Wal-Mart and the Kingdom

If stores that sell things to the public get better to the extent that they get bigger, then Wal-Mart has not only been going on to perfection --- it has almost arrived. The number of its employees roughly approximates the number of uniformed personnel in the U.S. military. The chain's economic clout has been characterized as greater than that of the Federal Reserve. We are talking big here, really and not just symbolically big.

In the long run, though, it is Wal-Mart's symbolic rather than economic power that will be the better remembered, just as the symbolism is also receiving huge attention in the here and now. From the standpoint of current political debate, Wal-Mart has become a symbol both of consumer sovereignty at its best and of corporate greed at its worst. It is a prodigious creator of jobs and a profligate exploiter of those who struggle to stay in them, a sterling paradigm for free enterprise and an insatiable devourer of local government subsidies, a cure for the woes of declining neighborhoods and a destroyer of the small businesses that helped make them neighborly in the first place.

Across the country, there is a large cadre of business and political leaders who have shared, sometimes eagerly and other times reluctantly and painfully, the experience of setting up the auctions that play towns, cities, parts of both, and unincorporated areas as well, off against one another to compete for a new Wal-Mart store of which their constituencies can then strive to make themselves worthy. Most of these leaders discover quickly that they are up against a powerful new kingdom in its own right, with a distinctive message of hope, a call to obedience and service, a system of rewards and punishments, a royal hierarchy, and the power to alter drastically the landscapes of whole communities geographically, demographically, emotionally, and economically.

From the standpoint of Christian social ethics, the kingdom of Wal-Mart poses a number of questions that even a greater number of its citizens seem loathe to pursue or even to ask. Here, just like in sermons, are three of them: First, does a community's need for an economic jump start justify --- morally and not only pragmatically, that is --- its political leaders' bartering away in the form of subsidies future tax revenues that should be going to meet other community needs? This same question can be asked in contexts far beyond that of building a new road to get customers from the highway to a new or an old Wal-Mart's front door. For instance, it's a good one to ask of sports club owners and investors in their negotiations to put up new arenas. (Isn't it galling to contemplate that these places may not be generating any net income for their host cities after all?)

A second question: how can we determine --- again, on the basis of moral considerations --- the extent to which workers who help generate an enterprise's profits should subsidize their companies' owners and investors by accepting lower wages, salaries, and benefits? The best way to avoid dealing with this particular question is the way business has chosen during most of the decades of all of our lives: by appealing to what it takes for profit-making organizations to survive in rapidly changing economic processes and systems. This economic version of Darwinianism rarely fails to scare off efforts at raising the minimum wage. Its most recent scare word is "globalization," now being hurled in the faces of their too expensive, left behind employees by executives charged with getting their companies out of town, country, and the continent at first light. One would think that a question with global ramifications, addressed at a global level, should in fact open up new possibilities of achieving global answers rather than keep us stuck with proclaiming parochially that the question is unanswerable.

Finally --- and here the preacher gets down to some really big meddling --- how, as professed citizens of the Kingdom of God, can we justify our never-abating, craven demands for anything and everything we want under one roof, whenever we want it, for whatever we want to pay for it, at whatever cost to our fellow citizens who make it, ship it, stock it, rack and shelve it, and check it out for us? As well as to those who deliver it, along with the cars and trucks with which we can choose haul it away ourselves. No wonder we have allowed Wal-Mart to become such a powerful symbol of corporate greed. It takes the pressure off of dealing with an even more malignant kind, the greed that is in our own hearts.

A New Right To Life Issue

A New Right to Life Issue

When the rules for human relationships became too complicated, Jesus cut through the casuistry with a startlingly simple way of expressing what God wants from us. In the words of his second commandment (of only two), we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Later, the philosopher Immanuel Kant would put it this way: treat every human being as an end in himself or herself, and not as a means to our own ends.

Jody Picoult's widely read novel, My Sister's Keeper, got Jesus and Kant right up in our faces with her soul-searing portrait of Anna, conceived for the purpose of helping reverse her older sister's leukemia. In telling us about Anna, and the impact that her artful creation eventually had on all of her family members, Ms. Poucault clearly hopes to leave us mired in moral uncertainty about a decision that recent technology is making available for an increasingly wide variety of purposes. Her strategy seems to be one of enveloping us in an emotional force field that threatens to de-magnetize our moral compass altogether.

What made the conception of Anna worth entertaining at all by her parents was a new medical procedure, "pre-implantation genetic diagnosis" (PGD), a procedure that screens embryos produced by in vitro fertilization for genetic defects. Technologically, the procedure has a lot going for it. It can detect genes that make for inevitably fatal childhood diseases, such as Tay-Sachs, and help parents come to a responsible decision about not implanting an embryo carrying those genes, in favor of implanting one that is free of them. Morally, however, there is something scary about PGD: it aids and abets parental selection of only the very healthiest of their petri-dish embryos for implantation. The troublesome question here is: "healthiest" on what and whose terms?

Currently, PGD is expanding to screen for genes that contribute only to adult diseases, not to childhood ones. And according to medical experts, some of these adult diseases are not certain to develop and are highly treatable even if they do. Further, most couples who seek PGD are doing so for the primary purpose of sex selection, not of screening for sex-related disorders. So just how moral is it to discard embryos not selected for implantation because some of their genes happen not to measure up fully to the sometimes disproportionately self-centered standards of their owners?

Most problematic is the use of PGD described wrenchingly in the novel, to facilitate the creation of babies whose umbilical cord stem cells can be harvested to treat siblings with disorders of which the newborns' originally implanted embryos were found to be free. However advantageous one child's stem cells, or bone marrow, or transplantable organs could be to the health and well-being of an older sibling, conceiving that child primarily for the purpose of rendering its body useful to the other is a morally questionable act from the moment its very possibility is entertained, and not only on the basis of the kinds of consequences Jody Picoult surveys powerfully.

From a medical perspective, of course, there are no ethical objections relevant to the use of pre-implantation genetic diagnoses, just as there are none with respect to practicing contraception in the first place, or by preventing implantation in the second (e.g., by use of the so-called "morning-after" pill). Why? Because medical science holds that a conceptus becomes a human embryo only after implantation. From a moral perspective, however, PGD performed on the cells of fertilized ova can only be described in life and death terms, because the results of these procedures influence and even determine decisions to create a certain kind of human being and to prevent the creation of other kinds (viz.: disease-free and diseased, or worse still, male and female respectively).

One by-product of PGD makes this perspective even more germane to parental decisions about employing the procedure. In specific, a cell that PGD requires from an embryo for testing can be allowed to divide. Then, that original cell can be used for the tests, and the others for establishing a new stem cell line, with which to carry on further research. In vitro fertilization for the purpose of conceiving offspring is one thing. When this sacred purpose is contaminated by preoccupation with creating stem cell lines, the ethics of desirable consequences (e.g., of treating otherwise intractible diseases by injecting umbilical cord stem cells) come into conflict with the ethics of intentionality (e.g., of assessing the moral validity of an act in terms of the purpose(s) for which it was performed.)

Kate, in Jodi Picoult's story, is the victim of a disease that she did not deserve and that seemed to justify almost any kind of aggressive response of the part of her stricken family members. That she survived and that her donor sister eventually did not is as inexplicable metaphysically as the disease was in the first place. Picoult absolves Kate from any blame for the claims she made on her donor sister, and we should too. Faced with a similar situation, many if not most of us might have embarked on the same course that Kate's parents did. But we would have no more moral justification for doing so than they had.