Moral Luck

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Talishi
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Moral Luck

Post #1

Post by Talishi »

Two men get drunk, then get in their cars and attempt to drive home.

One of them blacks out and runs off the road to the right, where he sleeps it off in the ditch.

The other one blacks out and runs off the road to the left, where he kills a pedestrian.


Both men performed precisely the same actions, except that chance intervened in the latter case, making him culpable for manslaughter.

The lesson is that the world is a chaotic place where simple black and white moral rules like “Yer either with me or yer with Qaeda!� handed down from on high are not cut out to deal with it. Divine command theory is as ineffective as central planning proved to be in managing a nation’s economy. In reality, even morals and ethics are subject to the principle of the market, also known, in a biological context, as natural selection.

In places like Ireland, where the Catholic Church was the final moral authority for centuries, the people have risen up to strip the Church of power when the sexual abuse of their children by the very arbiters of that moral authority reached a tipping point. From time immemorial, neighbors have risen up to deal with wife abusers or cat burglars when the local constable refused to do anything about them.

For debate:

Is morality handed down from on high, as a black and white proposition, or is morality subject to the uncounted variables that form the fabric of life as we know it?

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bluethread
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Post #31

Post by bluethread »

Blastcat wrote: [Replying to post 5 by bluethread]

bluethread wrote:
The difference is not a matter of chance, but a matter of subordinating one's judgement to factors that are within ones control.
If a person has blacked out, there is no control.


:)
There is control in putting oneself in a position of blacking out, behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. This person is not a victim.

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Blastcat
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Post #32

Post by Blastcat »

[Replying to post 31 by bluethread]




[center]
Killing a tree vs killing a human:
Are these two acts morally equivalent?
[/center]

bluethread wrote:
The difference is not a matter of chance, but a matter of subordinating one's judgement to factors that are within ones control.
If a person has blacked out, there is no control.

[/quote]

bluethread wrote:
There is control in putting oneself in a position of blacking out, behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. This person is not a victim.
Of COURSE.

Up to a point, both cases are the same.
The ending is different.

Both people in this scenario drank to excess and then DROVE. That's the SAME.

ONCE they blacked out, THEN they had NO CONTROL over what happened next.
We all KNOW that they had control when they decided to drink to excess. That's the same for the two cases.

The law says it doesn't matter if they were completely drunk when they decided to drive, that's an offense. ( I think in most parts of the world, now )

They MIGHT have not been in control when they decided to drive drunk like that, but LEGALLY, that's too bad. You drive drunk and get caught, you get a legal consequence.

We aren't discussing the morality of drunk driving.
That's an OTHER issue.

Up to here, both cases are exactly the same.
I say that they should be charged that the same.

This is a legal matter, however.
The law and morality are NOT the same in all cases.

People tend to forget that.


The DIFFERENCE between the two cases is:


They had both lost control of their cars, because both had lost consciousness at the time. One unconscious driver kills a tree and the other kills a person.

See any moral difference THERE?


:)

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