You won’t be awarded an English degree at most of the world universities without having read Oedipus Rex, a 400 BC Greek play on incest. You can’t get a degree in psychology without discussing the Oedipus Complex, a Freudian theory, built around the same problem.

However, a teacher at one of Pakistan’s most advanced universities has lost his job for giving students a question about this precise moral dilemma. The question was found “objectionable” by both students and an inquiry committee because it involved the taboo subject of incest.

The teacher gave an exam to his students of Bachelor of Electric Engineering. It was a quiz and not an end-of-semester terminal exam.

The course code and title suggest that this was a basic English comprehension and writing course that did not necessarily involve reading literary or advanced texts.

But the teacher decided to give a Julie and Mark vignette from the model of psychologist Jonathan David Haidt. The story has been viewed as a powerful validation of Hume’s dictum that moral judgments are not rationally deduced but arise directly from feelings of pleasure or displeasure or sentiment.

Most readers would—quite justifiably—condemn the siblings, Julie and Mark, for incest because it is morally wrong but they would find it difficult to supply ‘rationale’ reasons for the condemnation. That is the whole idea behind the story.

It is not clear why an English comprehension teacher chose a complex problem from the domain of psychology and set it as an exam question for his students. The inquiry later found that he had simply Googled the question and used copy-and-paste commands.

After students and parents protested, the ministry of science and technology took notice of the “highly objectionable” quiz which was found “totally against the curriculum law of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan,” according to a government letter.

COMSATS was told to take action against the teacher and the university fired him. This is all they could do against a visiting faculty who are paid for the lectures they deliver, and nothing more. Visiting faculty are not employees of the university.

The teacher reportedly admitted to the rector that he made a mistake and that the question was “stupid” indeed.

But now the internet is on fire with social media users claiming that the teacher tried to “peddle” the idea of incest to students.

The teacher and everyone involved in processing the quiz should be “apprehended & made an example for the academic fraternity,” demanded Salman Javed in a tweet.

Jamaat-e-Islami Senator Mushtaq Ahmed Khan said the question was a drone attack against “Islamic teachings, society, our values, traditions, family system.”

He said educational institutions are defenders of religion/civilization, but unfortunately they were attacking religion and civilization.

Journalist Hamid Mir questioned why there were no checks and balances at a big university like COMSATS?

“Sacking one lecturer is not enough. Who hired him? Who approved that objectionable and unethical question? Who published that quiz paper?” asked Mir.

One journalist revealed the name of the teacher and reported that he had been blacklisted for future employment.

Shama Junejo, a social media activist, said she lived and studied in the West for decades and that her children too studied there but she never “read any such filth, what I read in this examination of COMSATS university to promote incest.”

“Whoever designed it, is a sick *** and must be removed immediately,” she said.

They all shared the photo of the quiz with the objectionable question, which is the ultimate irony given that they all argued this kind of material should not be spread in society. Hmmmm.