From: mss2@quads.uchicago.edu (Michael S. Schiffer)
Subject: Re: God and Science: The Ramblings of The Nightstalker
Reply-To: mss2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 20:50:17 GMT

In article <1ej8hiINNh45@gap.caltech.edu> lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU writes:
>In article <1992Nov19.171539.18292@onetouch.COM>, jpalmer@onetouch.COM (John Palmer) writes:


>>     If you say, however, that injecting 22 units of insulin might be bad for a
>>person living under different circumstances, you have changed the whole 'moral'
>>point of the question.

>How so?  The question of relative vs. absolute morality is that according to
>relative morality, under different circumstances, different actions might be
>moral, while absolute morality claims that that's not the case.

	"Interesting... that's not how I'd view absolute morality at
all.  Circumstances _define_ the moral scope of a problem.  Waving a
knife around is morally neutral-- unless you have reason to believe
someone's within striking range (or perhaps if you haven't taken
enough precautions to see that no one is-- say swinging it in a dark
room).  Pushing a button is morally neutral-- but it isn't if it's
connected to a nuclear bomb buried beneath a city.  When I speak of an
absolute standard of morals, at least, what I mean is that different
actions cannot have different moral values for two different people in
identical circumstances, not that differing circumstances can't affect
an action's morality."

>>    If killing a person is wrong, it is  wrong, regardless of who does it.
>>Whether the PERSON is evil or not depends on their motivation.

>How about WHY the person does it?  Please answer the following two questions. 
>If your answers aren't "No" and "Yes" respectively, please explain your
>rationale for the answers:

>	Is it evil to kill somebody who's about to take an action that would
>	kill dozens of innocent people in order to prevent those murders, if
>	that's the only way to stop him?

	"Personally, I'm a firm believer in the `lesser evil'
analysis.  I don't think it's ever a positive _good_ to kill a human
being, even Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin.  But to prevent the greater
evil of their mass murders I would consider killing them to be
justified.  Similarly, I believe war is a great evil, but I don't believe the
appropriate response is surrender to aggressors, as that simply
facilitates more evil.  But I would be very wary of an idea that a war
is _good_ because it prevents a greater evil, and I feel the same way
about a single killing in self-defense or defense of others.

>	Would it have been evil to kill the same person because you didn't like
>	the way he was dressed, and preventing the mass murder was an
>	unanticipated consequence?

	"Yes, it would have been evil.  The morality of an issue,
IMHO, lies in intent.  In the previous case, the actor _intended_ the
death of the murderer, with the further intent of saving lives.
_Both_ intents count, and there are some means which may just be too
horrible to use regardless of one's intended end (i.e. Hitler and
Stalin both used the mass murder of millions as a means towards an
essentially perfect world; even assuming the honesty of their
intentions, the fact that they intentionally murdered millions, and
that they intentionally created circumstances deliberately designed to
humliate and degrade those millions before killing them,
counterbalances any utopia they could imagine).  And in answer to your
next moral puzzle the answer may well be, "I don't know".  Believing
in an absolute moral framework does _not_ mean believing _I_ know all
the rules, nor does it mean I have to.  I only have to face the moral
choices that _I_ have to make-- and if someone asks me advice on their
problems I may give them a suggestion or I may say that I have no
clue.  Fortunately for the world, no one's made me its moral arbiter.
There are answers I think I know with a fair degree of confidence, and
there are _lots_ of day to day moral choices that aren't even hard,
but even in the case of the hard choices I think that there's a better
and a worse answer-- and choosing the worse answer may be forgivable,
but it's still morally worse (e.g. helping cover up a murder because
the killers threaten your life).

>Now, tell me how you reconcile that with absolute morality.

	"Well, I've explained my take on it as well as I'm able: that
moral situations only exist within a context, that sometimes the only
choice may be between two evils, that intent is important with respect
to both means and ends, and that belief in a standard is not the same
as belief that one knows the standard inside and out.  Conversely, my
problem with relativism is that it implies that an identical action,
under identical circumstances, with identical intent, may be right for
Jane and wrong for Joe-- or, as one rather extreme relativist put it
with regard to applying morals on a cultural scale, `Maybe the
Holocaust was right for that culture.'  I don't know of many
relativists who would go to that extreme, but conversely I don't know
how one defines a relative morality which doesn't imply that mass
torture and mass murder might be right for one person or group if they
adopt a moral structure which considers it permissible or
praiseworthy."

Michael

-- 
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS	"Indeed I tremble for my country
mss2@midway.uchicago.edu	 when I reflect that God is just."
mike.schiffer@um.cc.umich.edu	 -- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on
mschiffer@aal.itd.umich.edu	    Virginia (1784)
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