My debating partner in high school won us a couple of rounds with this line. It's a good line. It points to the difference between the logic of "dead" and the logic of "red."
Yesterday in the Strib, there was an article on cloning cats. The article tells of a woman paying $50,000 for a clone of her deceased pet cat. David Magnus, co-director of the Center for Bio-ethics at Stanford, is quoted as saying, "It's morally problematic and a little reprehensible. For $50,000, she could have provided homes for a lot of strays." I like the "morally problematic" part of this quote, though one might also say, looking at the needs of children around the world, that it is morally problematic to give $50,000 to provide homes for stray cats. (And, looking at the political structures that reliably produce misery in children, over an over, it might seem morally problematic to give $50,000 to suffering children -- or to anything but political reform and birth control initiatives.)
What I don't get is Magnus' claim that what the woman did is "a little reprehensible." This sounds to my ear like "a small atrocity" or "a minor instance of genocide" or "mildly cruel." Something has gone wrong logically here.
I think this is the sort of thing people shouldn't say. Misunderstandings about the real limits on conduct are as dangerous as misunderstandings about sex. Our language gives us tools to navigate our lives. The corruption of moral language gives us ways of hiding from what we are doing.