The recurring question without an answer

[Gorgias]

What about the "kill all the men and boys, and kill all the women who are not virgins, but save for yourself the virgins (for your own sexual gratification)?

Men are combatants. Boys will grow up to kill in vengeance. In that time and place, the role of a woman was merely to give birth to children for the family/clan/nation. So, women who are not virgins cannot be married (it was a social convention) and the virgins weren’t “for sexual gratification”, they became brides (in order to birth babies for your family/clan/nation).

I’m not going to defend it, but one can understand it in the context of the time and culture. The question is whether God really ordered it, or if that’s how the people understood what they were supposed to do.

So, again: not relative morality, but – perhaps – a misunderstanding of people as to what God wanted of them.

Of course I am totally unimpressed by the Bible or the catechism.

We get that. We’re also totally unimpressed by your ‘technique’ of re-defining terms and then using the novel definitions in order to get to odd conclusions.

A law is “absolute”, if it is applicable in ALL conceivable circumstances. A law is “relative”, it is is applicable in some, but not all conceivable circumstances.

If this is a case of a mistaken understanding of God’s will – and the Bible is filled with cases of people who do bad things! – then there’s no “relative law” here.

 

[o_mlly]

Nobody said moral rules were ruled by emotions. That has been specifically denied.

Really? Well, then you’ve got a credibility problem here, Fred. You affirmed the validity of emotional rules in your moral system. To wit:

Everyone has a valid reason for not throwing the switch (or pulling the trigger etc). Even if it’s an emotionally based one.

So please don’t give me this nonsense about how emotion should be kept out of moral decision making.

Emotional based reasons are not rational reasons. Rational people are ruled by their intellect, irrational people by their feelings. The rational man moves his emotional impulse to act to his intellect. The intellect judges the passion as ordered or disordered based on principles. The intellect informs the will and either the passion is affirmed as good or denied as evil, the man acts or does not act accordingly. In a rational man who has virtue, the habitual disposition to do good, the process of vetting feelings is instantaneous. The process is somewhat slower in the one trying to become virtuous and non-existent in the vicious.

I could not follow the rest of your post. If you have a point(s) to offer then please rewrite (preferably unemotionally).

 

[EndTimes]

Question without an Answer?

No such thing…

Thou Shalt Not Murder

Time to move on, eh?

_

 

[macska]

Men are combatants. Boys will grow up to kill in vengeance. In that time and place, the role of a woman was merely to give birth to children for the family/clan/nation.

Aha! So preemptive killing of children just because they MIGHT grow into combatants is A-OK?

I’m not going to defend it, but one can understand it in the context of the time and culture. The question is whether God really ordered it, or if that’s how the people understood what they were supposed to do.

So, again: not relative morality, but – perhaps – a misunderstanding of people as to what God wanted of them.

If a morality is contingent upon the time an culture, then it is not “absolute”. This possible “misunderstanding” puts the OT into jeopardy.

If this is a case of a mistaken understanding of God’s will – and the Bible is filled with cases of people who do bad things! – then there’s no “relative law” here.

The only way to understand God’s will would be to read his OWN words…

 

[OKComputer]

Thank you!

 

[LeafByNiggle]

LeafByNiggle:

Freddy:

The closest you are going to get to that from a Catholic viewpoint is the catechism 2488, which confirms that there is no absolute moral position: ‘This requires us in concrete situations to judge whether or not it is appropriate to reveal the truth to someone who asks for it.’ In other words, telling a lie is conditional to the circumstances.

If that isn’t a relative position then I’m at a loss to be able to define the difference between absolute and relative.

It is absolute in the sense that no conditions other than the ones mentioned in the law would change the outcome. For example, if I have an opportunity through lying to cause a million dollars to be transferred to the charity of my choice from a company that is polluting rivers, situational ethics would say that “considering everything” more good can be done by lying, and to people who subscribe to that view, that situation justifies lying. But the law is absolute in the sense that this situation, as noble as it appears, does not change the applicability of the law.

That would relate more to stealing.

I use that example to illustrate that Catholic morality is not “situational ethics”.

If I steal something to prevent a crime, like my neighbours gun because he just threatened to kill my family, that would be justified.

That is your opinion. I disagree, and so does Catholic morality. I understand that your morality does not agree with Catholic morality, and that is your right, and not the subject of this discussion. But please be careful when assuming what Catholic morality would say.

So if the companynis breaking the law by polluting the rivers then it should be ok tonsteal from them to prevent them doing it.

