Black and White

I was once discussing ethics with a man. I was proposing that there is an absolute sense of right and wrong, and he disagreed. It all depended on the situation. To illustrate his point, he posed the following dilemma to me:

"Your wife is deathly ill. There is a store around the corner that has the drugs to cure her, but you have no way of paying for them and the store owner won't just give them to you. Would you steal the drugs in order to save her life?"

After a few moments, I gave him the answer that he expected: I would steal the drugs to save my spouse's life. He was delighted, of course, because he held that theft was moral in that circumstance. That it was justifiable. It sat poorly with me, but I didn't have a way of explaining my problem with it all.

You may have run into similar situations, where someone threw you a curve in logic that you'd never explored, or never considered. It happens to me all the time because I don't think well on my feet. I have to figure things out well in advance. So when somebody throws something at me that they think is a surprise, I can easily respond to it because I've already worked through it.

In this case, I ultimately worked out the answer that I'd like to have given him. I present it here in an effort to expand your understanding of moral relativism and moral absolutism. Moral relativism is exactly what the man that posed the dilemma subscribed to, that the morality of an act is determined by the situation that you perform it in. A moral relativist would say that stealing was moral in the situation of it saving a life. A moral absolutist would say that stealing was immoral because it violates the inherent rule of law that governs society.

Yet I chose to steal. I'm pretty serious about doing the right thing, and I still chose to steal in order to save a life. The answer here is that I chose to steal in order to save a life, but that stealing was still an immoral act. The end does not justify the means.

The way to understand this particular dilemma is to think about the aftermath. When my spouse has survived and I get back on my feet financially, what is the morally correct thing to do? Should I ignore the store owner that I stole from because my theft saved a life? Or should I pay the store owner for the drugs that I took? Clearly, I should pay the owner. Why? Because stealing is wrong, and paying the owner for the drugs is a step in the direction of correcting an unethical act. It is an attempt at righting a wrong.

People aren't perfect. We live in an imperfect world that demands compromises and distasteful acts. If we lose track of the absolute sense of right and wrong, we can easily be drawn into believing things that are not true; such as the belief that theft is good in some circumstances. This happens because we have to live with our mistakes.

Suppose I never got on my feet financially. I've be living with the fact that I stole something. I'd never stolen anything before in my life, yet I went and stole from someone I might very well have known. I'd feel pretty bad about it. Temptation time. I'd feel bad about it until I thought about the good that I'd done. I'd saved my spouse's life! I could tell myself that it wasn't THAT bad to steal in that circumstance. I'd ultimately done good.

And so it goes. The process of cementing moral relativism as a truth can happen oh so easily. Consider more mild situations. Little white lies that we tell to soften the impact of bad news, or to dodge unpleasant outcomes. Everyone is happier as a result, so why not tell the lie? We get very practiced at lieing as a result. We no longer see lies as being unethical but rather as a tool. We use terms like "spin" instead of "lie". It is moral relativism in action; when the unethical becomes legitimate, we institutionalize unethical acts.

Of course, the choices that life hands us can often seem dominated by shades of moral grey, never entirely black nor entirely white. But if you look closely at those choices, you will see little flecks of black and white, not unlike a photograph as printed in a newspaper. A moral man or a moral woman will look closely at each choice in their life so that they can keep track of which part of any given choice is black and which part is white. They can then be content in the white and act to correct the black. With practice, it becomes second nature.

The key here is to figure out what is right and what is wrong. People have been looking at that particular problem for thousands of years. You would do well to review what they have passed down to us in written and oral form. It has survived the critical test of time. They are the philosophies and religions of great and inspired thinkers. Read what they have written. Trying to figure it out all on your own is a fool's errand. It's that black and white.