One Sixteenth

I didn't even want to try talking about this without consulting my dictionary, and what I found was interesting:

"Morality: of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behaviour

Moral and ethical are both concerned with rightness or wrongness of actions and conduct, but moral is more often applied to the practice or acts of individuals (often specifically in sexual relations) while ethical is more often theoretical or general questions of rightness, fairness, or equity."

I am feeling ill equipted to start a large philisophical treatise this morning. Maybe I can wade in on the particulars once a debate gets going. But I would like to address your question about murder. I was born into a Mennonite family and raised to believe that there is never a situation in which violence is justified. This was not a theoretical, ivory tower, self-indulgent pacifism. My family was in Russia during the Revolution. The women were raped. People killed. And still they remained committed to the principles of non-violence. Mennonite universities offer really dynamic and intriguing courses in conflict resolution. Mennonites send people into some of the most dangerous places on earth to be nuetral observers.

I'm more conflicted than previous generations, but really only when it comes to the idea of peace keeping, a practice which I support and yet find difficult to reconcile with my notions of the sacred nature of life.

Ack. Gotta go to swimming lessons. I'll check back later.

If we all believe that murder is immoral, but we all make different exceptions in order to kill different groups of people ... does that make the immorality of murder so watered down that it's irrelevant?

It depends.....

If you haven't listened to the Peter Kreeft CDs you really need to. That's the entire point of them. Is morality/ethics something that can be objectively obtained? Socrates thought so, but others disagree. :)

As far as what I think, I'm like most people - my morality, ethics and faith all tend to intermingle. (I'm also becoming less apologetic about my beliefs lately. I've grown sick and tired of the PC/moral relativist crowd ramming their version of things down my throat - and telling me that I have to accept it.)

As to your question the morality of murder, I think the answer is that it is not watered down. First of all, you have to do what many are uncomfortable doing what so many of us aren't - calling something evil. If a man was raping a woman, and I kill them, I think I have acted in a morally good way, because I've prevented an evil person from continuuing to be evil. Pam tells me that in the strict Catholic view it would be a sin to kill someone in that circumstance, though, because killing is a more greivous sin than rape.

(Shudder)

Where it gets hazy is preemption. The classic: Would you kill Hitler as a baby? I tend to not like that one, though, because it presupposes future knowledge - and we never have that. Was it immoral to drop the Bomb on Hiroshima? We saved a lot of our soldier's lives by doing so - and ended the war with a lot fewer overall lives lost - but killed a lot of non-combatants in the process, which is usually considered the last thing you want to do. Sacrifice the professional soldiers, not the civilians, if possible.

Is life sacred? As a general rule, I would say yes. However, the free will we enjoy also comes with the price of consequences (something else the PC crowd hates). I don't think an evil life is sacred.

Next I guess we'll have to discuss evil :)

Interesting discussion. I'm not a philosopher or a theologian, but I'll add my two cents anyway.

I do believe there is a set of moral principles that transcends cultures. As a Christian, I believe it is because we are created in the image of God. This is what makes us different than animals, our knowledge of right and wrong and our ability to choose.

The Bible talks about this principle in Romans 2:14-15 "Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing now even defending them."

Of course, if someone didn't believe in God, it would be impossible to convince them of this.

And a little different take than Mike. I come from an evangelical background. There are plenty of examples in the Old Testament of capital punishment. I was always taught that there is a difference between killing and murder. Murder is taking someone's life for your own gain - to satisfy rage, to gain money, etc. Killing in war, executing a serial killer, etc, is different.

Of course, there are PLENTY of examples of Christians distorting this for their own selfish gain (e.g., the Crusades)

And I think it's almost impossible to discuss this without evil coming into the discussion. Like Mike I get very tired of listening to the politically correct moral relativism that is so popular today. One example that drove me crazy was right before the war in Iraq started. I got so tired of all the experts talking about the terrorists and Saddam Hussein and saying we needed to reason with them and use diplomacy. Like educating them is going to change this. Some people have chosen evil so long that their conscience is seared, in my opinion. No amount of talking, negotiations, is going to change that.

So what I was trying to say but didn't get around to with my whole Mennonite thing is that there are some people who don't water down the concept of morality and murder. I'm not a paragon of virtue or pacifism by any stretch. I didn't mean to come off sounding like I'm on a high horse.

My husband argues that people who commit awful crimes have forfeited their right to life. There's a part of me that agrees. But I can say for certain that I couldn't be the one to decide that or carry it out. I'd lock them up and throw away the key. I'm with Gandalf on this issue "Many who deserve life are dead" etc. ;-)

Funny...I was just reading the Catholic Catechism on this last night (no joke) and it's not so much that murder is a more greivous sin than rape, it's that murder in the case of rape, presumably, is using excessive force. You only use the necessary amount of force to protect yourself or someone else from the immediate danger. So, in the rape scenario, if the rapist is not armed and you kill him, it's exessive force, but if he is armed, and the battle turns to mortal combat, then the killing is justified. In fact, CCC 2265 states, "Legitimate defense can be not only a right, but a grave duty for someone responsible for another's life, the common good of the family or of the state."

