Right and Wrong – How can we tell?

Scenario
You turn the corner of a street on your way to the shops and to your absolute horror you witness a young man with a gun shoot a woman in the back as she runs away from him. Oh and this isn’t one of those nice, clean Hollywood shootings – it’s loud, people are screaming and she’s lying there writhing, moaning and bleeding into the gutter. The gunman then runs up to her and shoots her in the head.

What are you to think? (as you try to hide and try not to vomit). Clearly this is an immoral act; a violent murder, possibly a domestic dispute gone horribly wrong. Killing is always wrong, right? And then a large military style truck screeches up to the corpse and her killer, two men in weird body armour jump out and set to work disarming the bomb that’s strapped to her body, under her coat. It transpires that the ‘killer’ is a police officer who has just saved your life and that of several others.

So what was ‘wrong’ has suddenly become ‘right.’ The only thing that has changed is your perception of the situation – you only thought it was wrong because you misunderstood the situation.

Discussion point
We are convinced that some things are intrinsically ‘wrong’ and others are ‘right.’ How do we know this? Where do we get this knowledge?

Task
In the scenario above, a brutal killing occurs and most of us would agree that it was justified. Create/imagine short scenarios in which the following ‘wrong’ acts would be seen as the right thing to do.
Lying
Stealing
Speeding (in a car).

Relative – some facts are beyond argument. A circle is round, an orange is orange. Other ‘facts’ depend on the circumstances – ‘It’s a beautiful day’ may mean warm and sunny to you but a farmer may need heavy rain so to him, it’s not so good. It is possible to argue that everything is relative.

So, we’ve decided that morality, issues of ‘rightness and wrongness’ are relative – wrongness depends on the circumstances, right?

Well then you notice that the police officer with the gun is sitting on some nearby steps, white as a sheet, weeping and clearly very distressed by what he has just done. A colleague is comforting him and we could assume that he’s having a traumatic reaction to a near-death experience. After all, unlike the rest of us, he knowingly risked his life. However, let’s also assume that the act of killing has also distressed him. He is torn by the conflict that in doing his duty, a ‘right’ thing, he has killed a young woman, a ‘wrong’ thing. He knows that in doing this ‘wrong’ he has prevented an even greater wrong but he still can’t get over that obstacle. Police officers who kill in the line of duty are counselled and they are expected to be upset by what they have done.

When people are executed by firing squad, there is a tradition in some cultures to give one member of the execution squad a rifle with a blank round in it. That way, each member of the squad can persuade themselves that perhaps they had the blank and are not responsible for the death. When someone is executed by lethal injection in the US, the chemicals are injected by a machine after the condemned person is strapped down and connected. It would be quite easy for a person to do it but this way the responsibility for the death is removed from the prison staff. People don’t like to kill, even when it’s ‘right.’

So, is wrongness merely a label that we put on things (subjective) or is it an intrinsic quality of the thing itself (objective)? People who claim that it is objective are called moral realists because they argue that it is a real thing, not just an idea. They claim that we know when something is wrong. We can’t see this property like a colour or shape. We can’t test for it like magnetism, an invisible property. We just know! Some realists claim that we do this by intuition, a kind of sixth sense, because we can’t see it with our other senses. The subjectivists (idealists) seem to have more plausible arguments.

Subjectivism – you state that something is wrong because you personally disapprove of it. The difficulty is that you then may have to provide good and valid reasons for your disapproval to show that it is reasonable and that you are not merely prejudiced. Even so, the thing is wrong because you believe that it is wrong. That’s all you need.
Intersubjectivism – the subjective position is a problem for most of us. Is a serial killer correct in saying that killing is right, just because he believes it to be right? This position claims that something is wrong because the community in general disapproves of it. This is more comfortable but occasionally, whole communities or even nations behave badly.
Emotivism – This one is a bit tricky. It says that when we make a statement that something is right or wrong, we are not making a claim. We are not stating a fact but merely expressing how we feel about it. So we are not saying that ‘killing is wrong’ is a fact – we are just expressing the way that we feel about killing.

The realists respond that this is all rather unsatisfactory. After all an individual can be mistaken or even insane. In fact, an entire community can be mistaken. And even then, that other community that is doing awful things of which we disapprove now has the sheer cheek to disapprove of us and claim that we are wrong. How silly of them!

This is all most unsatisfactory. We don’t seem to be able to prove that rightness or wrongness is factual, an intrinsic part of an act or thing. Equally it doesn’t seem comfortable to argue that right and wrong are only in the eye of the beholder, a matter of how we perceive the world. So where does that leave us? No wonder that so many people rely on the law or a religion for guidance.

Here’s a ‘liberal’ subjective approach.
Something is wrong because I think that it is wrong and because most reasonable people seem to agree with me (intersubjectivism). But I’m still open-minded about it and prepared to admit that in some circumstances, it could be right or neutral instead. I also have to remember that I was brought up in a community that taught me that this behaviour is wrong so I should question what I was taught and what others believe.

Or try this ‘pragmatic’ realist approach –
Acts are wrong if they tend to distress people or damage them in any way, assuming that the distress is reasonable and genuine.

Task