The Good, The Bad--And The Gray

Crime was so much easier years ago. Immorality was so much simpler. You could categorize the one so effortlessly—murder one, murder two, manslaughter, negligent homicide or rape in the first degree, second degree, statuatory, over a hundred bucks and it’s a felony; under and it’s a misdemeanor, and so forth. You could define the moral and immoral so easily by holding up a litmus test like the Ten Commandments. It’s black or it’s white.
Even if you couldn’t define it, you could identify it. As one jurist put it, “I can’t tell you what pornography is, but I know it when I see it.”
How different, how slippery, how gray are the issues we face today. I sat in a class today where a high school age young lady gave an excellent report on stem cell research and the issues surrounding it. I couldn’t help but interject a few thoughts of my own as I listened to the discussion.
I pointed out that when you get to the end product—the stem cells coming from an already fertilized egg—the issue is simple. Obviously it’s better (and probably more moral) to donate the unneeded cells to a research laboratory rather than bundle them up in the trash.
But, I told them, that’s not the “moral” issue. The real question is the morality of creating, say, one hundred fertilized eggs (that some might define as already living human beings), knowing that you are only going to use two or three. You go in knowing that the rest will have to be disposed of. Whether it’s in a trash bin or a university laboratory is irrelevant—morally speaking.
A student suggested (seriously) that morality is not an issue where medical research is involved because ultimately you will benefit so many people. Another said that it was okay to harvest the stem cells from fertilized eggs because the eggs had never become aware human beings—and the people who might be helped by the research were fully aware of themselves and their condition.
Yet another put forth the argument that a paralyzed human feels pain, but the fertilized cell in a test tube feels no pain—so there is nothing wrong with destroying it and collecting its stem cells.
I asked them if they’d ever heard of a Dr. Mengele at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Only one had—so I briefly explained that he was the SS physician who met the trains full of gypsies and Jews and made the determination who would live and who would die.
He conducted endless medical experiments on inmates of the camp—often very cruel ones. But he would happily have accepted any one of the above student rationalizations for his “research”. I warned them about the dangers of establishing legal precedent for what seems a greater good—but can open the door to moral horrors thereafter.
I quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dictum that “hard cases make bad law”. I explained that this means that often when you provide a remedy for a poor widow who really has been wronged, you may create a legal precedent that will allow major corporations to ravage the national good.
When a young lady suggested that my points had no validity because “we are more broad minded today”, I came back with a final question: what if the standard of “feeling or inflicting no pain” were applied in murder cases? Would I receive a lighter sentence because I found a way to kill someone in which he or she felt no pain?
So gray, so slippery. How about Gay Marriage? For centuries an adherent of the Judeo-Christian position would have cited one or two Biblical references and said, “It’s wrong”. But this week’s Newsweek Magazine asks if a loving Christ would really have inflicted so much pain on homosexuals and lesbians by denying them the sacrament of marriage.
You could use the same logic to ask if a loving Christ would cause pedophiles and serial killers so much pain by denying them the natural outlet for their compulsions. (Newsweek and its adherents might have had more of a leg to stand on if they had simply suggested that in a diverse society, such atavistic strictures as Biblical morality no longer apply. That’s an argument I could at least respect.)
Having made the argument that morality based on any one religion has no place in this society, then you could made the distinction the girl in my class did when she raised the issue of what inflicts pain. Obviously pedophiles and serial killers cause way more pain than single sex couples do—so the one becomes “good” and the other two “bad”.
So the issues go. Slippery and gray. Our standard for deciding has been reduced to how we “feel” about it—or how it makes others “feel”.
Feeling good as a basis of morality is certainly not new. Greek Hedonists came up with that notion over two and a half millennia ago. Feeling good is the highest good. Then you never have to fuss about archaic notions like “right” and “wrong”. The hippies understood this. “If it feels good, do it.”