Moral obligations are a matter of opinion. Paterno’s opinion, based on his actions, suggest that in his opinion he was doing the right thing. This opinion is supported by millions of people around the country and hundreds if not thousands on the Penn State campus. Your opinion differs. If we were speaking fact and not mere opinion, one side or the other would be able to prove its case.
He met the minimum requirement of a law written to make sure schools don’t hide crime stats from the public.
He failed the minimum human requirement that is completely independent of any law - which is to have enough concern about a serious crime report that the first thing you do is call the police.
These are the facts (still, after 45 pages):
- report of a serious crime
- no call to police, no follow up wondering why the police didn’t ever ask about the report, no nothing
I have to give you credit, I didn’t think you would ever arrive at this point.
This entire thread you’ve been arguing all kinds of extremely weak points, trying to weasel some angle to make it so it’s reasonable that Paterno didn’t do more (e.g. calling the police wouldn’t have resulted in anything without a victim, what he heard was non-specific, etc. etc. etc.) - and those arguments were, frankly, dumb.
But you have finally realized the one single argument that can’t really be disputed, and that is that different people have different morality.
Most of my involvement in this thread with you was just pure entertainment - I didn’t really think you would ever finally realize this point. I even typed a post once explaining to you what would be a valid position, but i canceled it because it was fun watching you contradict yourself etc.
Anyway, I guess the final note is this:
Yes Paterno may have made what he felt was a choice that was up to his moral standards.
But, unfortunately, that doesn’t say much for his moral standards, does it? (that’s the problem with taking that position)
In other words, moral relativism.
IOW, that his morality placed his friendship and his desire to protect The Football Program’s image above the needs of preventing children from being raped. And you’re proud to defend it.
You therefore don’t even know what morality is. There are no words sufficient to describe you.
Which is why, of course, he stated after the fact that he wished he had done more.
Sounds like it to me. What a very liberal position for SA to take! I suppose that means that if Sandusky thought he was doing the right thing because he wanted to show those boys how much he loved them…
After a multitude of dissembling, parsecting and denial I think you’ve finally stated your actual POV: *Paterno cannot be held to any moral standard other than his own. This standard is defined by his actions. Thus, any & all of his actions are moral. * Most people reserve that kind of regard for their deity.
The position he held in Nittanyland was not all that uncomparable to a deity, really - which made the revelation that he was not only human, but a human with an impaired sense of responsibility to others, the basis of morality, so difficult for many to come to grips with. SA, for instance, is now forced to resort to the assertion that there is no such thing as a general morality, rather than face what underdeveloped Fifties concepts of it can lead to.
Damn liberals, getting in the way of a man having a little harmless fun with a kid …
I would say nice try guys, but it isn’t even that. There is no so-called moral relativism at work and I’ve not come close to claiming there is. Paterno reported what he was told in full and to the proper authorities. Thus he fulfilled his moral obligation as it existed at that time. The fact that you’ve come along after the fact insisting that a a different moral standard existed doesn’t change that fact. Paterno thought he was doing the right thing according to the standards that were in place at that time - standards which, btw, he did not establish.
So, sorry, but once again your hysterical unthinking eagerness to find some way to blame Joe Paterno has left you shooting blanks.
The moral standard is to not let kids get raped. He didn’t meet that.
Comedy gold.
Reboot! Reboot! After having every possible bizarre, yet somewhat entertaining, effort to whitewash Paterno blocked by rational discourse, you restate your original opinion. There’s no black hole time warp here. If you can’t come up with any more ‘interpretations’ it’s gonna get boring.
Good job, this is satisfying his LEGAL obligation.
No, you are incorrect. By reporting it to his superiors, that is satisfying his legal obligation. Unless you want to go on record right now stating that the only moral obligation one has to anything is their legal obligation.
Again, doing what was right according to the legal obligation. And later said that he “wished he had done more”, which supposes that he held himself to a different moral standard after not doing anything than he did at the time. The same standard we are holding him to, that he should have done more. Which he also wished he had done.
Paterno wasn’t told of a rape.
There is no way to have “rhythmic slapping sounds” “of a sexual nature” with a “ten year old boy” that is not rape.
I have no problem with that at all. What you’re left with otherwise is nothing but opinion, which as we have seen varies from one person to the next and is subject to alteration after the fact.
Oh, please! He lost his job, the school’s administrators got fired, the university stood to lose millions of dollars and much of its prestige. Plus he probably felt badly to learn that serious child sex abuse had been going on, abuse he was previously unaware of. So in light of all that, of course he wishes he’d done more. With the benefit of hindsight all of us would do some things differently. That doesn’t mean we were wrong to have done what we did as we viewed the situation at the time.
So he lost his job, the administrators got fired, the university lost money and prestige. Oh and some kids got raped, yeah he probably felt bad about that last one.
All we have is hindsight here, and in hindsight we are all saying that he had a higher obligation and failed at fulfilling it. You seem to be saying that because we all benefit from hindsight, there is nothing we could have done wrong at that time as long as we felt like at that time we were doing the right thing. I call bullshit on that, and it is absolutely moral relativism. Sometimes people make the wrong decisions, even if at the time they don’t think they’re wrong. That doesn’t make them any less wrong. Paterno made the wrong decision. Your justifications for why he did the wrong thing, such as not knowing anything, not understanding it, coming from a generation where rape didn’t exist, has not held up to scrutiny. The reasons you outlined above, the reasons for why he might feel bad in retrospect, all center around his reputation and the reputation of the university. But it is somehow not within the realm of reason that those same things which by your account made him question the validity of his choice back then also played a role in his decision making process at the time. Why is that?
Joe Paterno was informed, by someone to whom he eventually trusted enough to give a job, that another person he knew was engaging in behavior that resulted in a rhythmic slapping sound. And that behavior was between an adult and a child.
This is a fact.
He chose to follow the letter of the law and report it to his superiors. He chose not to follow the spirit of human decency and follow up with that report.
This is a fact.
Paterno sacrificed the safety of young people to his career, his position, and the Penn State football program.
This is the natural and understandable interpretation of the first two statements.
People who want to excuse Paterno’s failures based on the grand jury testimony must do so ignoring the facts. Ergo, people who want to excuse Paterno are ignoring verified facts. Ergo, Paterno’s defenders want the facts of child rape to be ignored in the service of Paterno worship.
I really hope that this episode ends any belief on the part of anyone on this board that Starving Artist is worth any consideration as a poster or a human being.
Do you really think a six-foot, three-inch sixty-something man could be having full-blown penetrative anal sex with a ten-year old boy in the manner McQueary thought he saw? To achieve penetration and thrusting action the man would have to be squatting so far down that his ass would be closer to the ground than his knees and he’d fall over backwards, pulling the kid with him - not to mention that his leg and back muscles would never stand the strain.
Where is your critical thinking? I don’t know what McQueary heard (or for how long he heard it)- maybe just the slapping of feet on the floor attendant to wrestling, playing keep-a-way with the soap, or some sort of sexual activity not anal rape. Who knows what it was? But one thing I’d put money on is that it wasn’t penetrative anal sex.