The Quandary of Morality

What is morality? Is it something that we can grasp? It is something easily defined and is there a clear line drawn in the metaphorical sands of ethics?

These are some very powerful questions I've been toying with in the past weeks. I do believe there is a God. I do believe there are some very important things that we cannot do because they are innately wrong and can be easily discerned to be right or wrong. Things such as taking something which doesn't belong to you or lying.

Now I will step back and ask how do we view right and wrong? I will venture to say that an activity which is nearly always "wrong" isn't wrong itself. The context of the situation is responsible for the transition of morality. Some activities, such as rape, will be permanently wrong. After much pondering, I have never been able to devise a situation under which a rape could benefit someone. They may force themselves to grow into a stronger person, but that is not a benefit of the actual evil itself, but rather of the individual choosing to be positive no matter what they are facing.  But, for many things, doing wrong isn't always wrong.

I think the only real difference between the right and wrong would be the object of the benefit and the target of the misfortune. When a soldier jumps on a grenade to save his friends, his actions are said to be good, because he choose to sacrifice himself for the benefit of others. He received the bad and others received the benefit of prolonged life. Good.

Therefore, according to our current hypothesis, we can judge the right or wrong of a specific action based on how it will affect others. In this way we can now see that stealing your sister's pack of cigarettes would ultimately benefit her, despite the theft required for the benefit to come about. So would this then make the act of thievery a morally right thing to do? I think so, but for some reason I still cannot view the actual action of removing the cigarettes from my dear sister's possession as a "good" thing. Those are her cigarettes. I do not own them, and therefore should not endeavor to do so, without the permission of my sister. But I would be adding years to her life if I could succeed in motivating her to quit.

Now let us enter the mythical realm of the hypothetical. Let us pretend for a moment that I am driving a bus full of school children across the Alaskan wilderness in the dead of winter. A blizzard is mounting and I am running low on fuel. If the bus were to run out of fuel, all of the children and I would freeze to death within the hour. We haven't passed a gas station in hours and then out of nowhere, we happen upon a unheated store. The owner's car is sitting outside, and he is just about to leave. Let's also say that we know the store owner lives almost an hour away. If I were to stop and steal the store owners gas so that I would save the lives of the children, but also certainly kill the store owner, because he then would not be able to make it to the safety of shelter, what would be the proper thing to do? Would the right thing to be the action that gave the most number of people the biggest benefit? Or would the fact that I would be stealing from that very unfortunate store nullify the benefit? I don't have the answers. I don't know what is the right thing to do.

I thankfully believe that the world is never nearly that dramatic, but I think that often the black and white line of morality is severely muddled both by our perception of what good and bad will occur based on our actions.

Food for thought, my friends.

~V 1.0~

 //If you have any topics you would like to see me write about, drop me a comment\\