Morality C.S. Lewis

LG-

Your conception of christianity is not really what my belief system is. I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with loving your self, preserving yourself and taking care of yourself, as you too are created in God's image. We are not supposed to worship ourselves however.

I think the holy spirit dwells within us so there is God within all of us as christins, and even before then the divine spark I believe is within all of us, and we all are brothers and sisters with responsibility to ourselves, others and God in everything we do.

I too, am not trying to convince you, nor am I attempting to proseletyz. I was just wondering where you were coming from and hoping for enlightenment/ a different perspective. Thanks for sharing.
 
Any being with the formal capacity to distinguish justice from injustice is essentially rational. This is something that humans have, and something which, apparently, animals and inanimate objects lack. When I defined morality as that part of justice which deals with how rational beings behave toward one another, this was the meaning I had in mind.
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Coel, yes, entropic was completely wrong. No wonder I got a D in Thermodynamics 20 years ago. Whatever the word is for ever-increasing is what I'm looking for.

I'll respond in greater depth later, but I am curious and don't want the question to get lost.

In your opinion, are all humans rational?
 
All humans have the formal capacity to distinguish justice from injustice. By "formal capacity", I mean that the particular form of our species allows for such an understanding. If things are operating as they should, and normally do, then the human will be able to make this distinction. Some people, for a variety of reasons that we can both imagine, do not have things operating as they should. But they retain the formal capacity for such an understanding, if things are ever set right, if a cure is found, etc.

Animals and inanimate things do not possess this formal capacity.
 
Coel, again, thanks for the conversation and please spend as much time explaining your position as you do questioning mine. I promise I'll defend. It is just a more time consuming process.

It appears to me that we are worlds apart on the issue of Universality. You would draw lines based on rationality (defined as a capacity to discern Justice) where I would not. I can question this from a variety of perspectives. We can start with:

Are all humans rational? when does rationality begin? Conception? Implantation? Brain waves? Birth? When does it end? Brain death? Heart death? What about children? Is there an age at which one becomes responsible? Is it a sliding scale of rationality? What about sociopaths?

We can spend a lot of time there, which will likely lead to different conclusions regarding the morality of early-term abortion and euthanasia for vegetative states. It will get more interesting when those with the "potential" for formal capacity start to do real damage. Welcome to Chipper's ice cream shop.

So, what is the responsibility to the Collective Self of those who do not have this formal capacity? What is the responsibility of those who do have this formal capacity in regard to those who do not?
 
Hayden,

Let me begin by apologizing for my manner. I sense from you post that I have unwittingly offended you in some way. For that I am sorry.

As to the issues at hand, it appears to me that your objections are two-fold: one, there can be no absolute justice if people disagree about the laws that are supposed to ensure justice; and two, some people disagree about the nature of justice itself, and therefore absolute justice is an impossibility.

Related to these objections is the question of whether disagreement among people on such matters proves that at least some humans lack the “formal capacity” to understand justice that I’ve mentioned.

If I’ve managed so far to stick to the heart of your argument, then I will try to answer:

First, the fact that people disagree about the nature of Justice does not mean that people disagree about the existence of justice.

Second, the fact that people disagree about how to promulgate justice into society by means of the law does not mean that they lack the formal capacity to understand justice.

Third, the fact that people sometimes act unjustly does not mean that they lack the formal capacity to understand justice.

The disagreements that you mention – the death penalty, abortion, gay marriage – involve several layers of applied justice. If we discuss murder, the case is an easy one. A great injustice has been done; no defendant is likely to argue that murder is righteous. Rather, he will argue that he did not commit the murder. But how do we deal with the murderer?

The question of the death penalty, rather than being a disagreement about the nature of justice, is really a case of how to apply a particular, shared notion of justice to a dynamic world. Which shared notion? We all – well, pretty much all – believe that human life is valuable. We believe it is an injustice to take human life. Some, such as yourself, might conclude on these grounds that we should not execute the criminal. Others, however, might be in favor the death penalty as a means whereby society might emphasize the sanctity of human life by visiting the harshest possible punishment on those who do not value human life. So this is not really a disagreement about the existence of just or moral principles. It is a disagreement about how to apply those principles properly in a dynamic world.

Now, if a person came along and began to argue either for or against the death penalty based on his belief that human life was not valuable, what would we say? Would we say to the man, “Well, perhaps you are right; let us consider the issue further” ? Or would we say, “Clearly you are wrong.” Surely we would say that he is wrong. We would perceive the injustice of his position.

But what of this misguided man’s “formal capacity”? I have said previously that all humans have the “formal capacity” to understand justice. How can this be if we might find even one person among us who argues that human life is not valuable? What will we say about Charles Manson, or Joseph Stalin, or Adolf Hitler? Did they possess this formal capacity that I have said all humans possess?

I answer that we act out of a variety of motivations. The human brain is a complex machine, capable of understanding justice, yes – but also capable of rationalization, of self-deception, of suppression and willful ignorance. Further, it is capable of being thoroughly corrupted by all the selfish vices of the world. I would say that it is not at all an uncommon thing for a person to subordinate his understanding of justice to these malignant agents. All of us, to some extent, are compromised to some degree by such things. Those whom we see as less compromised we tend to call just; those whom we see as more compromised we tend to call unjust. To witness injustice is not to witness the lack of a formal capacity to understand justice; it is instead to witness the subordination of that understanding to other motivations.

I would argue that the monster-statesmen of the 20th century and those who assisted in their crimes retained this formal capacity throughout their lives. And because they retained it, they are guilty of a great injustice. They allowed their understanding of justice to be overwhelmed by other causes, and the injustice within their person was amplified a thousand times fold by their positions as leaders of industrial, and sometimes very aggressive, superpowers.

Regarding “absolute justice”, I would say this: Justice is absolute in the sense that it is universal – it is the same always and in every place. But humans behaving justly is rarely an absolute proposition – which is to say that it is rarely a binary proposition of either/or. The moral contexts that we live within change by the moment; the considerations are multi-layered and often involve dilemmas that ask us to prioritize one notion of justice over another, or further, to weigh our sense of justice against our other, formal needs as humans.


LHG,

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