My step-father-in-law had every moral issue already worked out. He was one of the cruelest people I ever met. I try to judge each moral question as it arises.
For example, I am generally opposed to capital punishment for various reasons, including its failure as a deterrent, but I am willing to consider exceptions (for spammers, for example). My wife would firmly opposed to abortion–for herself–but is just as firmly pro-choice. Seems like a reasonable position to me.
Well can you name one situation rape would be justified? If not it looks like rape is absolutely wrong. So there’s one.
To the OP: maybe it’d help if you sat down and considered what really pisses you off and gives you an uneasy feeling.
For example, I find making/letting people suffer needlessly, and persecuting them really pisses me off. Therefore I find my moral directives point to the idea of building a live, let live world with basic safety nets and recognized rights and freedoms.
Sometimes this comes into conflict. For example a Klan demonstration. Is it the greater harm that people are reminded certain people despise them based on the pigments in their skin, or that people be denied their right to speech?
Different societies demonstrate different answers for this question. Ultimately for me it comes down to a question of greater harm. Deciding what is and isn’t allowable speech would cause much more severe harms in my opinion, therefore as long as the Trolls aren’t a threat to anyone’s safety, better to let them at it and point and laugh.
There is a great plaguie or disaster, there are exactly one man and woman left… TheLast Man and Woman in the world… The woman wants to continue the Human Race… the Man thinks it should die… the woman ties the man in his sleep and rapes him… for Progeny.
Justified, Unjustified?
I dunno, but if this happens the same question is gonna come up about incest a few years down the line.
Didn’t Noah already deal with that?
Lot, too.
Attam and Ava, also
And just in case that isn’t “rapey” enough for your quanta of “morals” and " ethics". She ties him, orally stimulates him, mounts him, and then sticks a cattle prod up his ass to electrically stimulate his prostate and induce ejaculation.
Not remotely justified. There’s no grand scheme for humanity that would justify this act. Indeed, the man, by not bringing any children into this thoroughly hellacious world you describe, might be making the only moral decision in your scenario.
I differ in my opinion… I think it is justified for the progenation.
What? Why would someone’s moral character effect how likely I was to wear a sweatshirt given to me by them? I voted the same for all of them.
And any children produced will be left to breed with either themselves or their parents. Congratulations you’ve just propagated several generations of intense suffering as inbreeding cripples following generations, until that sad pathetic echo of the human race loses the last of it’s genetic viability.
Let’s say one of the children doesn’t want to breed, should she be raped by her family?
The rape victim in your scenario would be right not to breed.
Further how would they know they’re the last ones? That really begs the question. The world is a big place. Maybe instead of the rape, they ought to be looking for survivors yea?
Rape is never right. Try again. Bonus points if you can come up with anything actually like the world we live in and not pulled from some trashy scifi rag.
Good question, I can’t think of one off the top of my head, but what does leap to mind is that the definition of rape, or the degree of rapeyness in a given situation, could be disputed. For example, it’s not hard to imagine that for someone to grab a person off the street and force themselves on them at gunpoint is rape and is unjustifiable. But the line between rape/not rape can be a lot fuzzier than that depending on the situation.
Many populations face bottlenecks, even the human race did at one point, and likely might at another point… guess what, we adapt and evolve genetically… life will find a way. All of us are descended from one common man and one common woman ancestor, Look at us now.
All life has the drive to procreate, if she is instilled with a duty to life and the continuation of the species and raised with a different set of morays and a social system that doesn’t impose your/our current taboos and morality or ethics it should seem rather natural to have children, even with relatives. Desperate times call for desperate measures and entirely different sets of morality and ethics, they are purely a man-made construct, and if they do not lead to survival as a species and evolve in situation they are not useful. There are no morals or ethics without mankind… they are entirely a social construct, and the irony is that morality dies when we do. If morality extinguishes mankind then I don’t think they are very moral at all.
I think the man in the scenario is putting himself above the greater good and the survival of the human race, which I think is selfish and immoral, and playing judge, jury, executioner, and God to the human race. His indignities are justified for the survival imperative.
It’s a hypothetical I pose more in the spirit of a seminary or law schul disussion, it is not from some trashy scifi rag, It’s just something that ran through my mind. You are the absolutist here, you said there is absolutely no justification for rape. I posed a scenario where your black and white morality doesn’t work and I think it ticks you.
