The problem is, the puppy’s presence in the North Atlantic is not a result of his rescuer’s actions as a rapist. If the same guy threw the puppy out of the window of his car and then had a crisis of conscience and dove in after him, how can that be considered heroic? It’s his fault the puppy needed rescuing in the first place.
But these acts in THIS situation aren’t disparate acts as your example is. Now if he was a puppy rapist perhaps they are tied together. In the example cited in this thread the killer and the confessor are the same person for the same act. I agree that a man can be both a hero and a villian, of that I don’t think there is any doubt or disagreement.
The more interesting question to me is can you be both a villian and a hero for the act that YOU commit? If we are in a war situation, and I give our position out to the enemy and many men get killed, and later I confess to this treason. Hero or goat? I personally would not consider that an act of a hero.
I confess to not having a working definition of ‘hero’, other then it intrinsically seems to convey a positive aspect without selfish gain. The act described in the OP doesn’t seem to have that ‘without selfish gain’ aspect for me. Others may consider him a hero, but for me I can’t agree with that assessment.
TellMeI’mNotCrazy and Hakuna Matata said it better than I could have, thanks folks.
Err… why not? He may have done something wrong, but by God, he went after to do the right thing, at great personal risk and/or cost.
Haven’t you heard? Since 9/11, everybody who isn’t a terrorist is a hero. That’s how it’s so easy to tell which ones are the terrorists, they’re the ones who aren’t heroes.
Maybe we should just agree to expand our definition of “heroism”.
How about the minority of people in prison for serious crimes who take responsibility for their actions?
Like Karla Faye Tucker, who was involved in the pickaxe murders of two people, found religion in jail and repented, but was finally executed for her crimes. Wasn’t she a heroine?
On a smaller scale, if you steal a library book and return it 20 years later, are you a hero?
America needs more heroes - role models - good news! Let’s not quibble over the details.
The “right thing” would be not to throw the puppy out the window in the first place.
This made me think of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. Mom poisons baby, rushes baby to ER, gives mouth to mouth, and baby miraculously lives.
Hero Mom!
You’ve clarified the problem: we don’t have a working definition of ‘hero.’
But because he was the one who put the puppy in harm’s way in the first place, he loses any chance at hero status.
IMO, anyway.
To start the ball rolling:
I’m reminded here of a line from the movie Quiz Show. I don’t recall the exact words, but the sentiment has always stuck with me:
“How far have we fallen as a society when we stand and applaud a man simply for telling the truth?”
Confessing to a crime and accepting full punishment doesn’t put one anywhere near heroic in my book. At best, it could return them to zero if reparations are also made to the victim (or victim’s family in this case).
Exactly. Well, almost. Although as a society we agree to consider him as returned to zero in a legal sense, most wouldn’t consider a jail sentence as adequate compensation for having killed someone. To get out from under that karmic cloud, you’d have to save someone else’s life and sacrifice something significant while doing so. Like sacrifice your own life or limb.
How about to save another person, I sacrifice a third?
If it’s your own child, yeah, maybe. It has to be something significant to YOU, silly.
And your point would be? The one bad deed does not make the other immaterial.
Their hero doesn’t have to be your hero. This recurring debate over whether someone is a hero or not is as relevant as arguing whether oysters taste good or not.
Agreed
What question ? I didn’t read any question in the OP. He’s ranting because someone else says oysters taste good. I’m posting to tell him to get a life.
People – why can’t we just agree to accept Kelley’s definition?
But seriously,
Calvin Wayne Inman and anyone similarly situated should consider these thoughts. I would think such a direction might bestow meaning to such a life. But even so, it would, at the most, lift him out somewhat from his karmic hole. I feel foolish even using the word hero in relation to a situation such as his.
I agree with both of these. The difference is that I see each deed as a weight on a balance. If one does acts of good that equal the impact of one’s acts of evil, then one is left at zero. One could still be a hero after doing bad deeds, but the good deeds would have to far outweigh them.
I guess it goes without saying that I set the bar for “hero” pretty high.
I’m not convinced the issue merits such heat. It’s easy if (and all this requires is simple consistency) you accept that if a murderous act makes one a murderer, an altruistic act makes one an altruist, or a lie makes one a liar, and that an heroic act makes one a hero. And just let that be.
Otherwise, you can go a couple of ways with this. One is to give up on labeling people altogether and try to judge individual actions only. This is probably the shortest path to Utopia, but I can’t do it reliably and it doesn’t seem to enjoy much popularity elsewhere either.
A second is to set the bar at the point where you enjoy the greatest satisfaction with respect to your moral superiority to the subject. Judge everyone by their lowest point and ignore the rest. This seems to me to be likely to lead to early extinction just out of sheer discouragement, so I reject it.
Another is to try to do the math, to try to decide on a label based on equations like: murder= minus half a million, repentance= plus three hundred thousand, jaywalking without guilt= minus 16.7, winning a silver star= plus a hundred thousand and twenty thousand more for each soldier saved, cheating on a spouse= minus a couple grand, recycling= 1 point per aluminum can or plastic bottle, breaking his mother’s heart= minus a whole bunch and running a point into the ground= death to King of Soup. This seems a mug’s game to me, for two reasons. First, as any mathematician will tell you, if you use arithmetic, and don’t know all the quantities involved (which you don’t), you’re a fool if you think you’ve got the answer. Second, people (as Bricker aptly observed) aren’t summable. The measure of a man who can kill a stranger in anger (-1000) and run into a burning building to save a stranger’s child (+1000) is not zero. He is not a null quantity: he is a vast potential reservoir of good and evil and the Lord only knows what else. Null quantities, like those who dream of dog-poop-based roguishness and/or heroism, may manage to equal near-zero by simple inaction: but it is a mistake to think of a hero (who may do great and/or terrible things) as morally equivalent to a schmuck (whose compass wavers between doltish/annoying and slightly-more doltish/annoying), just because their averages may be similar.
If we insist on labelling people rather than actions, and can’t get people to cooperate by always doing only good or only bad things, the only thing to do is allow for the possibility that a woman or man might deserve more than one label.