Creatures of Reason

G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his mother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.” The word ‘necessarily’ shows that Chesterton is a true philosopher. From me, I think the concepts of good and evil are essential concepts for placing our own actions somewhere in the middle of that continuum, but each person’s individual placement of actions could be, and often are, very different. With that in mind, I believe it is fundamentally useless to discuss this within a personal context because each person’s values and beliefs are often very different, making any argument about the nature of good and evil almost impossible to prove.

            However, in order to provide some substance to this blog, I will present some of my favorite parables and allegories to illustrate some interesting concepts about what is good and what is evil. One of the most confusing is the duel scenario of making money to buy a TV by selling a homeless child to someone who will harvest his or her organs for transplant and going out to buy a TV with money that could be going to an organization that protects homeless children from these criminals. At face value, the former action is definitely far more evil than the second action, which is quite common in our society. However, it is not difficult to see how one might come to the conclusion that buying a TV instead of giving to charity is not much worse than committing the crime the charity is trying to combat. I believe this issue is especially prevalent in our society. When we have so much, it can become difficult to determine how much to give and how much to keep for ourselves.

            A sadist is a masochist who follows the golden rule. This one-liner throws into stark relief the fundamental problem with the abstract algorithm for moral action that we have been taught since first grade. The English playwright George Bernard Shaw once cleverly wrote, “Do not do unto others as you would have others do unto you; they may have different tastes.” The philosopher Immanuel Kant devised a more refined version of the golden rule, which he called the “supreme categorical imperative.” This colder and more Germanic version of the classic idiom adds one subtle yet major change to the wording: “Act only according to the maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become universal law.” While this may seem similar, no masochist could logically conclude that his or her anecdote of the golden rule, inflicting pain unto others, should become universal law. Therefore, it is my belief that, in order to end the misconception and confusion caused by this imperfect recipe for morality, we should replace the posters of this incomplete principle that pepper our first grade class rooms with the improved and more logically sound supreme categorical imperative.

           

“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do” – Benjamin Franklin