Maybe the man and woman have been searching for several years for another sign of life and the remaining human population is so small and isolated or dispersed that they have zero chance of ever finding one another. It might as well be like there are no other survivors or finding a needle in a haystack because the world is so large.
You really are so naieve as to believe that mankind in all of his hundreds of thousands of years of survival and generations has never had to face this situation in real life and the world that we live in? There are many islands of isolated populations that have probably had to face this situation, and testament to their “lowered” morals they survived and we are only here because of it … I also defer to Noah and thousands of other disaster or origination myths that stand so clearly in Mythology… though they might be myths they reflect a sure basis in reality and truth about mankind.
You, you would rather extinguish the human race rather than one man face a passing indignity? Is that moral?
Really what you are suggesting is that with two people left in the world, one of them should enslave the other to dictate the terms of their future co-existence.
Are you talking about Genesis? If so, bogus. Or are you talking about mitochondrial evidence? If so, you’re still wildly misinterpreting it. You’ve got two parents, four grandparents, probably eight great-grandparents, possibly sixteen great-great-grandparents–but at some point you’re going to start getting some redundancy in the system. The fact that we all share mitochondria from a single person just points to the fact that if you go back 1000 generations, in theory we each have far more ancestors than there are atoms in the universe.
Eventually you’re going to find one person who’s common in all our family trees. That doesn’t mean she was the only woman on earth at the time.
Nonsense. Plants have no such drive, inasmuch as plants don’t have any drives to speak of. Sure, they procreate, but describing the process as involving “drives” is anthropomorphism.
Even if you limit yourself to humans, there are plenty of humans with no drive to procreate.
Who cares about what seems natural? Rape is perfectly natural, so is murder (as we move into an increasingly technological society, we move into the least violent time in human history (link is a completely fascinating video by Steven Pinker). We’re not talking about what’s natural, we’re talking about what’s moral.
Why not? Even stipulating your claim–which I dispute on a technicality–that just means that by ending humanity, she’s forever extinguishing evil. Booyah! And if the continuation of humanity means you gotta commit rape, then we really need to wonder why humanity needs to be continued.
But that gets all mystical. There’s nothing inherently good about continuing humanity. Humanity is not a moral object. Individual humans who actually exist, or who definitely will exist, are.
Leading to a new set of societal eels?
Sorry, I’ll get my coat.
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
or if you prefer a more modern version:
“Do what makes you happy, do what you KNOW is right, and love with all your might before it’s too late.”
Morality is just something that lets us live with ourselves. It has nothing to do with making the world a better place.
Before I can really hit the point of the OP, I have to say that I strongly disagree with this. I think there’s often a significant overlap between ethics and morals, but they’re definitely different things. They may often be used as synonyms, but IME, at least conotatively, they’ve always determined the correct action with different criteria. As such, I consider morality to be determining the correct action based on what is right or wrong, where ethics is concerned with observing rules and order. These are subtle differences, and since rules are usually in alignment with what’s right and vice versa, they’re often similar, but I think it’s an important and useful distinction. Further, even as a Christian myself, I don’t think morality necessitates referencing the authority of God, in fact, I specifically think that it shouldn’t (which isn’t really relavent to this point).
To illustrate why I think this differentiation is important, is precisely related to how laws operate, in that they don’t (or at least shouldn’t) exist to say what is right or wrong, but rather it exists to establish how we can and can’t treat eachother, regardless of what we think is right or wrong. Obviously, a lot of laws also follow things that most people think are right (eg, no murder, no stealing, no raping, etc.), but there’s some that stick out strongly. Abortion, as mentioned up thread, I think is one for a lot of people.
I think abortion a question of ethics of balancing the rights of the fetus versus the rights of the mother, if you think the rights of one outweigh the other, then it’s either ethical or unethical depending on which way you lean. However, even those who are perfectly comfortable with its legality, it’s easy to come up with situations where the morality of a choice of abortion is different. For instance, a woman who was violently raped and chooses to have an abortion will probably be seen as a moral application by more than not, whereas a woman who consistently fails to use any form of traditional birth control and, instead, relies on abortion to remain childless will likely be seen as an immoral application by more than not.
