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Saturday, June 28, 2014
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
How I Met Your Morality- A Further Discussion
Last week I podcasted on a curious quote from the tv show
How I Met Your Mother. Marshall, one of the main characters, had said, “I broke
my own personal moral code once, so I’m not going to do it again.” He was referring
to an immoral decision he had made earlier in the episode.
Now I pointed out that if he had such an issue with the
action that he had made, but he only had broken his “personal moral code,” then
why not change the code? His current version of the code said that his previous
action was wrong, so why not change the code so the action was actually virtuous?
If morality was based on something so arbitrary and
unstable as our own personal preference, then we would have no foundation or justification for right and wrong.
Even further, why couldn’t everyone in the episode just “decide”
that his actions were virtuous? (I guess because the episode would have been shorter?) My problem with that statement was that it proved
that he knew what he did was objectively wrong, but could only bring himself to
be constant with his relativistic worldview and simply say it was his preference.
Now I want to clarify something. An objection to my podcast
was about when I said that morality is either this or that, right and wrong, and not
about preferences. “I like vanilla ice cream” and “I like killing” are two
completely different claims, and it is plain to all who read it. Morality
transcends personal opinion; we discover morality, we do not decide it.
But the objection was to grey areas within morality.
Examples: is it objectively wrong to have a drink of alcohol? Is it objectively
morally wrong to participate in a videogame in which the objective is to kill?
Is it objectively morally wrong to listen to music with profane language?
To this I say almost exactly the opposite or my previous
statement: morality within gray areas is not as cut and dry as we would like. For
example: when my family goes on vacation, we leave the kitchen light on to make
people think we are still home. This is to ward off potential robberies from
happening. Now I ask you, is that lying? If not, it is deceiving at best… which
is in fact lying! But I would never say that it is not virtuous to protect your
home. No, in this case it is good to deceive in order to protect your property.
Much of life is lived within the realm of wisdom, or skilled
living. Or even another way to say it, wisdom is the right application of
knowledge. And knowledge is a belief that both corresponds to reality, and has
reasons to back up the claim. Therefore, wisdom is the application of a belief
that is true. If I valued personal health, and held the belief that working out
would achieve that value, then wisdom would lead me to a regular schedule of
various exercise (which… by the way, is actually what I’m getting myself into. Boom.
Wisdomed!)
Within morality, there are differences of opinion about gray
areas, but many of the freedoms that come even from being a believer in Christ must be
tempered with wisdom. “All things are permissible,” Paul claims in 1
Corinthians 10:23, “but not all things are beneficial.”
Pursue wisdom, be skilled at living, and wrestle with moral and grey issues.
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Thanks for reading!
Monday, June 2, 2014
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