WinePusher wrote:
I think that some people who support abortion have good intentions, and are generally concerned about women's rights. These are not the grounds of immorality though.
McCulloch wrote:
Even people with good intentions can act immorally. Or is it that all that is required, in your view, to be moral is to have good intentions?
WinePusher wrote:
To be moral is to have good intentions. If I slip on a bannana peel and kill a dog, it is not an immoral action because it was not my intent to do so.
Can morality be reduced to merely having good intentions?
Examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good. First Epistle to the Church of the Thessalonians The truth will make you free. Gospel of John
AkiThePirate wrote:How does one determine that that is morally correct?
It depends on how you define 'moral' What do you mean by moral?
Why do I keep seeing this question posed to the same person every tim?
Why use moral, why dont we use socially correct? Morals change from person to person depending on their background, wealth, and other factors. So when it comes to using the term "moral" there is no definite answer. So we need to create another word for it that everyone agrees with. Everyone knows what society deems to be right and wrong.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Voltaire
Kung may ayaw, may dahilan. Kung may gusto, may paraan.
This hair-splitting about the exact meaning of words is a waste of time. Every sensible person has a sense of what is right and wrong. Infinitesimal debating about where each person draws the line between one thing and another is not the way to proceed.
The question that was asked concerned the nature of morality; is it a social convenience or is it deeper than that. The implicit question is whether life has a spiritual reality to it. If it does morality is more than a convenience because morality is concerned with life. If life is spiritual morality is concerned with spiritual reality.
The hair splitting is an attempt to either have you define an objective morality or to cease claiming that it exists.
That humans have a general sense of 'right' and 'wrong' means little.
In my humble opinion, it is precisely when "hair-splitting" is necessary that this becomes a subject for debate; and debate and consensus is where we find solutions to the DIFFICULT ethical questions, and those solutions are inevitably dependent on circumstance and detail and may or may not be wholly clear.
The basics, or extremes, or however one wishes to phrase it, are not difficult. Gratuitous cruelty, e.g. torturing a small child to death for one's amusement, is wrong; actions that are clearly of benefit and not harm to humans, e.g. protecting that child from such treatment, are right, as are feeding the starving and caring for the ill and afflicted. Now, theoretical speculation about whether those things can be proven moral or immoral, and on what grounds, is a nice little intellectual boardgame, but if anyone really NEEDS these extremes to be proven right or wrong as a practical matter... Well, I don't have time to teach otherwise intelligent adults moral concepts that are clear to seven-year-olds.
It's the complex and multifaceted situations that require deeper thought, and sometimes there is more than one answer; sometimes there are NO answers. As discussed on another thread, I once had a client with both Alzheimer's and progressive cancer. Does one seek chemotherapy to lengthen life in that situation, or not?
Questions of this nature aren't simple, with obvious answers. Other questions necessarily present themselves; Does the chemotherapy have difficult side effects? How painful and lingering will the death be? Is the Alzheimer's the relatively benign kind, where the patient is forgetful, but happily so? Or the difficult kind, with the patient suffering from paranoia and constant agitation? Who should get to decide? Many possible answers are defensible; are any of them provably and indubitably correct?
As I have said many, many times, only practical questions about real life are really meaningful. The rest are interesting, but academic and theoretical at best.
