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.

The Happy Peasant

Robert G. Ingersoll wrote a famous piece about his visit to the tomb of Napoleon. He waxed poetic over the dramatic and frequently tragic events of the man's life. Anyone who has the least passing knowledge of European history knows of Napoleon's conquests, his exile, triumphant return and his final play at Waterloo. Ingersoll reminds us of all these things and more; the countless orphans and widows he had made, and even the loss of the love of his life due to his ambition.

Then Ingersoll seems to turn his back on that cold marble tomb to perhaps look off into the countryside. This is what he writes:

And I said I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes. I would rather have lived in a hut with a vine growing over the door and the grapes growing purple in the kisses of the autumn sun. I would rather have been that poor peasant with my loving wife by my side, knitting as the day died out of the sky, with my children upon my knee and their arms about me. I would rather have been that man and gone down to the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder known as Napoleon the Great.

It is a moving bit of prose that makes me think of the range of attitudes that people have today, and have always had, about how to approach life. The pursuit of the American dream was once that of the French peasant with his loving wife at his side, but it has become more Napoleonic as time has progressed.

This is nothing new. Men who dreamed of power have always existed. They were the clan leaders, the kings, the dictators, the industrialists and so on. They pushed all their lives for some vision of how the world could be, with them at the crest of the wave that was going to make the necessary changes. A very few have been benevolent, but all have consumed their lives to fulfill some vision of accomplishment, status and wealth.

Where I'm going with this is not a sociology lesson, nor a caution about the corrupting influence of power. Instead, this article is an invitation to examine your own life, to see if the dream that you hold in your mind's eye is something that will actually bring you happiness. Do you believe that the image of the happy peasant is even possible? For most married couples these days, it seems that there isn't any time to be a happy peasant. Both parents work, and the children are constantly occupied with television, school, sports, camps, hobbies and games. The demand to excel permeates the American experience, causing single people to look for spouses during various odd moments of their week and married people to try to relate to their spouse at similarly rare moments.

Napoleon was undoubtedly conducting his life at a feverish pitch, constantly working on this plan or that, dealing with this emergency or that, and so on. The happy peasant lives a much slower pace of life, savoring his interactions with the people around him. Do we no longer take the time to savor life because we are so compelled by a world running at a feverish pitch? Or do we conduct our lives at a feverish pitch because we no longer believe that there is anything left to savor?

When was the last time you thought about relaxing in a casual conversation with someone? Instead of enjoying your time in pleasant distraction, were you intent on some personal agenda, fulfilling some small vision of the day? Were you trying to find out the latest gossip? Proving a point? Winning the game?

A modern truism that applies here is to take time to stop and smell the roses. Roses are to be beheld as beautiful both in looks and in fragrant aroma. People can be beheld as beautiful in many ways as well. Physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, we have a great capacity for beauty. Part of our ability to savor our lives is rooted in simply understanding that other people hold that capacity for beauty, even when unrealized. Ultimately, it may take a little savoring by others for us to really develop our own beauty.

The happy peasant sees the beauty in his lot in life, and he drinks deeply from it. It is my fervent hope that you can do the same, avoiding the oft-wasted effort of constantly improving your lot without ever enjoying what you have.