Even if you don’t really see or agree with the distinction I’m trying to make, it’s an important point related to my response to the OP, so… take it for what it’s worth.
This is something that I’ve spent quite a bit of time over recent months working on and I’ve mostly come to an answer, so maybe my thoughts can be of worth to you.
I think a lot of people evaluate morals from a top down approach, trying to identify fundamental rules about right and wrong and then applying them to situations, but I think it’s a bad approach because it’s easy to end up with inconsistencies because you decide you believe in some fundamental rule, but a particular situation arises that goes against it, so rather than evaluating that fundamental rule, people find ways to justify why that particular situation isn’t an exception.
Instead, I suggest a bottom up approach. Start with specific situations and generalize farther and farther back to derive your fundamental rules THEN work top down and apply them and see if you get back to the same sorts of results in specific situations.
To explain what I mean, it’s easy to start with some fundamental rule like “I value life above all else” or “I want to make the most happiness for the most people”, those sound all great, but how do they really apply to specific circumstances. If, for instance, you’re attacked and it would require deadly force to defend yourself, wouldn’t that violate the first rule? Hell, if you’re single and living alone, but you’re mugged by a guy who has six kids to feed, wouldn’t that make his mugging you more moral than you defending yourself because it provides for and makes more people happier? Yes, it’s a ridiculous example, but that’s the point. I think this is why a number of people can have some pretty wacked out views about what’s moral because they use some all encompassing rule and try to apply it to everything.
Or to use a mathematical example, it’s sort of like deciding before seeing your data points that you can fit it with a linear regression, following through, and then being suprised that a lot of your data are pretty far off the mark rather than carefully studying your data and trying to figure out what regression model makes the most sense.
So, for you, start with some easy examples of things that you feel strongly about as being right or wrong. What do they have in common? Can you mix in some things you’re less sure about? How do the things that you’re kind of iffy on mix into that. Most importantly, when evaluating, try to be careful not to let the momentum of how things are sway your thoughts. It’s easy to think “well, such and such is illegal, so I don’t do it,” and then later “I don’t do such and such, therefore it’s immoral” and then not really see that you may or may not think it’s actually immoral. Though, of course, one could hold the position that always following the rules is a possible moral decision, but that’s sort of an odd case.
This is an important question that I touched on a bit above, which is why I think it’s important to start with the data points of what you believe rather than with some guiding principle and shoehorning it to fit everything. With such generic rules, like the ones I mentioned and others, it’s pretty easy to find justifications for any number of things. Hell, I’ve met a number of people who have claimed to have the same underlying principles and yet reach highly contrasting sets of moral guidance. Either way, whenever you find yourself justifying, it’s probably a sign that your fundamental rules aren’t in alignment with your true morality.
For instance, if one were to decide that lying is always wrong, but then say something like “well, white lies aren’t really lying if it doesn’t hurt anybody”, you’re justifying and your rule probably needs some re-evaluation.
Basically, yes. I like to view morality as a sort of n-dimensional function. You have absolute data points from things that you absolutely believe in, and so it’s a lot easier to look at those data points that you are absolutely sure are on that graph and see the trend rather than cycle through an endless set of possible trends and seeing that none of them really hit all your points.
Now, that’s not to say that some well established rules of thumb don’t get very close on many or even all points, but it’s important to understand when they don’t and why before you try to apply them to other situations and assume they’ll be good rules when they may or may not in that case. For instance, using the lying is bad rule, it applies pretty well for most people in most situations, but what makes a situationation like lying to the SS about the Jews you’re hiding in your attic okay, but lying when under oath in a trial not okay? How can you generalize that to other situations involving lying to authority like a cop, for instance? The only real way to figure out how it applies is to get enough points that are definitely on that line, or you’re at least are sure are very close to it, and see what sorts of trends arise.
Speaking personally, I’ve gone through a couple cycles of generalizing to some basic rules and reapplying to see if I get the same answers again, and I’ve actually currently boiled everything down to a pretty simple, though deceivingly complex, single rule and I’m in the process of re-expanding it to see how it fits for some complicated scenarios. It will take a while.
And, of course, most importantly, even if/when you do figure things out, don’t just assume that that settles everything. You need to take time periodically to review what you believe, otherwise you could end up applying a set of rules that you don’t even really believe in anymore.