Again, that is not what Catholic morality says because it is not situational ethics.

And in nay case, how do you relate that to the obviously conditional example in the catechism: ‘This requires us in concrete situations to judge whether or not it is appropriate to reveal the truth to someone who asks for it’.

It is conditional. That does not mean it conforms to the formal understanding of situational ethics, which is term with an existing definition that we should use if we are going to use that term. If you want to use some other term, like “ethics that takes into account certain conditions” I would not object to the application of that term to Catholic morality. But since the issue was raised using the term “situational ethics” I must object to the use of that term because it is inaccurate.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

Gorgias:

Men are combatants. Boys will grow up to kill in vengeance. In that time and place, the role of a woman was merely to give birth to children for the family/clan/nation.

Aha! So preemptive killing of children just because they MIGHT grow into combatants is A-OK?

You mistake Gorgias’s explanation, which was not meant to be an explanation of a general rule that man could apply in some other circumstance. In Catholic morality, God is understood to have a special role when it comes to morality. I can well believe that you do not share this understanding, but it is there nevertheless. That is that all we have, including our lives, comes from God, who has a perfect right to order that life as He sees fit. We have no cause to complain to God because we have nothing of ourselves that was not first given by God. So when God commands an action that would otherwise be immoral without that command, it is moral. Not other acts like it. Just that act. Full stop. But what you are trying to do is to abstract some human understanding of that situation so that the action God ordered in that situation must be OK in other situations where God did not order it. This is a problem for atheists who do not believe there is a God and who believe that all morality must be something that man can deduce through his own power of reason. This is a fundamental problem that cannot be resolved by playing totally by the rules of atheists.

Perhaps the best example of a morality seemingly detached from human reason was when Abraham was ordered by God to offer up his only son Isaac as a sacrifice. Of course we know from the rest of the story that God intervened at the last second to prevent the sacrifice, but we believe that Abraham was fully intending to follow through with the sacrifice.

 

[o_mlly]

If I steal something to prevent a crime, like my neighbours gun because he just threatened to kill my family, that would be justified.

The act you describe is not stealing.

CCC#2408 The seventh commandment forbids theft , that is, usurping another’s property against the reasonable will of the owner.

Your neighbor seems quite unreasonable.

 

[Gorgias]

Aha! So preemptive killing of children just because they MIGHT grow into combatants is A-OK?

Two problems with that assertion:

• First: in that culture, it’s not a question of “might” – the children would be honor-bound to avenge the deaths of their family members. Vendetta is a horrible thing, and it self-perpetuates.
• Second: we’re not asserting that this is a moral act. What makes the “difficult verses” in the Bible so difficult is the seeming contradiction between God as all-good and the appearance of something that is not good. Is this a representation of something that the people thought God was asking them to do? A misunderstanding of what God actually wanted? We want to find a way to understand this, in a way that doesn’t violate what we know about God – His omni-benevolence. I won’t sugar-coat it: it’s a tough row to hoe!

If a morality is contingent upon the time an culture, then it is not “absolute”.

That’s the whole point: this is immoral behavior. Just because an event in human history appears in the Bible, doesn’t mean that it’s a moral event. We understand morality in terms of God’s will, not in terms of human behavior in contradiction to God’s will.

The only way to understand God’s will would be to read his OWN words…

That’s a nice oversimplification, but it doesn’t get you far. Is the sin of Adam something that God wanted? Are the sins that led up to Noah’s flood? Just because it’s in the Bible, it doesn’t mean that it’s what God desired… it’s just what people did. Sometimes it’s good… and sometimes not.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

Nobody said moral rules were ruled by emotions. That has been specifically denied.

Really? Well, then you’ve got a credibility problem here, Fred. You affirmed the validity of emotional rules in your moral system. To wit:

Everyone has a valid reason for not throwing the switch (or pulling the trigger etc). Even if it’s an emotionally based one.

So please don’t give me this nonsense about how emotion should be kept out of moral decision making.

Emotional based reasons are not rational reasons. Rational people are ruled by their intellect, irrational people by their feelings. The rational man moves his emotional impulse to act to his intellect. The intellect judges the passion as ordered or disordered based on principles. The intellect informs the will and either the passion is affirmed as good or denied as evil, the man acts or does not act accordingly. In a rational man who has virtue, the habitual disposition to do good, the process of vetting feelings is instantaneous. The process is somewhat slower in the one trying to become virtuous and non-existent in the vicious.

