Time is short. We can’t fret about the world and its awful problems 24/7/365.

So, the question: how to allocate one’s moral energy?

Some people campaign on the risks to small remote tribal communities threatened by a tidal wave of modernisation.

Others demand reparations for real or asserted massive wrongs done to their ancestors.

Some want action to correct what they see as past injustices, others want action to stop what they see as future injustices.

In effect we have a fast and furious moral market place, where ideas and principles are traded to and fro and the prices reflect the skill of the traders, the winds of consumer fashion, and (last but not necessarily least) the quality of the moral product.

So take that referendum decision by Swiss voters not to want Islamic minarets to be built in their country.

Where in the sprawling noisy global moral (and immoral) market-place of rival ideas and principles does that one fit?

Where does one even start in analysing the question?

Carlin Romano argues that a good place to start might be a small desert town called Der Zor – the Auschwitz of Turkey.

She concludes:

How intolerant is it not to apologize? Whether we owe tolerance to the intolerant is one of the great logical challenges within ethical theory. Simply declaring that we do, as so many commenters on the minaret vote urge, fails to convince if one believes tolerance, like some other ethical duties, arises out of implicit or explicit social contract, and should be reciprocal.

I, for one, find that context, apology, and intolerance matter in the following way. If you steep yourself in the atrocities of the Armenian genocide, not to mention the many intolerances exhibited by majority-Muslim societies toward Christians, Jews, women, gays, and other non-Muslims, one’s conclusion is not an absolutist moral judgment, but a decision on who owes a greater apology to whom, a decision on how to allocate one’s moral energy.

The day that Turkey apologizes and pays reparations for the Armenian genocide, that Saudi Arabia permits the building of churches and synagogues, that the Arab world thinks the homeland principles it applies to the Arabs of Palestine also apply to the Armenians of Turkey—on that day, I will find time to commiserate with the generally kind and hard-working Muslims of Switzerland.

Read the article.

Then read the torrent of comments which attack her position from numerous points of view, some principled and fair, others less so.

The uncomfortable questions right at the heart of globalisation and so on one’s own street, are the following:

What degree of tolerance am I entitled to respect from my neighbours, and when will the law step in (or not) to uphold basic mutual tolerance rules?

Not easy anywhere.

And especially not in Switzerland, where a diplomatic colleague of mine shamefully missed the date for leaving out his Christmas tree for collection and so had to smuggle it out of the flat and try and abandon it in a forest, only to be shouted at by a passing Swiss for such revolting behaviour.