Still on “Legislating Morality”

 

Where the Nazi German's morally right in exterminating Jews, Gypsies, Blacks, the Mentally and Physically Handicapped, Homosexuals, ethnic Poles and Slavs? I am sure you will say no, but you are wrong! The Nazi Germans action was morally right as Morals are rules and standards that we are told we must “conform” to when deciding what “right” behavior is. Morals are dictated to us by either society or religion thus we are not free to think and choose. Under moral subjectivism, good and bad are entirely subjective commodities. This means that if I think a thing is right, it is as right as is possible for moral right to exist. The principle of subjective morality authorizes an act as “morally good” if the person that performed the act believed it to be the right thing to do; that is the only framework available to moral subjectivism for an evaluation of “moral” and “immoral”. It is strictly a relationship between the actor/believer and the act.
The NAZI Germany example is a classic case of Nietzsche ‘MPS’ - Morality in the Pejorative Sense, where people who are being guided by ‘morals’ dictated by their society assume that their “morality” has universal applicability, thus MPS “says stubbornly and inexorably, ‘I am morality itself, and nothing besides is morality”.
The difference between Morals and Ethics is that with Morals the “thinking has been done;” with Ethics there’s a freedom to “think and choose” your personal philosophy for guiding the conduct of your life.
At the post WWII Nuremberg trials the refusal to accept “orders from above” from the NAZI Officers on trial as a basis for some of the atrocities committed was in essence the refusal to look at the 'morality' of their actions in the context of what was dictated to them by religion or society but judge them based on the underlying “Ethics”… “Why didn’t you think about it?” For despite what was dictated to them by the NAZI society the Nazi officers were free to choose their actions and in the eternal words of Jean Paul Sarte, “Freedom is the freedom of choosing but not the freedom of not choosing”…”not to choose, is in fact, to choose not to choose”....Not to choose to differ was the choice the NAZI Officers on trial made.



Jekwu Ozoemene