Car: An Ethical Inquiry

It always seems a little strange to pull up behind a Hummer or BMW and see the little Christian fish symbol. Realize: many generations of the human race have survived without the benefit of luxury cars. Now with heightened awareness of the AIDS crisis in Africa and new charitable humanitarian programs starting to help out, it seems like cynicism about the modes and effectiveness of charitable giving would have less warrant, and new means of assisting others would naturally preclude conspicuous luxury.

Yet there is no divine sliding scale for the possession of luxuries. In the years before the Protestant Reformation, members of Roman Catholic monastic orders and popes debated whether the Apostles owned property individually or held all material goods in common. Somehow a defense of individually held property won the day, while some monastics held things in common. Today it's easy to raise a holier-than-thou eyebrow at the Hummer and BMW when there is often hunger in our own towns. although many more automobiles, less expensive, also could be judged equally unnecessary.

However, some thinkers, far better than I, have pointed out that the consumers of these high-end autos aren't the only people in the equation. Expensive cars and yachts are built by crews of people who don't necessarily earn hundreds of thousands (or millions) each year. The demand for expensive cars and yachts creates jobs. The demand for lattes, another unnecessary consumer good, creates jobs. Between Hummers and lattes, there might be a difference in price and a difference in status, but when it comes to basic human needs, they're about the same. Yet as humans, we invent and create and express ourselves, working from the given materials of Earth . Sometimes what we come up with is enjoyable and frivilous, like prime-time television, and other times what we come up with is expensive, decadent, and unnecesary, like prime-time televsion, Hummers and Beemers. This is all OK.

No, this is all inevitable. We are born into an environment, as Walker Percy has pointed out, and then we enter a world only as we grasp the words and symbols that correspond to parts of the world around us. As we enter into the world, we appropriate words and symbols in a generally uniform fashion (we all eventually understand the "stop" sign), and yet we subjectively appropriate these words and symbols according to our own complex genetic and environmentally impacted personalities. One person is mostly impacted by the red of the stop sign; someone else barely registers the color while noticing the sign's uncommon shape. And that's just the beginning of our subjective appropriation, which eventually spins itself out into individual contributions of new works of art, new products, new scientific breakthroughs. Or, just a quaint table setting. Then again, maybe something like a Hummer: art and science and entertainment and practicality. We shouldn't stop creating just because we might dream up a luxury item.

Lastly, I remember wondering, as I pulled up behind an expensive car with a Christian fish one evening, what if the person is extremely wealthy and extremely charitable? Maybe she has given millions away, maybe even more than half her income, and this fun luxury car is just her little hobby.

If that's the case, then good for her.