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From: laura@l5.uucp (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.religion,net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: How come God doesn't affect Dave?
Message-ID: <177@l5.uucp>
Date: Sun, 6-Oct-85 16:25:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: l5.177
Posted: Sun Oct  6 16:25:33 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 8-Oct-85 04:23:56 EDT
References: <2214@sdcc6.UUCP> <583@k.cs.cmu.edu.ARPA> <12039@rochester.UUCP>
Reply-To: laura@l5.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Organization: Ell-Five [Consultants], San Francisco
Lines: 48
Xref: watmath net.religion:7910 net.religion.christian:1413

In article <12039@rochester.UUCP> ray@rochester.UUCP (Ray Frank) writes:
>
>What in effect you are advocating here is that it is reasonable under the
>proper circumstances for a person to behave in a manner that was originally
>condemned as improper behavior.  A judges B, A's behavior is abominable,
>but B in turn judging A is OK?  What is not evident here is whether or not
>A was justified and B was not.  Or whether B's behavior in any case is just
>as abominable as A's.  This is one of the arguments of the anti-capital
>punishment groups.  They feel that under no circumstances should a murderer
>be murdered in turn by a legal system.  They feel murder by any other name
>is still murder, no ifs, ands, or buts or buts about it.
>
>Bottom line here is that your argument is by no means a cut and dry issue.
>The ends do not always justify the means.

NO! NO! NO!  (sorry about that). This is just one of the larger problems
that moral philosophers have in getting their point across.  What you are
claiming is that it is possible to look at events from any point-in-time
and judge.  This is not usually what is believed at all. If A kills B,
according to this theory, then it is murder because that is what murder is.

I don't buy it, and I don't know very many moral philosophers who do. If A
kills B in self-defense, then it is *not* murder, simply because B, in 
threatening A with death has stepped outside of the ``normal'' condition and
all moral judgements of A's actions will have to consider that A now has
*less freedom of action* than before.

In the above example, suppose B robs A's grocery store and threatens A. A
fears for his life but manages to shoot B.  Assume that nothing (like
starvation) forced B to rob A.  Then B had a wide variety of choices which
he could have made and he chose to rob and threaten A.  This action is
immoral.  A, however, had many fewer options - in fact, A believed that
his only options were to shoot B or to die.  Given this, most moral
philosophers (and me) would call A's actions moral. Note that if A had
always harbored a grudge against B and decided to kill B, not because A
felt threatened, but because he wanted to get away with it, my moral
judgement would be different.  Also, if after killing B, A proceeded to
rob him of his (B's) wallet, then I would judge A to be guilty of robbery,
since A is not constrained to do this.

Discussions of morality are a lot of fun. But please remember that few
people think that you can view events in isolation of prior events and
come up with meaningful moral judgements.

-- 
Laura Creighton		(note new address!)
sun!l5!laura		(that is ell-five, not fifteen)
l5!laura@lll-crg.arpa