I'd take this a step further to saying any condiments on steak (assuming you cook it). If it's good steak all you need is to put some seasoning on it before you grill it. If it's cheap steak, marinate the hell out of it first, the flavors should be more than enough. If I'm at someone else's place and they suck at preparing steak I'll put on some BBQ sauce though.
As Book in Firefly said "you're going to a special hell reserved for child molesters and people who talk in the theatre" Seriously, shut the hell up in movies. And there is certainly no reason to ever have a cell phone on in a movie outside of MAYBE checking what time it is.
Well I disagree. I happen to believe lying is wrong categorically, that is to say it is never justified under any circumstances. Now i may lie out of self-interest, in order to save a person's feelings, to get out of a jam etc. There are surely all kinds of practical reasons that benefit me or the other person. Society approves of lying in a few circumstances. But I would never say it it is the morally correct thing to do. The question is how can you justify lying as a moral end? If you ask yourself "is this the kind of behaviour I want to see repeated in every decision by every human?" you will say no. This will lead you to treating yourself as an exception to the rule.
I don't have an example off the top of my head, but what if a lie is told with the intention of saving a life?
I guess you could then argue that the lying is the lesser of two evils. I can come up with a million examples of lying to prevent someone being killed with malicious intent, but accidental? I can't see how you could prevent an accident from happening with a lie. Edit: And this is not to say that I have never lied to make things easier on myself. I consider myself a very honest person who tries her best to be forthcoming, reasonable, and reliable, but even I have lied about being busy tomorrow night to avoid hanging out with someone who I am not particularly fond of.
Well I would experience anguish and then make a decision. My answer is that real life forces you into situations where you have to make a decision one way or another ( not doing anything is still a decision!) and sometimes moral rules break down when you are confronted with certain situations. However, I still think it's pretty clear that a priori it would always be wrong to lie. By telling the truth you have fulfilled your obligation to act out the good. Now if telling the truth leads to someone being killed...then presumably somebody ELSE killed him. They took the action and not you. That answer is good enough for me but I can see how it won't be convincing to other people, especially knowing 100% that telling the truth would lead to someone being killed. this is actually a common objection and it is a good one. I think the value in seeing that lying, cheating and stealing are all contradictions of the will and are good and apply to many areas of life. Being able to see it and apply it has a lot of moral value, as well as practical value in the long run. Primarily it's good for the conscience but it also can lead to a good reputation if done correctly over many years. But that's another argument.
If a robber came into your house and demanded to know if anyone else was there, and you knew that your child was hiding in the closet, you don't think you would be moral in saying that there was no one else home? My conscious would be forever marred if I said yes and my child died/was kidnapped/molested/etc as a result.
well yes. I think not answering would suffice as well. Keep in mind I was talking about moral judgments a priori. No possible situation could ever lead me to believe that telling a lie would be good. also to quote myself : you have to look at the action itself and not the surrounding conditions. So the act of telling the truth or lying, and not paying any attention to the details surrounding the circumstances. So you are willing the truth when you tell the truth, and wish that everybody else will always tell the truth in every circumstance as well. Im basically re hashing Kant here but I believe his moral philosophy is right.
And I think that you are silly in the belief that not making a decision is somehow a more moral thing to do than tell a protective lie. Technicalities exist, but real life does not function on them.
Why exactly? Because your philosophy professor told you so? You don't HAVE to do this, many people, including philosophers think that Kant is an idealistic douche bag who's ideas go against the very fabric of what makes our society work.
