There are all sorts of ethicists, I think they call themselves, as well as other arcane philosophers and various different holy men and women who study ancient tablets, scrolls and tomes, and then pontificate on those subjects, invariably for money. I enrolled in Philosophy 101 in a little one-room junior college when, inexplicably, I was honorably discharged from the U. S. Navy, in 1974. (As I often repeat, the fact that I made no conscious effort to re-enlist was perhaps my single greatest contribution to national defense. I was not an exemplary sailor.)
When final exam time came around, I and the other students were called upon to write a paper on the subject of freedom. What is it? That was the question. At the time there was a popular feminine hygiene product advertised on TV, by the name “New Freedom.” Accordingly, I began my essay with the following sentence. “Freedom is a sanitary napkin.” I don’t recall anything more about the paper; but my teacher tracked me down at the little shack I lived in a few miles away from the school, and he told me that I’d made a B in the class, and that he would change it to an A if I would give the essay another shot. I took the B.
According to The Devil’s Dictionary Revisited (DDR), a philosopher is “a person who can only think.” I can think, but I never saw fit to devote my life to it. I knew early on I had more to do. I have tried reading a few philosophy books; and one in particular, by the crazy German, Nietzsche, proved to me I had no business doing so, and led me to further understand why he eventually drove himself insane.
Recently I was called upon to join in monthly discussions of the parables of Jesus Christ. The next powwow will be centered on the story of the good Samaritan. I’ve been hearing about it since I was first dragged into a Southern Baptist church as a child, and reading a contemporary commentary written by one of the aforementioned scholars did little to expand my knowledge of or insight into the story.
There are many good lessons to be found in the Holy Bible, and perhaps in the Torah and even the Koran, not that I would know much about the two latter books, just as I know little about Buddhism and Hinduism. But what I do believe about the Bible is that for many a base hit contained therein, there is a pop fly to the second baseman. The good Samaritan story is more like a line drive to the glove of the first baseman.
Is there an absolute moral obligation to help another person? I say there is not. In my view the help is relative to whether the person is unworthy of it. Who am I to judge? I am myself, and no one else can do my thinking for me. The same goes for everyone.
Let’s say that a known serial killer like the late, infamous Ted Bundy, were to escape death row. If Ted got in his Volkswagen Beetle and drove away and crashed into a bridge abutment and was seriously injured, would he be deserving of help? Well, if the battered and bleeding Bundy thought I had a moral obligation to help him, he would be alone in his thoughts, and he would die that way. If I happened along and recognized him, instead of trying to save his life, I would stomp on his head.
Oh, but a man can’t take the law into his own hands, some would say. Tut tut, I say. Men (and women) take the moral law into their own hands all the time. This is especially true of politicians who send teenagers off to die on foreign fields. Whence comes their moral authority to do so? And if they can cower at their desks and send high school graduates off to a rice paddy or a desert to kill another teenager who speaks a different language, why should I or anyone else think I would by their own perceived moral authority owe Ted Bundy anything but a boot up against his head?
So many questions. At least the one concerning Bundy is now moot. He is dead, forever.
As for life or death and who decides, is it not supremely paradoxical that some of the people who vehemently oppose capital punishment for killers like Bundy are the very same people who as vehemently advocate for late term abortions? Asking for a friend.