| And this is the second commandment, which is as great as the first... |
 And this is the second commandment, which is as great as the first...
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Mar. 3rd, 2009 @ 10:01 am 
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... that you shall love your neighbour as yourself.
Tired this morning, so I stopped off at the Reid Library cafe for a coffee. I also remembered I'd forgotten to pack an apple today for snacking purposes, so I bought one of those as well. (They sell out fairly early, but apparently before half past nine there are still a few left...)
I was thinking about something that I read about on my morning internets today, although I don't remember where exactly and I can't look it up because I don't have internet access here. (Accursed SNAP deadzone.) It was probably something that came up on/was linked on my friendslist. Anyway.
The point at issue was a discussion the moral implications of Hitler's great-great-great-grandparents having sex. The issue being that their act of copulation ultimately lead to genocide, and so was arguably wrong, except there's absolutely no way they could have known that, etc. The ultimate point of the argument is that the final moral value of acts are unknowable, which is fine - anything can potentially have consequences wholly unknown. If you pull a drowning child out of a pond, you may well be saving the boy who will one day cure cancer, or you may be saving the boy who will one day nuke all of Eastern Europe to bedrock. You can't know.
All this is well and good. We cannot know all the ramifications of our actions. All we can do is our best, in good faith; if you're religious, you can add to that a faith that !deity is working to some grand plan where everything will be All Right. If you're not (and even if you are, just add an "also" here) you can cling to the view that, in the march of human history, overall, the trend for humanity is positive. Or you can fall into some kind of fatalistic nihilism, whatever gets you through the day.
The point with which I took some issue was that they included the argument that Hitler's work may have prevented some greater genocide, and so, in an unknowable way, his ancestors' combining to produce him may have been a good thing.
It's a cute rhetorical point, but it bothers me, because as a line of reasoning it's kind of dangerous. It offers a copout - taking the argument further, all the people who could have stopped Hitler, and didn't, may not in fact have been wrong; they too may have been contributing to some greater good. So obviously any kind of moral agency or potential for human fault is expunged from the world; if you can't know the ultimate results of your actions, for good or ill, then presumably you can't be held accountable for them, because who knows? You may have been wrong, or you may have saved the world in some unknowable fashion.
To hell with that!
As flawed as we mere humans are, and as unknowable as the lines of future possibility may be, I believe that we should do the best we can to try and make the world a better place. If you're religious, well... few religions don't command it. If you're not? Then all we have is each other, and since no god has ordained that you have the right to live and breathe and consume the resources of a finite planet, then you have a responsibility to the world in exchange for your place in it.Current Mood:  pensive Current Location: Arts: ALR9 Current Music: my linguistics lecture starting
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Totally agreed. "We can never be sure for certain what's right" does not mean "Everything is equivalent and there's no point even bothering".
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