I could not follow the rest of your post. If you have a point(s) to offer then please rewrite (preferably unemotionally).

I don’t think that you followed the first part either.

Moral rules are based on reason (not always agreed upon). I would have thought that that was pretty clear. Sacrifice the one and save five (or in your case do nothing and let the five die).

But the decisions we make in regard to moral problems are often based on emotion. Equally clear but often misunderstood. People think they are making a moral decision based on reason when their emotions are pulling some of the strings. Save dear old mum and let the five die. You’d do the same. Hey, are we in agreement?

No. We are not. Your decision is based on reason (well, actually it’s based on conforming to a religiously based moral code but we can skip that). And mine on emotion. Hence the need for trolley problems. So we can determine which part of the moral decision was based on emotion and which on what we individually determine to be the reason based moral rule.

So what this entire thread has been about is moral problems and the part that emotion has to play in them. If you kept emotion out of these moral problems as you suggested (an impossibilty in any case) then there would be no requirement for the last few hundred posts. How emotion affects our decisions on moral matters is the entire raison d’etre of this entire discussion.

Didn’t you realise that? Colour me puzzled.

 

[Freddy]

I’m not going to defend it, but one can understand it in the context of the time and culture.

So, again: not relative morality…

Now I have cornflakes all over my tablet.

 

[Freddy]

If I steal something to prevent a crime, like my neighbours gun because he just threatened to kill my family, that would be justified.

That is your opinion. I disagree, and so does Catholic morality.

And in nay case, how do you relate that to the obviously conditional example in the catechism: ‘This requires us in concrete situations to judge whether or not it is appropriate to reveal the truth to someone who asks for it’.

It is conditional. That does not mean it conforms to the formal understanding of situational ethics, which is term with an existing definition that we should use if we are going to use that term. If you want to use some other term, like “ethics that takes into account certain conditions” I would not object to the application of that term to Catholic morality. But since the issue was raised using the term “situational ethics” I must object to the use of that term because it is inaccurate.

‘He’s going to kill us! Take his gun!’
‘Sorry dear, that would be stealing’.

Really?

And situational ethics is pretty much the term and the description of the concept in one. From wiki:

’ Situational ethics or situation ethics takes into account the particular context of an act when evaluating it ethically, rather than judging it according to absolute moral standards. With the intent to have a fair basis for judgments or action, one looks to personal ideals of what is appropriate to guide them, rather than an unchanging universal code of conduct, such as Biblical law under divine command theory’

I’m at a loss to differentiate that from the section quoted from the catechism. Which, as you agreed, was conditional morality. That is, act appropriately to the conditions. Relative to the conditions. He’s going to kill your family so steal the gun for heaven’s sake!

 

[LeafByNiggle]

LeafByNiggle:

If I steal something to prevent a crime, like my neighbours gun because he just threatened to kill my family, that would be justified.

That is your opinion. I disagree, and so does Catholic morality.

And in nay case, how do you relate that to the obviously conditional example in the catechism: ‘This requires us in concrete situations to judge whether or not it is appropriate to reveal the truth to someone who asks for it’.

It is conditional. That does not mean it conforms to the formal understanding of situational ethics, which is term with an existing definition that we should use if we are going to use that term. If you want to use some other term, like “ethics that takes into account certain conditions” I would not object to the application of that term to Catholic morality. But since the issue was raised using the term “situational ethics” I must object to the use of that term because it is inaccurate.

‘He’s going to kill us! Take his gun!’
‘Sorry dear, that would be stealing’.

Really?

I’m not sure what scenario goes with this dialog, so I won’t presume. It sounds like you are trying to describe an incidence of self defense. But stealing is not self defense, so you are just mixing things that don’t go together in an effort to make two different things the same.

 

[macska]

That’s a nice oversimplification, but it doesn’t get you far. Is the sin of Adam something that God wanted? Are the sins that led up to Noah’s flood? Just because it’s in the Bible, it doesn’t mean that it’s what God desired… it’s just what people did. Sometimes it’s good… and sometimes not.

You keep forgetting the principle: “The BUCK stops here!” (On the desk of Harry S. Truman) The buck stops with one on the top. Whether God wanted these acts, or merely allowed them is totally irrelevant. Of course this has been explained to you several times, but you either don’t understand or do not WANT to acknowledge it.

But the point stands either way. Pre-emptive killing of innocents is SOMETIMES justified, and other times it is not - depending on the circumstances.

In Catholic morality, God is understood to have a special role when it comes to morality.

