Thank you, MGibson.
HairyPotter, while I do appreciate your effort in trying to educate me, I find your schooling in forum etiquette to be rather insulting. I can assure you that I am well aware of proper forum behavior.
Fantastic. If I ever hear my neighbor beating the tar out of his wife I will not call the police. I would not want to deprive her of an opportunity to show what a “true” moral person she is. If someone tries to kill me I shall not resist. It would be silly of me to waste such an opportunity which would prove that I am a “true” moral person. I shall write my representatives in congress and demand the abolishment of the penal system and the immediate release of all prisoners. I believe that by imprisoning them we are limiting the number of times that we can be presented with moral challenges such as theft, rape, assault, and murder which would tell us if we were “true” moral people or not.
Tell me, when someone has their hands around your throat and you do nothing to defend yourself will your last thoughts be “Man he’s a sucker” as your vision grows dark around the edges?
Marc
I take it that you wouldn’t call the police if you were threatened with loss of life, limb, or property then. After all how moral would it be to get someone else to do something you considered immoral?
Marc
Marc, to be fair, I am not sure that Even Sven’s position is that violence per se is immoral, just killing. So causing alot of pain in a person so that they will go away is OK. Furthermore, turning them over to the cops for a non-capital crime would be acceptable. However, you could not turn them in for a capital crime.
At the same time, there are situations where the only way you can stop someone from hurting an innocent is by using lethal–or potentially lethal–force. Even Sven, you still haven’t answered the question about situations where a third party’s life is threatened. I, myself, feel like we do have a moral responsibility to others, and that while we do have the right to throw our own lives away, we do not have the right to throw away someone else’s, even if the cost is a life time of guilt on our own part.
YOu could tie these things togwthere into a really grim senario: you are an eyewitness to a capital crime. If you testify, the man who commited that crime will die. If you don’t, he will go free. If he goes free, there is a good chance he will commit a similiar crime (let’s say he’s a serial killer or something). I think that the only option for someone wiht a total “no-killing” attitude would be to not testify, and then dedicate your whole life to following the guy around, 24/7, to make sure he never commited another murder.
What I find really interesting about you philosophy, even sven, is that it makes much more sense for a thiest. If you believ in an afterlife, then it dosn’t matter, really, if a five year old gets sent to heaven a bit sooner than she would have otherwise. In such a case, it makes sense to worry about your own moral behavior first, and the healthiness of society second. It is more diffucult to justify if you take the position that this life is all we have–why is your moral sanctity worth more than some third party’s life?