"What interested me was the other feature--the complaint that relativists see right and wrong as a function of whether the outcome is good or not rather than the act. I don't know if I had just checked my brain at the door or what but that was new info to me. If that issue was ever raised, it blew right by me. First of all, it never occurred to me that relativists didn't see some acts as basically good or bad, all else being equal, like lying is bad and telling the truth is good, generally. It never occurred to me that anyone didn't think that. I thought the issue was merely one of whether one should lie to a mother dying from a car crash to tell her her kid survived when, in fact, he didn't, so she could die in peace. "
I don't remember discussing this- but I don't even agree with it. As a relativist, I am very process oriented. So the outcome, thought important, isn't the MOST important thing, it doesn't trump everything else- because of the precedent a process might set in certain cases. Of course I do think about the outcome of the effect of the process- so in that case I guess you could say I was outcome oriented, but only in a very convoluted way. |