Going with Frank here - context is extremely important. What prompts someone to do an action is often just as important as the action itself. For example, lying. Telling a robber a lie so that he won't kill your family is very different from telling Grandma a lie so she'll give you money for your crack habit. They're both lies... but the first one is beneficial and the second one is disgusting. If you don't pay attention to context, you're doing the equivalent of putting duct tape over your eyes and then trying to draw an object. I guess you can do it, but the picture is going to be terrible. Kant actually was onto something despite being flawed; you have to ask the question, "What is appropriate context?" One of the things that he hits on is that it's often very difficult to figure out when an action is good or not. His response: play it safe and never do anything bad, that way the question never arises. But that's flawed in and of itself. Would you tell a lie to save one person's life? How about ten? A hundred? A million? Just going by the action, a lie that's told to save a million people is still just a dirty stinkin' lie. I find it interesting to note that postmodernism goes way too far in one direction, (nothing is objectively true, morality is relative, etc) and Kant goes too far in the other. I guess philosophy runs the gamut.
Those two are the exception, without a doubt. We should always protect our young, unless we can't care for them. That's what abortion is for.
My first month teaching in Uganda. My roommate - who was Ugandan - was at the front of the class with me and we had to administer a quiz to Grade 6 children to get a baseline of their sexual reproductive health knowledge. The lesson was structured as an open discussion and the children were encouraged to answer with a show of hands, then talk about what they thought was happening. When it came to the sexual assault area of the questionnaire, one of the questions was, "Is it acceptable for a parent to rape their child?" Every single student - all 27 of them - raised their hands yes. I turned to my teaching partner, thinking there had been a mistranslation, and asked her to ask in the local dialect. Once again, 27 students (boys and girls) agreed that it was acceptable for parents to rape their children. For one of the only times in my life, I had no words. There are no moral absolutes that extend uniformly across all cultures.
Well, there are no moral absolutes acknowledged by all cultures perhaps, but that doesn't make them less wrong. It is wrong for parents to rape their children and it remains wrong even if some or all of Uganda fails to realize it. I am comfortable with universally condemning the concept of child rape regardless of how many people or countries disagree with me.
This raises the question of moral relativity. Sure, we have certain Western ideas about things being right and wrong, but there are cultures just a plane trip away who see the world through completely different eyes. Morals come down to guidelines from either culture or some higher power. Both my culture and religion condemn violent acts against innocent people, but that isn't true in a lot of different places--Uganda, some Middle Eastern countries, etc. At that point, all you can do is hope to reason with the people and come to some common ground. Total culture clash, though.
That's you, though. I'm not defending incest or child molestation, but I acknowledge that I only find them morally reprehensible because of the culture and time I was raised in. Had I been raised a girl in a Bedouin tribe somewhere in the desert of the Middle East, I would have been married to my first cousin at the age of 11 and never known anything different. Just because YOU feel righteous condemning something does not mean the world will follow suit or agree.
One of my conversation partners was a 35 year old man who married his first cousin. His mother and father were also first cousins. His mother had a sister and his father had a brother, and those siblings were married, too. He has 2 children. Stuff like this happens ALL the time. We're so insulated from it here because no one around us does it, and the people in other countries who do usually speak another language and have fairly rudimentary technology (compared to us--basically, no internet or no use of it). It's like these people no longer exist, but don't fool yourself.
I am not saying that I expect the world to agree with me, I am saying that universal agreement is not required for all morality. Child rape is wrong and any culture or person in any time period in any part of the world who does not believe so is incorrect. So the alternate 11 year old you who doesn't know any better is just that, someone who doesn't know any better. It doesn't make child rape any less wrong. I am not beholden to a requirement that everyone agree with me when it comes to things like this. Other people not following suit on condemning child rape doesn't tell me it's any less wrong, it tells me that there are ignorant or evil people in the world. Some things are a question of moral relativism, this isn't one of them. And I will sleep fine at night feeling righteous about it because, frankly, everyone should be united on this one and those who aren't are incorrect. All of which means that, clearly, I do believe in moral absolutes. I don't know if I believe in many of them, but this is an example of one of them. Being a moral absolute means it remains good or bad regardless of culture and child rape is bad regardless of a culture existing that does not think so. But, if you do not believe in any moral absolutes, you're bound to disagree with me and it's an unresolvable argument. That's fine, as far as it goes, I suspect neither of us depends on convincing the other in order to have a good day.