Skip to main content

Dial M for Mur...er...Morality

I was watching a video from the Prager U YouTube channel where Dennis Prager asks the following question:

But how do you KNOW that murder is wrong?

Prager's idea is that we can think murder is wrong, or feel inside that murder is wrong, but that this is not enough: according to him, it's vital for us, and for society at large that we KNOW murder to be wrong; and the only way we can KNOW it is that God tells us it is wrong.

The problem with the example of murder, is that it's completely relative. Murder is defined as the illegal killing of human beings. So anytime we want the killing of some being to be considered "wrong", all we have to do is to classify that killing as "murder". And conversely, if we want the de-lifing of some being to be permissible, we classify it as not murder. Some examples of killing that is not murder are these:

  1. War. It's perfectly legal to kill someone -- or millions of people -- using war as an excuse. There are many examples in the scriptures of God commanding this, so it's also possible for a person to argue that it's not only legal, but moral to do so.
  2. Execution. Killing someone for breaking the law is another category of making it OK in the eyes of the law (and God) to de-life someone. It seems ironic to me that we kill mostly to punish killing.
  3. Non-humans. It's never murder to kill beings that are not human. We get away with some absolutely awful behavior using the category of "non-human" as an excuse. In fact, this is one technique that we humans use to get rid of people we don't like -- we classify them as somehow less than human. Think of the Holocaust, or slavery, or any of the various pogroms and genocides that have taken place in the last few centuries.
Dennis Prager never wants to have this conversation, and he fervently hopes that people who view his videos will never exercise their critical thinking skills in this regard. But the really interesting question in this space is not "how do you KNOW murder is wrong?". The real question is this:
How do we decide when killing is wrong?
And the reason Dennis Prager would go to any lengths to avoid ever touching on this subject is that it leaves his Absolute Morality shtick without a leg to stand on.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Comments on Paradox: On Ownership

It's funny, but not not surprising, that we seem to have had some similar life experiences. The notion of ownership has been very transformative in my life, too. I can clearly recall several instances of what some might call an epiphany, where I experienced an overwhelming realization of ownership. These instances were all similar -- a sudden certainty, like a light turning on, that I was in the right place at the right time doing the right thing for the right reasons; and the not-unpleasant sensation of a new weight of responsibility settling on my shoulders, a weight I was comfortably able to bear. For the longest time, I had no word to describe these experiences, but I have come to view them as taking ownership. These experiences, and the habit of ownership that arose from them, have been very instrumental in any successes I have experienced in my life. Every religion on the planet is probably eager to offer an interpretation of these experiences -- to frame them in the phraseol...
1 comment
Read more

The North-going Zax and the South-going Zax

Yesterday, I was on my lunch time walk and had an interesting experience. It lasted perhaps less than 2 seconds and yet I've been thinking about it on and off ever since. I was trundling along at my usual brisk pace, on the right-hand side of the path. A few yards off, I spied a man walking toward me on my side of the sidewalk, two trains heading toward each other on the same track. As we grew closer, I instinctively hugged the right-hand margin a little closer and he did the same. When it became clear that we were on a collision course, the image of the old Dr. Seuss story about the North-going Zax and the South-going Zax popped into my head. In the story, the two Zaxes meet and stand there for years, each too stubborn to give way to the other, while a city grows up around them. For about a quarter of a second, I contemplated such a pissing contest and realized that such a course of action did not advance my goal of getting back to work in time for my 2:00 meeting. So I swerve...
2 comments
Read more

To Boldly Split Infinitives

This is somewhat a manifesto. English is not Latin. We can put prepositions at the end of a sentence if we want to. And we can start sentences with a conjunction! If we want to boldly split infinitives, then we're perfectly welcome to do so. Why? Because these are all syntactically correct constructs in English; they parse. And even more, they convey meaning to other speakers of the language, which is the real test of whether something is permitted in a language. My seventh grade English teacher, Mrs. Doane, a throwback to the 19th century prescriptivist grammarians, would no doubt sniff disapprovingly and peer with narrowed eyes over her Far Side-style glasses at such goings on. However, now I have the M.A. in Linguistics and can scowl back with gravitas. And so I will echo those marvelous Churchillian words: " This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put. " But in the end, I must confess that it was Guy Deutscher who freed me from the pointless tyran...
2 comments
Read more