SWISS CHEESE LOGIC, SMORGASBORD ETHICS

I like swiss cheese and smorgasbords because they’re generally tasty and light to eat. But as metaphors for logic and ethics, they stink. Whenever I see or hear swiss cheese logic and smorgasbord ethics at play along racial grounds, the stench is particularly strong.

A case in point is the use of myths about Moriori to prove that Māori are not indigenous to Aotearoa, and to support the Crown’s confiscation of the takutaimoana.

Moriori are genetically and lingusitically Māori. In 1835/36 when their rohe was invaded by Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama, all three iwi had a shared language and common laws, except in one respect – Moriori weren’t permitted to kill, while their invaders were. You may shudder at the ferocity of Ngāti Mutunga / Ngāti Tama, but you can’t logically accuse them of breaking their laws.

However, the swiss cheese logicians and smorgasbord ethicists can and do, and here’s how they roll. They first ignore the Crown’s utter disregard for its own law against theft. Then they apply that law retrospectively to Māori who had no such concept. Next they recall that Māori were cannibals, and follow that up with claims that Māori were not the first race here, and massacred their predecessors. Finally they say that all this proves Māori are not the indigenous people of this land, and therefore the Crown is justified in seizing the takutaimoana for the general public.

Strip away their holey logic and carefully selected ethics, and the guts of their message to Māori is, “There are now more of our type of people in these lands than your type, so we can get away with pretty much anything we do to you, and you may as well shut up about it.”

But the problem with relying on being the majority as your moral compass is that, unlike true ethics and logic, the numbers can and do change often and unpredictably. And they don’t travel well.

Try transporting our majority into Japan or China and how do you think they’d fare claiming ethical ownership of those nations’ foreshores and seabeds? Reckon they’d dare to apply their law and logic to the cultures and histories of India or Indonesia while trying to claim the resources of those lands?

The facts are that their predecessors tried those tricks in those very countries throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they all got booted out after the numbers swung against them. I’ll bet you anything they complained about the “poor me” attitude of the indigenes they’d oppressed, mourned the loss of multi-culturalism, and wept into their nightcaps over the natives’ failure to appreciate that, at heart, they were all one people.

You know I feel kind of sorry for those whose logic is full of holes and whose ethics are based only on their dwindling majority. It can’t be comfortable for them.
Oh well, they can always comfort themselves temporarily with a slice of swiss cheese and the occasional smorgasbord.