I recently posted a moral problem on Facebook. Someone I thought was a friend became angry, called me a racist and blocked me.
What horrible sin did I commit?
I posted honestly. Here is what I wrote. You can read it and let me know what you think…
“Relative morality: It’s wrong to lie. But it’s worse to allow an innocent person to die, so of course you should lie to the Nazis about the Jew hiding in your basement. So far so good.
“But what if the Jew is not “innocent” — what if he’s a thief? What if he’s stolen from you personally? I would contend — you still lie. But what if he’s a murderer?”
“Yes, I am a weird person who thinks of this stuff sometimes before I have my coffee. And, just to clarify — it’s never OK to cooperate with Nazis.”
Looking over what I posted — other friends got where I was going. One buddy pointed out that it was basically a re-statement of the Trolley problem.
So why did I post this? To point out that there are shades of gray and life involves tough choices. And that a just law protects not just the innocent, but also the guilty.
As a corollary, just because someone is unjustly persecuted does not mean that person is an innocent.
The Nazis sent many people to their death. They started off by killing disabled children. Parents allowed their children to be taken, thinking they’d be getting treatment. Some of these poor babies were starved to death. The death of these innocents breaks our hearts.
The Nazis went on to expand the groups they targeted. Poles, Jews, Catholic resistors, Gypsies…. Some of those people might not have been “nice” or “good” people. But even the worst of them did not deserve to be summarily executed simply for an accident of birth.
Even if a person is a murderer, he or she deserves a trial in a court, not to be thrown into a concentration camp.
Why did I post what I did?
Because so often people justify abuse by claiming the person being abused is not really innocent, so they deserve the horrible thing that happened.
For example, I have heard people justify rape, as I talk about in this article. They blamed a girl for her assault because she was too friendly, too trusting. I’ve also heard people blame women for their rape because “she slept around”, or “she dressed like a slut”.
So, this lead me to challenge them. Does a prostitute deserve to be raped, I asked? It’s interesting how these types of questions expose misogyny… I will then ask them questions such as — what if a woman is selling her body to feed her starving family? I point out that during the Irish Potato Famine, women sold their bodies, believing that this act condemned them to the fires of Hell, in order to feed their babies. Do such women deserve rape?
Or, to use another example — do we consider waterboarding torture? If we do, then how do we justify it? The answer usually is, “well, we only do it to terrorists”. So does the terrorist give up his claims to humanity? Can we freely torture someone we consider subhuman?
Of course, in the old South, blacks were sometimes considered subhuman. At the very least, they were considered less than whites. Did this justify lynching?
Much is made of the innocent blacks who were killed this way. But here is my point — even if the man in question was, in fact, a rapist or murderer — he still did not deserve to be lynched. Why not? Because he was still a human being.
Today we continue to see the miscarriage of justice in our prison system, justified because the people who suffer are considered to be “bad people”. I write about this here. We even joke about prisoners being raped or tortured in jail. How can we laugh at this abuse of other human beings?
Even if someone truly is a very bad person who has murdered many people — what does it say about us, about our own morality, when we use that to dehumanize someone else?
It is simple justice to punish a criminal. But torture is something else.
The real issue always comes down to this — do we treat our fellow human beings as human? Do we see beyond skin color, gender and so on to the humanity underneath?
It is relatively easy to do when the person is “innocent” or “good”. But who is innocent, aside from small children? Who is good?
Why is it that we can forgive ourselves for, say, lying, but we have a hard time forgiving someone else? Why is it even harder to forgive someone we consider as less than ourselves?
Ultimately this comes down to the real moral question — who do we consider as fully human as we consider ourselves?
And, if we are truly moral — should anything separate us from the rest of humanity?
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This post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: Shefali O’Hara