This is the problem expressed in the so-called Euthyphro dilemma. Is there an “absolute” morality which is binding on God, too, or is the morality contingent upon God’s whim? One of the unsolvable dilemmas. And, of course you cannot solve it by stipulating that God is ALWAYS “moral”, so there is no dilemma.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

LeafByNiggle:

If I steal something to prevent a crime, like my neighbours gun because he just threatened to kill my family, that would be justified.

That is your opinion. I disagree, and so does Catholic morality.

And in nay case, how do you relate that to the obviously conditional example in the catechism: ‘This requires us in concrete situations to judge whether or not it is appropriate to reveal the truth to someone who asks for it’.

It is conditional. That does not mean it conforms to the formal understanding of situational ethics, which is term with an existing definition that we should use if we are going to use that term. If you want to use some other term, like “ethics that takes into account certain conditions” I would not object to the application of that term to Catholic morality. But since the issue was raised using the term “situational ethics” I must object to the use of that term because it is inaccurate.

‘He’s going to kill us! Take his gun!’
‘Sorry dear, that would be stealing’.

Really?

I’m not sure what scenario goes with this dialog, so I won’t presume. It sounds like you are trying to describe an incidence of self defense. But stealing is not self defense, so you are just mixing things that don’t go together in an effort to make two different things the same.

It’s stealing. You said you wouldn’t do it. Situational ethics says you could donit. The catechism says that if the conditions permit it you can do it.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

This is the problem expressed in the so-called Euthyphro dilemma. Is there an “absolute” morality which is binding on God, too, or is the morality contingent upon God’s whim?

The word “whim” is loaded, implying an uncaring decision. God is moral because He is the author of all that is, including morality, but humans are not in a position to judge God. So it makes no sense to talk about something being “binding” on God, for who is in a position to do the binding? No one.

And, of course you cannot solve it by stipulating that God is ALWAYS “moral”

But I just have. The fact that you don’t like my position does not make it wrong.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

It’s stealing.

So you say. But since you haven’t described the scenario yet, only given some dialog that accompanies it, who can say? The most reasonable scenario I can imagine that goes with that dialog is self-defense, not stealing. But it is your scenario. Care to fill us in on what is going on?

 

[macska]

The word “whim” is loaded, implying an uncaring decision.

I never saw anything to the contrary. And I looked, and looked real hard.

God is moral because He is the author of all that is, including morality, but humans are not in a position to judge God.

God is also the author of all the misery, cruelty and pain. If you wish to talk about God, don’t selectively talk about the “good” stuff. That is like a scientist, who “cooks” the books; retains the records of the successful experiments, and destroys the records of the unsuccessful ones. Intellectual honesty is praiseworthy, the opposite is not.

But I just have. The fact that you don’t like my position does not make it wrong.

The lack of intellectual honesty renders your opinion irrelevant.

 

[Gorgias]

Now I have cornflakes all over my tablet.

Your digestive problems aren’t relevant here. Spew on your own time.

Seriously, though: if we were to assert, simultaneously, that murder is wrong and murders actually happen, that wouldn’t be a concession that “relative morality” is in play. Rather, it would be an assertion that absolute morality is what’s being proposed, but that humans don’t always meet the standards of that morality.

If that makes you laugh, well… it’s telling that you think that human frailty is humorous.

Whether God wanted these acts, or merely allowed them is totally irrelevant.

No. It’s literally the whole point.

Of course this has been explained to you several times

Of course, the deficiencies of your argumentation have been explained to you several times… but it’s clear that you don’t want to understand.

But the point stands either way. Pre-emptive killing of innocents is SOMETIMES justified, and other times it is not - depending on the circumstances.

Nope. Again – you’re demonstrating that you have a greater desire to mischaracterize than to dialogue honestly. Good luck with that approach.

The fact that you don’t like my position does not make it wrong.

In his mind, apparently, it does.

The lack of intellectual honesty renders your opinion irrelevant.

If I had a dime for every time someone attempted to explain away the weakness of their argument as a “lack of intellectual honesty” in their interlocutor…

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

It’s stealing.

So you say. But since you haven’t described the scenario yet, only given some dialog that accompanies it, who can say? The most reasonable scenario I can imagine that goes with that dialog is self-defense, not stealing. But it is your scenario. Care to fill us in on what is going on?

The guy has said he is going to kill you and your family. While he is arguing with your wife you slip off and take his gun without his permision. You steal it. Thus preventing him carrying out his crime.