Vastly different situations, as you know. At least, I trust you are intelligent enough to know that.
Understanding someone's context doesn't necessarily mean agreeing with it. But it is necessary before you impose moral judgment.
My first example was apt.
On the streets of New York City, intentionally crashing into somebody and knocking him down is generally not okay. You go to jail for it. (But even there it's sometimes okay, as for example if the person has just snatched a woman's purse and is fleeing with it.)
On the ice of Madison Square Garden, it is.
So what in one context is a crime in another is sport. (Or even good samaritanship.) You may not like ice hockey, you may think it is cruel, evil, stupid. But played within the rules it isn't a crime.
Let's look at maybe a better example.
When a doctor vaccinates a child, he hurts the child. He deliberately inflicts suffering on the child. Does that make the doctor evil? Here, he INTENTIONALLY hurt a little child that hadn't done a thing to him. He INTENTIONALLY CREATES suffering. If all you can say is "it is always wrong to hurt a child or make a child suffer," then the doctor is evil, wicked, terrible.*
I say you can't stop there. I say you have to look at the context -- the doctor is hurting the child short term to help it long term. Within that context, hurting the child is not a bad thing, but a good thing, even though some few children will have bad reactions to the vaccination and may even die. So again, if you say "causing the death of an innocent child who was doing you no harm at all is always wrong" the doctor should go to jail. Along with all the people who produced the vaccine, and the parent who brought the child in for the shot, etc.
If you want to call that moral relativism, that's your choice. I don't. I call it exercising moral judgment.
If you are making a moral judgment, which E is, you have to start not by ignoring or, worse, denying the principles out of which the person acts, but by first understanding what the context, principles, and purposes of the act were. Given my doctor example, you don't simply say "the doctor hurt the child" and stop there. You ask "for what purpose did he hurt the child--is there any justification for hurting the child?"
Now, say you are a Christian Scientist, or a secularist, who believes that at all vaccinations are immoral, or that they do more harm than good and constitute a form of child abuse. You would then believe that the doctor was not, in your moral context, justified in hurting the child at all. If you stop there, you would say that the doctor did a wrong act, and might post all sorts of nasty things here condemning the doctor for deliberatly inflicting suffering on little children and being an evil person.
But I hope you are also capable of saying that society at large accepts, even though not all agree, that it is not immoral or unreasonable to believe that vaccinating children can be a helping, caring thing to do. Within that context, the doctor is not evil, but good. So, clearly, context and intent matter. They aren't all, of course, but they do matter.
That's all I'm saying. Nothing to do with Hitler or Stalin, who you just dragged in because you like to be obnoxious.
If you pick the right (or wrong) context, every one of us can be proved to be wicked and evil and a totally terrible person. There's no difficulty in that, and as far as I'm concerned no point to it. Moral judgment requires judgment.
Unless, of course, you agree with X, in which case MT did what she does because she has no choice, and E condemns her because she has no choice, and you post stupid analogies which even you are bright enough to know are stupid because you have no choice. That's your alternative.
*A note that belonged above but interrupted the flow of the argument too much: what's worse, the child being vaccinated didn't make a choice to come to the doctor; he was brought, probably kicking and screaming (at least that was me when I was getting shots back when -- they aren't supposed to hurt as much now, but then, they DID) and was physically restrained and forced into being hurt. Not the case with MT; she didn't dragoon people and drag them into her hospitals in restraints and force them to undergo her treatment. As, BTW, we do today in this country with certain people today. |
