RE: What IS good, and how do we determine it?
June 15, 2015 at 8:53 pm
(This post was last modified: June 15, 2015 at 8:56 pm by Aroura.)
Do you realize you couldn't even get consensus on your"murder is universally wrong" proposition? This alone should be showing you that there simply are no universal morals.
Killing other humans is often considered wrong, but there are always situations where it is also acceptable. Even, sometimes, what we would call murder.
Take the common college class example. There is a train coming, and the track divides nearby. On track A you see 10 people are tied to the tracks, and this is the track the train is on. They will die of you do nothing. There is one person tied to track B. You cannot reach the people to untie them in time, but you can flip the track switch to switch the train to track B. Do you actively take action to kill one person? It's murder to do so, even if it saves the lives of 10 other people.
So, do you murder one person to save 10?
Another common one, is, would you murder a Hitler as a baby, if you had a chance?
These are thought experiments, but real life examples have come up. The point is, you can't universally say anything is morally right or wrong because everything is conditional.
In general, I would personally go with the least harm thing. The best moral choices are those that cause the least harm. Then we all get to sit around defining and weighing what constitutes harm.
Killing other humans is often considered wrong, but there are always situations where it is also acceptable. Even, sometimes, what we would call murder.
Take the common college class example. There is a train coming, and the track divides nearby. On track A you see 10 people are tied to the tracks, and this is the track the train is on. They will die of you do nothing. There is one person tied to track B. You cannot reach the people to untie them in time, but you can flip the track switch to switch the train to track B. Do you actively take action to kill one person? It's murder to do so, even if it saves the lives of 10 other people.
So, do you murder one person to save 10?
Another common one, is, would you murder a Hitler as a baby, if you had a chance?
These are thought experiments, but real life examples have come up. The point is, you can't universally say anything is morally right or wrong because everything is conditional.
In general, I would personally go with the least harm thing. The best moral choices are those that cause the least harm. Then we all get to sit around defining and weighing what constitutes harm.
“Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead