Taboo Scenario 1: Cleaning with the Flag

A woman was cleaning out her closet. She came across the flag of your home country (it's a coincidence!). She didn't want the flag, so she cut it into pieces so she could use it to clean her bathroom. Is anybody harmed by this use of the flag?

No

Would it bother you to observe this woman using your home country's flag to clean her bathroom?

Yes

How do you judge the woman's act of cleaning her bathroom with your home country's flag?

Not Wrong at all

Should the woman be prevented from using your country's flag in this way or punished in some way for having used it already to clean her bathroom? [Note: if you think that either or both of these things should occur then you should answer 'Yes'; only answer 'No', if you think neither of these things should occur.]

No

Suppose you learn about two foreign countries. In one country, it is normal to use your country's flag to clean bathrooms. In the other, your country's flag is never used to clean a bathroom. Are both these customs okay morally speaking or is one of them bad or morally wrong?

Both are Ok. A flag of course is merely a symbol of something else. The example makes it clear that for this woman, the symbol has no meaning. I do think that it is immoral to purposefully, and without good reason, damage a symbol that someone else values (Flushing a Koran down a toilet for example.) For me, the American flag represents many things, from the sacrifice of many to grant me to freedom I enjoy to the very concepts of liberty and democracy. I firmly believe those to be good and moral ideals, and I would consider anyone who purposefully desecrated their own symbols of those ideals to be behaving in an immoral fashion. Desecration is itself is a symbolic act so what is desecration in one person's mind may not be in another. Symbols have no inherent meaning, so moral relativism is an appropriate way to view symbols and symbolic acts. It is also interesting, and worth noting, that the first scenario (and the subsequent ones follow this pattern) brings up the subject of punishment, which interestingly is not mentioned in the baseline questions at all. It seems to be that their is an assumption that morality and punishment should be always related, i.e. that which is immoral should be punished. I will discuss this further in some of the other scenarios.