Last Thursday, when I collected my five-year-old daughter from school, she presented me with a sprig of cherry blossom plucked from a tree in the corner of the schoolyard. Tomorrow, she said, she would get one for Mammy.
I was pleased and thanked her with the statutory kiss. When we got home I put the sprig of cherry blossom in a bowl on the kitchen table.
I should have left it at that, but perhaps I have been paying too much attention to the tribunals, and so decided to engage my daughter in a discussion of the ethical aspects of plucking cherry blossom in the schoolyard.
Next morning, when we returned to the scene of the crime, I took her to the tree and asked her what she thought would happen if all the children in the school each plucked one sprig of cherry blossom for their Daddy and another for their Mammy. Throwing in a gratuitous arithmetic lesson, I calculated this would mean almost 1,000 sprigs. Then, I said, there would be no cherry blossom at all. She looked at me with a mixture of pity and irritation. "But they haven't, Daddy," she said. "It's only me. And they will grow again next year." Thus endeth the lesson.
I was still thinking of what I should have said in reply when I read about Beverley Cooper-Flynn going down for £2 million in costs after her libel action against RTE. Ms Cooper-Flynn was caught in the same moral space that rendered me inarticulate in the face of my daughter's life-centred clarity.
We are led to believe that tax evasion is theft. But even if it is, not all forms of theft are morally wrong.
Some things are wrong not because they offend morality, but because the rules of social life forbid them. The payment of tax is a social issue, predicated on the necessity to maintain the technical wherewithal of collective life. By encouraging tax evasion, Beverley Cooper-Flynn breached not some immutable principle but a social norm - and a relatively new one at that.
The economist Joan Robinson argued that much of what we think of as morality is constructed as part of the social contract, which changes with time and place.
She employed an analogy concerning rooks, observing that, while the easiest place to get twigs for nest-building is in the nests of other rooks, the rooks do not "steal" sticks. "What prevents them from robbing each other?" she asked, and then answered: "If each relied on the others to fetch twigs, the society would break down."
OUR "morality", therefore, is rooted less in a set of noble, abstract principles than a kind of collective selfishness which exists to counteract the phenomenon of individual selfishness. This certainly applies to the payment of taxation, which is why it is ludicrous to hear people demand that clergymen express opinions on such matters, and more so when they oblige. It is arguable that failing to vote in an election is just as "immoral" as evading tax, because if everybody did it, social life would also break down. In "moral" terms, neither "offence" is more serious than a child picking a sprig of cherry blossom for a parent, and justifying this because it is "only me".
What we call moral responses, therefore, are, as Joan Robinson observed, derived not from theology or reason, but from collective self-interest, and they are subject to change.
The confusion arises because we have crossed over from one set of social constructs to another. Not long ago, social life in most parts of Ireland depended on tax evasion: if people paid what the authorities demanded, everybody would have gone out of business. Today, in an era dominated by the PAYE imperative, the "moral" pyramid has flipped over.
The anger of the majority because they cannot evade one penny of tax has created a compliance fetish which condemns evasion. You only have to consider that the chief witness against Beverley Cooper-Flynn - portrayed in last week's newspapers as a hero - became involved in all this because of his own past reluctance to render adequately unto Caesar. "I'm very happy," he said after the costs judgment. Beverley, meanwhile, slipped between different "moral" floorboards.
She was silly to pursue the matter. Because of the moral ambiguity I have outlined, the "damage" to her reputation from the allegation that she had helped people evade tax was itself ambiguous. Some tax advisers might like to advertise their services in precisely these terms.
In this sense, the jury's verdict had a double-edged meaning, and Mr Justice Morris's characterisation of a finding that "the plaintiff's character was flawed" was incorrect.
I know what he meant, but "character" is the wrong word. Beverley Cooper-Flynn simply inhabited two cultures simultaneously: one saw little wrong in what she did; the other, which holds a veto over her right to carry on in public life, did not agree. This means that, although she might well top the poll in Mayo at the next election, she is finished as a politician.
jwaters@irish-times.ie