My hubby and I were talking about the Catholic concept of a "Just War" and what all that entailed, which is why I was reading this. Interesting stuff.

Morality is always about choices. If there is no choice, there is no moral issue. For me, the most moral choice is the one that causes least harm. To address Mark's question about the nuclear weapons, it was half a million Japanese or 10 million Americans; clearly using the nuclear weapons was the more moral choice. On the other hand, killing a rapist is harder, because it's only moral if you had to kill the rapist to stop him, or if you knew he would escape and rape again. Otherwise you are doing more harm by killing him than by, say, capturing him.

Another example was stealing to feed your child if you cannot get them food any other way. In this society, that's a false choice, because there are always other ways: various charities and government programs and the like; there's no reason for a child to go without food in the US. Leaving that aside and assuming the false choice is real, it depends on from whom you are stealing the food. If you are taking it from another child who otherwise has no food, it's not moral to do so (though I'd still do it, valuing my children more than any other as I do). On the other hand, stealing from a store to feed your child would cause less harm than letting your child starve.

Now, let's address this vs. the argument that the moral choice is the one that accomplishes the most good. That argument is bunk, and here's why. Choosing to do good in an absolute sense suffers from two problems: how do you define what state is better, and how do you account for the bad side effects of actions which do good in the narrowest sense? For example, it was the desire to do good (erase poverty and corruption) which led the Communists to slaughter 100 million people in the 20th century, and which led the Nazis (who wanted to secure for ethnic Germans their just and fair share of prosperity) to slaughter the Jews and Gypsies wholesale. No accounting for the negatives leads to vast evil done in the name of good.

Worse yet, how do you define whether you are doing good? Is it good to end poverty? Sure. At what cost, though? Killing all of the rich and evenly dividing what's left over? That's hardly more moral than allowing poverty, I'd say. Without a clear definition of what makes a situation better, it's a crappy standard. There's a reason for the saying, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."

Consider real life moral quandaries, and you see that the "doing good" standard falls apart in situations where the "cause the least harm" standard does not. For example, recently terrorists seized a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, Russia, taking as hostages 1500 students, teachers and parents and killing several dozen men who attempted to resist them, but were unarmed. (No, I'm not looking for a debate on the morality of taking guns to school at this point.) During the course of the crisis, the terrorists let some women and some children and some old men go. One mother was there with her 3 year old boy and a 6 year old girl. She was given the choice to leave with either one of her children, or stay with both. Under the "doing good" standard, she had no moral choice: staying would have possibly condemned her and both her children to die; leaving would have saved one of her children (and herself, though I suspect that was of less concern to her) and possibly condemned the other. She took her younger child, which was moral by the "least harm" principle. By the way, she was fortunate: her daughter was injured, but survived, thanks to a 15 year old boy who picked her up and ran when the shooting started.

If the standard is "making the world a better place," one again runs into the problem of defining better in a meaningful way. Is it better to steal from the store (we're back to feeding a starving child apparently) and saving your child, if the act is part of the cumulative impact which causes the store to raise its prices (for extra security to reduce losses, and to cover the losses) so that more children starve for inability to by food or because their father was laid off from his job at the store to pay for the security improvements?

And sometimes, there isn't a "better." Sometimes the best choice you can get is less worse (again, see the mother at Beslan).

Hmm, I realized that I am unintentionally posting in absolutes (thinking too much in terms of "the ideal world", I guess). Put another way, I tend to look at choices as a scale in the realm of free will. Free will gives you a choice, but you start out in balance and put weights on either side as you make choices.

Put numerically, think of a number line. The "least harm" standard is from 0 to 1 (0 being no harm, 1 being absolute harm). The "good vs. evil" standard would be represented from -1 to 1 (-1 being absolute evil, 1 being absolute good, 0 being neutral). Either way, you're still making choices that fall on the line somewhere, and either way, you have to define good/evil and harm and how they measure up. In that sense, I'm not sure there's much more than a semantic difference between the two. Morality/ethics are simply the tools by which we make the measurement.

The question that is interesting is whether or not you can rationally come up with a universal measurement tool.

Ah, y'all are great.

Jennifer, that's very interesting. Pam? Want to fill me in on the Catholic concept of a just war?

Sarah, I greatly admire your stance on killing. My heart would like to join you. There is a part of me, deep inside, that does believe all killing is wrong. But I can't reconcile that with the way the world works. I used to think that I would never, ever be able to take a life, but that's not true any more.

I do believe in a soul, however. And while I would kill and support my military killing, I also believe that no matter how just or moral we perceive the killing to be, our soul has to answer for it somehow in the end. There are many cases, though, where I'm willing to take that upon my soul.

