral disengagement, part 2)
• Principled moral arguments (Moral engagement, part 3)
• Euphemistic labeling (Moral disengagement, part 3)
• Telling it like it is (Moral engagement, part 4)
• The second siege of Fallujah, 2004 (Stories of engagement)
• Advantageous comparison (Moral disengagement, part 4)
• Identifying better alternatives (Moral engagement, part 5)

Will Not Pay Bobbed Hair Tax

(Special Cable to the New York Times and Montreal Gazette.)

Geneva, October 8 [1929]. — The authorities of the little Canton of Uri had a long and grave discussion at Altdorf yesterday concerning the law voted a year ago taxing women’s bobbed hair at 12 cents per head.

One deputy declared that the tax had given little financial results, as the women refused to pay the tax, which should be suppressed. Meantime indignant women, especially the young ones, refuse either to grow tresses or to pay the toll tax.