Pakistan, Oct. 22 -- Pakistan has not lost its moral vocabulary. It has learnt to speak it in public while negotiating its meaning in private.

But there is one paradox in this society in particular: morality is everybody's business until it becomes somebody's own business. We police clothes, we denounce immorality, and we speak condescendingly about the loss of character in each successive generation with the ease of people talking about the weather. But a principle that requires us to make sacrifices to uphold it becomes a matter of private choice when it is our turn.

It may be, however, that the greatest moral crisis we face is not that we have lost our conscience but that we have allowed it to become negotiable.

Consider the average...