I want to add more about how this list conversation started. A girl came on the list and asked us to discuss whether morality was culturally based. Then she put forth a statement that she believes offers an argument for one morality that transcends culture. Her statement is that an act is moral if it makes the world a better place.

Instinctively I don't like that statement, because it uses fluffy language that I hate :) But does it work? I've come to the conclusion that no, it doesn't work. What makes the world a better place? Who says what is better?

I say that that statement doesn't work because you can never really know what is going to make the world a better place. Not in the long run, anyway. Can your really base your moral actions on that?

I asked her, "What if I think the world would be a better place if all stupid people are dead?" and she told me I was being irrational, and there's no way I could argue that that would make the world a better place without being irrational. I always feel that I need someone else to check my logic, but I think she's the one not being rational there.

I've also been challenged to come up with my definition of morality in one sentence. That's what I'm working on now.

I agree, Mark and Staci, you can't talk much about this without defining evil. I see now that I have not been defining evil in this argument, and all that leads to is running around in circles. (Thanks for the reminder of the definition between killing and murder, Staci. That's a very useful definition.)

So, isn't evil as relative as morality? Or is it? My idea of evil is that which causes pain, fear, unhappiness and/or loss of freedom without compassion or consideration for the victim. Poke holes in that, please. Tear it apart. Help me come up with a better definition.

People are evil when they cause injury for their own enjoyment, or without any regard for the person they're hurting. Saddam did that. Jeffrey Dahmer did that. I can't decide if I would call Timothy McVeigh evil, or just sick, twisted and wrong. Was he evil? OTOH, I think the terrorists in the planes were evil because they gloried in the lives they were taking. Manson was evil, but Mark David Chapman was sick, I think.

Then she put forth a statement that she believes offers an argument for one morality that transcends culture. Her statement is that an act is moral if it makes the world a better place.

That's sounds a lot like utilitarianism (John Stuart Mill). Mill said that if the consequences are good, the act itself it moral. The problem with it is that it ignores motive - which you seem to want to take into account when you talk about why someone does something in addition to the act itself. Which is more good: me giving a pint of blood out of a sense of altruism to save a life, or getting paid to do so? Both result in the same consequence, but one is done for personal, financial gain.

On evil: Evil is relative if you believe in no higher authority than man. After all, if there's no creator, no higher morality, no consequences in whatever afterlife you may believe in, then man's rationality is the highest arbiter. Each man being unique, we each get to define our own morality.

If you do believe in a higher authority (maybe not God, but as you put it: answering for our life), then I think a "higher morality" makes sense. Figuring it out is the problem. I got into an argument in college with a Baptist about questioning God. They claimed that by questioning the Bible, I was questioning God's authority. My response was that I was not questioning God's authority, just the rules of the game - and that as a citizen of the Universe I have a right to question the rules.

I also think it's possible to believe in a Creator without believing in a higher morality. God could just as easily been playing around in his lab, we were a divine accident, but God discarded us and is not even paying attention to us anymore. If true, then we're back to relativity. I don't think that's the way it works, though.

My working definition of morality is: "Not ethics". It comes down to monotheism for me (this came up at Knowlege is Power awhile ago, I link to that on my blog as K=P). There is only one Absolute, everything else is relative to that Absolute. OK, maybe I'm forcing this to fit what came up at K=P, but monotheism does give a good reference point, IMHO.

You should link to that list you mentioned so I can reffer SondraK to it.

Mark, I have so much trouble with that danged blood donor example! I believed in Utilitarianism in college. Now, though ... Is *everything* a moral act? Is every action morally good or morally bad? Is anything neutral? I think that if I donate the blood because I want to help save a life, that is a "better" reason than donating the blood to make money. I'm not sure it matters, because either way someone who needs blood gets blood. But if I do it for the money, that still doesn't make it an immoral thing to do. Now in this girl's terms (the girl on the list) donating the blood would make the world a better place, and is therefore the morally good choice. And I can see how that idea works with that example.

But what if I have a deep conviction that the would would be a better place if Islam ceased to exist, and followed that conviction to the idea that the most good I could do for society is to kill Muslims? I would believe I was making the world a better place. But many others would not.

I do believe in some sort of higher power, but it's not the creator-type that lays down laws. Then again, defining it is another terrible problem that's been haunting me.

Dave, I will come back this afternoon and post the link. I should have thought to do it in the first place. I hope it will turn out to be an interesting list, once this dies down. I guess it doesn't do to start out on a new list by pissing off the list owner :)

I wasn't saying it was immoral to give blood for money, but - going back to the example of scales - doesn't the money make a person's motive less pure and therefore less moral? It's still positive on the scale, but not as far over.

I would say yes. It's still a good act, as it helps someone, but you don't get as many karmic brownie points.