A re-examination of Morals

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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The Future - What needs to be done???

Lets look at society - Most of us live with the luxury that we are good people because of our Morals - or vice versa.

The problem is - that within our own cliquestic (I have to admit I made this word up - however you get the point) societies we satisfy our morals all too easily - hey me too! We do what we can for charity and have the mordacity to feel superior about a contribution that we have made that when all is saidand done, will have no lasting effect on our lives. Is this really a Contribution??? What has been contributed…?? Only something that would not be missed or indeed acknowledged if not contributed. If you deny this and you believe you are a better person then answer this.

A Moral Question.

Say you had £100 in the bank and £100 cash you are on your way to the Party of the century - without doubt the greatest night you will ever have! On your Way you past an alley - you hear a sound - its a child’s cry. You investigate and find that three IS a child - not looking so good - So you use your expensive mobile phones to alert the appropriate authorities feeling good about the fact that you are the saviour of a life - as you wait u are informed that the medical relief is delayed - you must perform a procedure that will use up £150 of your cash (if anybody queries me about the purpose of the money - then GET A LIFE - its hypothetical) So at this stage every one left with the choice of leaving a baby to die or parting with the cash would probably part with the cash. And after a further while your told - “still can’t make it” you need to spend the rest of your cash or even go into £100 debt or that child “IN YOUR ARMS” Dies. You’d pay up ‘No Problem’ Right? - OK …

So Because of You there is a young life that otherwise would’ve been extinguished!

Feel Good?

What if the child was ‘IN YOUR ARMS’ and you needed to sell everything you had - would you let it die???

No??

You’re a good Person!

Seriously!!!

Now what if it was a child u couldn’t see???

U would give up everything for a strange unknown child??

No? How much then what is the price of redeeming your soul

But how many would upon reading this would make an instant contirbution of £20 to a charity that could probably save a number of kids lives in a place we will never see?

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The point to this was lost (literary) I posted that in the nature of things we would never let this child die - sight is obviously a bond (a financially acceptable bond) and whilst the child who is out of sight _ (a starving child in Africa)_ is far more in need of finacial support it is support it is less likely to receive. In fact I’ll Bet my Life on it. I ask any body who has been in africa in the famine district, to help force people to acknowledge that our comfortable lives are at the expense of those kids. Their blood is on our hands.

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You’re right here and yet at the same time completely wrong. We do have a certain amount of culpability, there is exploitation by our country/ies of others.

But morality defies definition, those who question that just have to look at two main contenders, utilitarianism and Kant’s universal maxim to see that there are problems with both trying to make a system which derives overall benefit and those that try and derive a set of laws. I’ll give more details if you want to know, but I’ve been posting far too much in the few days I’ve been with this site :slight_smile:

I ask this:

If we all gave our money (or, ignoring money, assets such as machinery or farmable land or whatever you define it to be) and spread it throughout the world there would be nowhere near enough to support everyone even if everyone was in a constant state of drudgery. So should we spread it out anyway or keep it devided?

Yes, all right some of the problems are our fault, the use of powder milks instead of breast milk in third world countries has meant that a natural contraceptive (woman wh are breast feeding do not ovulate or are less likely to or something) has been lost and their population is growing at an alarming rate. The catholic church opposing a cheap and non-invasive form of sterilisation to the third world on the grounds that sterilisation is against God’s wishes has meant a higher birth rate too. The policies of the Western world in the 60s/70s of throwing money at these countries created huge urban slums and deprived the countryside of it’s work force. There’s a huge list of mistakes and delibrate exploitation we can say, but is the normal Joe Bloggs on the street culpable? But we can only do so much. We are where we are today through the work of our ancestors, to throw this all away is just to regress civilisation back to an early state of affairs where starvation would be epidemic and the death rate a lot higher than it is now. We can only do so much before we break ourselves.

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In response to the above three posts:
Mr_Oblivious, I agree that there are many that satisfy their morals all too easily by donating to charities, but my personal opinion and action is that I do not donate ANY money to ANY CHARITY. Every time a charity representative knocks on my door or calls my house I always ask them the same question. “How does the money get to the kids?” No one has had a straight answer for me yet. Some say, well your money goes to buying for for needy children. I say “okay, how much of my money goes into buying food for the needy children? What kind of food is bought for these children? Who are these children and where are these children that need support?” Now they begin to stumble. They say they don’t know how much money goes to buying for children, they say they don’t know what kind of food is bought, they say that they are children from either Africa, Ethiopia, Downtown Toronto (Ontario, Canada) or some other place, at which point I again ask “Where in these places are they from and what do you know about how these children live and why they are where they are” Should they answer that these children are in the slums of Toronto because their parents abandoned them than a person is more likely to give more money. Yet, they don’t know. I mean, come on people, if we care than we must really care, right? And if we really care, than we really want to know everything that is going on and exactly how these children are helped so that we know how much more to help later.

Your example of the child is a far reaching one. “Slippery Slope Fallacy”. Just because someone helps a child they see on the street and saves their life, doesn’t mean they now have to go out and save the world’s children.
You make it sound like any one who helps another person should be afraid being binded to helping everyone else in the world. You can’t jump from one incident to global help. Remember, for a long time UNICEF was the most renoun charity in the world. Last year it was found that over 80% of the money people give doesn’t go to the people. Many scams surround Unicef. Plethora of people are sceptical that were once donating thousands of dollars and Unicef is losing millions. But still, no one has put a law suit against them.

Matt stated:

Conjecture. What do you know about all the money in the world? Did you know that if every country in the world stopped spending money of army (everything to do with it like technology, weaponry, soldiers, etc.) there would be a surplus way over $100 trillion dollars!

Are you aware of how much a single person like Bill Gates is worth? Do you know just how many more people there are like Bill Gates or in his ball park around the world?

Did you know that each major bank in Canada brings in billions of dollars of profit in each year? Count the number of these banks, than multiply by the average profit per year. Add to that the average profit per year of every major bank in the US. Once again we will arrive at hundreds of trillions of dollars.

Did you know that one of the richest organizations in the world are churches? Getting their financial figures is something I can’t even do, but a ball park figure can still be estimated. Unfortunately, there is too much of a variation of profit from one church to another and an average is difficult to attain.

What’s your take?