Booze and Islamic Cab Drivers

Since I haven't had much time to write, I'll let you chew on this story. In which, we see there is a religious conflict brewing in Minneapolis. It seems many of the Muslim cabbies believe their religious prescription against alcohol extends to not transporting it in their cabs--such as, airport customers who have partaken of duty-free goods. The airport, of course, doesn't want a large fraction of its taxi fleet refusing to serve a sizable fraction of its customers.

So the question is, upon whom will the hammer fall? Those trying to stay true to their faith, or those legally purchasing an entertaining chemical? The general principle of allowing free practice of religion in this country (as long as it does no harm to the unconsenting) butts heads with the notion that all people should get equal service (if they are not being belligerent or threatening.) I guess the question is if "waiting for the appropriate cab" is sufficient harm ask people to decide between their faith and their meager livelihood.

The thing that gets me, that the story doesn't answer, is what these cabbies do in regards to one of their other societal roles--getting drunk people home from bars safely. Do they refuse service to the intoxicated? If so, is that person more likely to get in their car? Or even to have driven it in the first place, instead of taking a cab? To me, it would seem that taking someone to a bar is just as much "making money off of alcohol" as is transporting someone with a bottle of wine. I'm curious about this angle, and how it affects public safety, but apparently the reporter is not.

Given that, and the fact that as word gets out, people will just stuff their duty-free booze in a bag and not say anything about it (making the cabbies transport it anyway), I want to say I'd side with the airport commission here, but it's not as if most cabbies could easily slip into another line of work. For many it's the best living they'll be able to make, and it seems harsh to tell them to take it or leave it. And it's not like taxicabs are some inalienable human right. So I don't know. Thoughts?

Capital Punishment and the Social Contract

Something struck me in this Eric Zorn blog entry, and it was this sentence:

I can't make a persuasive moral case that, say, Timothy McVeigh or John Wayne Gacy deserves to live; that it is wrong for a society to hang a Saddam Hussein.

If you don't have time to read the whole entry, he's arguing that his opposition to capital punishment is pragmatic, as opposed to on moral grounds, in that he admits there are criminals so heinous and obvious they should be executed (but that in most case, we can't know guilt with enough certainty that execution benefits society).

I don't see these things as necessarily following from one another. I wouldn't argue that the most awful tyrants, terrorists, mass murderers and genocidal maniacs have abused their right and privilege to breath the planet's oxygen. But I would argue that a society should not execute any one of them. The question in my mind is, "At what point can a group of individuals, bound by social contract, perform an action that it is wrong for any one individual to perform?" And I would argue that, no matter how duly constituted the social body, it does not have the right to terminate the life of a human being.

The entire justice system, of course, is an illustration of that question; it allows a means for determining and punishing guilty actions where an individual would be a vigilante for doing so; the civil system provides a means restitution where individual retribution would be no more than self-justified theft. But I'm not comfortable with the justice system ending life in my name. (And it is in my name, in part, in this government of, by, and for the people.) So I guess I seem to hold the contradiction in my head that there are those who have so wronged decent society that they don't deserve to live, but they should continue doing so anyway.

I guess that makes my objection principled.