Organizations are like people: they can frame their activities in the language of moral disengagement or engagement.
Some organizations (I bet you can come up with your own examples) do terrible things but cloak those terrible things in the language of “pseudo-moral” principles, or blame the victims of racism for hatred directed at them or use euphemistic language to describe their dirty deeds.
Other organizations operate on the principles of moral engagement.
With tax time upon us, our latest recognition of moral engagement at work goes to organizations promoting resistance to war taxes—for example, the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL)—which produced the brief video on “Where is the peace dividend?
The FCNL –a nonprofit associated with the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers)—provides many useful materials regarding the costs of war. One that you may want to read before tax time comes around again is “Where do your tax dollars go?” They report that in 2013 40 cents out of every tax dollar went for “defense”—and there’s a nice example of a euphemism–and only 2 cents out of every tax dollar went for diplomacy, development, and the prevention of war. What’s wrong with this picture?
Other anti-war, anti-war taxes morally-engaged organizations include:
*War Resistor’s League (WRL); see their predictions for where your 2015 tax dollars will go.
*Global Day of Action on Military Spending, co-founded in 2011 by the International Peace Bureau (IPB) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS); check them out.