Читать книгу This Is Philosophy - Steven D. Hales - Страница 11

You might think that moral action means sticking to your principles, holding fast to your beliefs and respecting how you were raised. Or perhaps morality is acting as you think God intends, by strictly following your holy book. Acting on the basis of your instincts and sympathies is to abandon genuine morality for transient emotions. One person who subscribed to the view that moral action requires strict adherence to principles and tradition was Osama bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden was, of course, the notorious terrorist mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden was not a madman or a lunatic, though, and if you read his writings you’ll see that he was an articulate, educated spokesman for his views. Bin Laden believed that the Western nations are engaged in a Crusader war against Islam, and that God demands that the Islamic Caliphate (i.e. the theocratic rule of all Muslims under an official successor to the Prophet Muhammad) be restored to power, and that all nations follow Islamic religious law (sharia). In a post-9/11 interview, Bin Laden responded to the criticism that he sanctioned the killing of women, children, and innocents.

The scholars and people of the knowledge, amongst them Sahib al-Ikhtiyarat [ibn Taymiyya] and ibn al-Qayyim, and Shawanni, and many others, and Qutubi–may God bless him–in his Qur’an commentary, say that if the disbelievers were to kill our children and women, then we should not feel ashamed to do the same to them, mainly to deter them from trying to kill our women and children again. And that is from a religious perspective…

As for the World Trade Center, the ones who were attacked and who died in it were part of a financial power. It wasn’t a children’s school! Neither was it a residence. And the general consensus is that most of the people who were in the towers were men that backed the biggest financial force in the world, which spreads mischief throughout the world. And those individuals should stand before God, and rethink and redo their calculations. We treat others like they treat us. Those who kill our women and our innocent, we kill their women and innocent, until they stop doing so.

(Lawrence, 2005, pp. 118–119)

Bin Laden was clearly concerned with the morality of killing “women and innocents;” he took pains to note that al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center, a financial building that–in his view–contained supporters of an materialist, imperialist nation of unbelievers. WTC was not a school or a home. Moreover, Bin Laden cited religious scholars and interpreters of the Qur’an to support his belief that killing noncombatants as a form of deterrence is a morally permissible act, sanctioned by his religion. Bin Laden was a devout and pious man who scrupulously adhered to his moral principles. If you think that he was a wicked, mass-murdering evildoer, it is not because he failed to be principled. It is because you find his principles to be bad ones.

What proof is there that Bin Laden’s moral principles are the wrong ones? None, really, other than an appeal to our common ethical intuitions that the intentional murder of innocents to further some idiosyncratic political or religious goal is morally heinous. If you disagree, it may be that your moral compass points in such an opposite direction that you don’t have enough in common with ordinary folks to engage in meaningful moral discussion. Even Bin Laden worried that it is wrong to kill children and women, which is why he was careful to justify his actions.

Just because you base your actions on some rule, principle, or moral code that you’ve adopted or created is no guarantee that you’ll do the right thing. You could have a bad moral code. Of course, everyone thinks their own moral code is correct, but that’s no guarantee that it is–just look at Bin Laden. Well, is it better to base your actions on your intuitions, on the feelings you have about whatever situation is at hand? Not necessarily. Feelings are immediate and case-specific, and the situation right in front of us is always the most vivid and pressing. Your gut instincts may lead you to choose short-term benefits over what’s best in the long term. For example, imagine a mother who has taken a toddler in for a vaccination. The child is crying, not wanting to feel the pain of the needle. Surely the mother’s instincts are to whisk the child away from the doctor advancing with his sharp pointy stick. Yet sometimes the right action is to set our feelings aside to see the larger picture. The mother has a moral obligation to care for her child, and so must hold back her protective sympathies and force the child to get the shot.

If we can’t trust our moral principles and rules (because we might have bad principles and rules), and we can’t trust our moral intuitions (because our sympathies might be short-sighted and narrow), then what should we do? The most prominent approach is to use the best of both worlds. We should use our most fundamental moral intuitions to constrain and craft moral theories and principles. This approach does not mean that we just capitulate to our gut instincts. Sometimes our principles should override those instincts. At the same time, when our principles or theories tell us to perform actions that are in conflict with our deepest feelings and intuitions, that is a reason to re-examine those principles and perhaps revise them or even reject them outright. Such a procedure apparently never occurred to Bin Laden, who either felt no sympathy for his victims, or was unflinchingly convinced of the righteousness of his cause.

The idea that moral rules be tested against our intuitions is analogous to the scientific method by which scientific theories are tested against experiments and direct observations. Sometimes a really fine and widely repeated experiment convinces everyone that a scientific theory cannot be right, and sometimes experimental results or observations are dismissed as faulty because they come into conflict with an otherwise well confirmed and excellent theory. There is no hard-and-fast way to decide how to go. How would all this play out in the case of ethics?

Here is a simple example to illustrate the procedure, before we move on to taking a look at the more prominent moral theories. Consider the so-called Golden Rule¹, a moral rule dating from antiquity that appears in various forms in a variety of different ancient authors and traditions. It states: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What intuitions could be used as evidence against this rule? Put another way, what’s counterintuitive about it, if anything? Well, the Golden Rule implicitly assumes that everyone has the same preferences. That assumption seems a bit questionable. Suppose that you like backrubs. In fact, you’d like a backrub from pretty much anyone. The Golden Rule advises you to treat other people the way you would like to be treated. Since you’d like other people to give you unsolicited backrubs, you should, according to the Golden Rule, give everyone else a backrub, even if they didn’t ask for one. But some people don’t like backrubs, or don’t care for strangers touching them. Intuitively, it would be wrong to give backrubs to those people without their consent, or against their will. Since this intuition conflicts with the Golden Rule’s implication to administer unsolicited backrubs, we should conclude that maybe the Golden Rule is really iron pyrite after all.

You might respond that we should revise the Golden Rule to avoid the unwanted implication, or we should replace it with a more precise moral rule. Perhaps, Do unto others as they would have be done unto them, or some such. Of course, that formulation means we would have to give others whatever they ask of us, which is surely more than we should have to provide. That’s just how moral philosophy proceeds– we modify our moral views in light of compelling arguments and counterexamples, or sometimes go back to the drawing board altogether to come up with better theories.