On another thread, Grimpixie asked the following:
To avoid a hijack of that thread, and because I suspect it will be hotly debated, I’ve started this thread to answer. And my initial answer is a fairly long one. Spiritus Mundi, Vile Orb, and others interested in ethics are invited to critique it. I begin with an apparent off-topic comment that nonetheless is a pertinent analogy:
At one time, physicists were quite convinced that one could attribute various absolute properties to matter. Then along came Einstein, and we discovered that many properties believed absolute were only relative.
Someone once summarized the implications of relativity with the idea, “Everything is relative.”
Not true. In Einsteinian physics, the value of C is an absolute. (Not “the speed of light” – that varies with the medium. But the constant C, representing the speed of electromagnetic radiation in a vacuum.) The values of a given object’s mass, duration, etc., vary in strict accordance with its relation to C, i.e., its speed.
I needed that little excursus to make clear where I’m coming from in my response.
Yes. There is an absolute morality. It’s defined in the Gospels, and has been posted on another thread recently. And it consists in total radical love of God and of one’s fellow man as of oneself.
Everything else is relative to this.
Not that I reject the Ten Commandments or any other specific rule or regulation someone may propone.
But that I evaluate how it should be applied by that fundamental rule. (Why is it a fundamental rule? Jesus said so; I believe so…;))
Mebbe that passage in Leviticus that gets trotted out in the gay debates represents God’s feelings about homosexual activity. (And maybe it doesn’t, but Jewish cultural mores written up as God’s Word…a separate debate.) However, if I attempt to suggest it to gobear or Esprix as a rule for their behavior, I may or may not be correct in my understanding of the O.T. Law (which, technically, applies only to Jews, Christians being, according to Paul, free of the Law…yet another debate). What is certain is that in trying to force a given moral behavior on them, I am disobeying the Law, since I am hardly “loving them as myself.” (I use the “gay=immoral” gimmick because it has been debated at length here already, so as not to raise another red herring by yet another example.)
To carry this one step further, let’s take a restrictive view of “Thou shalt not kill” that permits moral war, executions, etc., and simply says, “As an individual, thou shalt not take upon thyself to cause the death of another individual.”
Now, a hypothetical example: Paul Jones is a notorious serial pedophile/killer whose modus operandi is to seize groups of preschoolers, sodomize and torture them. Through his amazing elusiveness, he has been positively identified as the perpretrator of such crimes, but has escaped every time.
As you drive down the street from target practice, you in our example being an amateur sharpshooter, you hear on the radio that he has struck again at a preschool near where you are, and you almost immediately see him herding a group of preschoolers into a bunker constructed by the contractor in charge of erecting convenient structures in hypothetical examples. You know that that bunker is impregnable, with its own air supply and proof against anything short of nuclear weaponry.
However, you can stop the truck and get off a clear shot – cannot guarantee, at that range, you will disable but not kill him, but can surely bring him down.
Does the Sixth Commandment apply here?
What’s your moral duty?