What if your intention was to teach them survival. No they are not you dependents nor is there any reason to do so, but your intention is not malicious, you never intended for them to get harmed. Now what? Is it wrong or not? — khaled
For the actor to intend them not to be harmed, they would have to be mentally deficient enough to not consider that the lesson was more lethal than that which the subject might expect to face. Or, alternatively, belong to a culture in which teaching this lesson is held as crucial. In the former case, we're likely not describing a moral agent; in the latter, there are other examples.
Human sacrifice is one I've brought up before, in which the belief is that the disputed act is essential to the survival of the group as a whole and all of the individuals within it. Homicide was a grave (haha) crime in Aztec law, so this matches Kierkegaard's description of a teleological suspension of ethics. The root error is not a moral one, but one of fact.
Another pertinent example is how religions propagate. Parents usually indoctrinate their children almost from birth, which hugely skews the child's ability to determine the validity of their own beliefs, which in turn makes it harder to discern reality from fiction. Religion is hardly alone in this, but it is the most pronounced example, especially given the fears often instilled in those children for even questioning their beliefs in the face of contrary evidence, sound argument, or a disagreeable consensus.
I would consider both cultures bad in the sense that they are antisocial: they lead to the pointless murder and brainwashing of innocent people respectively. However the individuals perpetrating the acts are themselves products of the cultures that insist upon them, and thus are blameless.
I have heard of cultures in which adolescent boys are sent into the wild for a spell of time to learn how to survive, however I'm not sure how accurate these are. One example I've heard of is some Australian aboriginal tribes, where there is definite risk, such as spider or snake bites, but not the sort of risk where one might expect the lesson to be more lethal than real life. I could only conjecture on this because I'm not sure it's accurate. It seems to me illogical to send an inexperienced person out alone to face dangers that they are likely to overcome later based on experience and safety in numbers. It seems, therefore, contrary to what it is to be social, but then cultures often are. Were it true, I would not judge them morally, but like the other two examples, I wouldn't mourn the loss of the culture.
I can't think of any other scenario in which it can be logically possible for a person to drastically reduce the odds of another person surviving in order to teach them survival. It seems such a stupid idea, either the person involved is a moral idiot, or they emerge from a stupid culture I'd rather see perish.
But what if your intent was never to harm, but you put them in harm's way anyways. Does that make it acceptable? — khaled
I'm not sure what you mean. Can you flesh out the example? Or does the above cover it?
I was referring to the couples that don't have children after learning that they are likely to have a severe genetic illness. Even if they can afford to care for them. How do you explain that behavior? — khaled
Oh I see. That's not too mysterious. If you can make a rational decision, then you are not that desperate. For instance, if you are starving but think, "No, I shouldn't steal that load in case my victim also starves to death" than you are clearly capable of rational decision making. That's admirable, but it doesn't follow that
every starving person is in the same state.
But if they're psychopaths, which many are, then they're not culpable per your own words... So now what? Are they no longer doing anything wrong? — khaled
It's a good question. Psychopaths are edge-cases, and edge-cases depend all the more on specifics. We cannot have evolved to handle psychopaths precisely because they are edge cases. Nature has nothing to say about them and so in a way are also not moral
objects as well as not being moral
subjects. I assume that, in pre-agricultural times, psychopaths would have been treated exactly the same as any other antisocial element and been promptly killed or exiled.
What do we do with the knowledge about psychopathy? It seems to me that we cannot generally hold them morally culpable for the actions they take (although see below), and so we cannot in good conscience punish them beyond that which is strictly necessary to safeguard society. What say we put them under house arrest, but in a grand penthouse suite with the best luxuries of life? Instinctively, it seems abhorrent, but that's because, like our ancestors, we struggle to see them as anything other than moral agents. In a way, it's the equivalent of not being able to comprehend death or the void. But there's no moral or rational reason to punish them.
However, I did say it depends on specifics. A person capable of cognitive empathy but incapable of emotional empathy is hungry (not starving) and steals the bread of another starving man... It seems reasonable to me that the psychopath could not be expected to understand that his need (hunger) was less than his crime (theft). If he then killed someone who was about to report him to the police in order to safeguard his liberty, that is horrific but still understandable: his ethical crime, from his point of view, was simply to break a social rule for the sake of something vital to himself (a teleological suspension of entirely abstract ethics). I see no moral culpability.
But if he pushed a child of a cliff to enjoy the sound of her screams... There we might have common ground on. There is no perceived need, and he knows that's wrong on an intellectual level. That has more in common with a normal person hurting others for pleasure, so we might have common ground there. Such a person would certainly be a monster, and the question of the extent of his moral culpability seems rather moot. Happy to talk it out though.
There is no contradiction there so there is nothing irrational about it. I am not a perfect being. I do wrong things. That doesn't make the wrong things not wrong. I don't see why you want to join the ideal that is morality with the reality. If you want to say that arguing about ideals is impractical, people will still have kids, and starving people will still steal, sure, I don't really care though. — khaled
And this is why I think we have very different ideas of what morality is. Yours is quite old school, in which if you broke the law you're immoral and that's that. Mine is somewhat more new-school, in which one considers a broader range of factors in determining culpability (e.g. self-defence laws). I think that progression in law is an effect of our natural morality refining less sophisticated approximations to what constitutes moral culpability. We are becoming more understanding, not just as to the causes of immoral behaviour, but even about the nature of moral culpability itself.
Or we were, until Trump started executing mentally handicapped offenders again.
I am talking about it because it's fun to talk about is all. — khaled
Yeah man, and interesting too.