When does the morally right thing to do become the wrong thing to do (see details)?

I would say the moral thing to do in all these cases were the things that were done. Morality is largely based on outcomes rather than specific actions.

An easy example for me is our current zero tolerance laws and most first offense drug laws. So often kids, even adults, moms and dads as 1st time offenders get the book thrown at them to make a point/teach a lesson and it ruins these peoples lives…I mean RUIN!! There has to be better ways to provide recourse and/or punishment that otherwise turns productive citizens into hardened criminals overnight with long languishing internments for what??

intense question. maybe it’s about protection, of our car, of future, our state of mind., whatever is at stake.

I think your examples represent “moral” reasoning. The first isn’t moral, but self-preservation. Ditto with the second; Nixon’s resignation was a plea bargain of sorts. With the last example, banks are made up of depositors, when banks fail, the lives of little people fail.

Perhaps a better example is that it would be morally correct to abort a fetus that would be born with horrendous birth defects, bankrupt the family, and inflict horrible sorrow on the parents. However, the mother carries the child to full term because the protesters outside the abortion clinic vilify her for the decision. The family incurs hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses, lose their health insurance coverage, and their home, and the child dies of complications at age 5.

I think like so many other arguments this hinges on some semantic distinctions. Something being legally right doesn’t necessarily make it morally right. And if you’re talking about something being morally right, it seems to me that’s always contingent on the circumstances.

There’s nothing inherently moral or immoral about driving through a green light, pardoning criminals, or giving money to banks. The circumstances around each one decide what’s “right” or “wrong.” And I think net suffering to all parties is an excellent way to define moral rights and wrongs (or at least the very best thing we have).

So by that definition, taking your legal turn through the green light wasn’t a right that became a wrong; it was value neutral until some net harm could have been caused by it.

I guess I am inclined to answer your root question as: the morally right thing becomes the wrong thing when it causes more suffering than the alternative. (But “more” is tricky; suffering isn’t always easy to quantify!)

It all depends on the big picture, and what you think is moral. Contrary to your examples, I find that the moral thing to do is to go with whatever will help the majority in the end, not go with your knee-jerk reaction and get revenge on the person in the wrong. If doing your interpretation of the “right thing” isn’t going to have negative consequences on the majority, then it is the right thing to do. However, if your interpretation of said “right thing” will have a negative effect on the masses, then the option that will best aid the many actually becomes the “right thing,” in my opinion. The “right thing” is really all relative to the situation.

Without getting into definitions of right, good, etc., when what ought be done is clear it must be done if one is to abide by the ethics to which they ascribe. Suffering is sometimes necessary (many times to undo the results of less than ethical prior actions) and is not, in and of itself, bad, particularly when through it a greater good is reached for the greatest number of people.

@nikipedia – Some folks equate economics and morality, in a kind of financial Darwinism. That’s not necessarily me, but I’ve heard from some quarters that it is “immoral” to bail out failing businesses like banks or GM. Similarly, I’ve also heard it argued that laws represent the morality of the country, which is why so many people want to make things like abortion illegal, and why alcohol was illegal during Prohibition. just sayin’

@everybody – i understand the difference between “legal” and “moral,” but these were the best first three examples I could think of.

@PandoraBoxx‘s example is perfect.

It sounds more like ethics here. The Utilitarian ethic of what will cause the most good for the most people. Since the entire country is affected by the decision, the President must take the broader view into account. A secondary ethical school of thought might look at his character. What is the character of a man who has to make this decision? The greater part of the country wanted this man to be president. Does it follow that his character is one that we trust to make decisions that affect all of us with us in mind when he makes them? The majority must have thought so.

When does the right thing to do become the wrong thing to do?

It doesn’t. It’s the right thing to do. Done deal.

Now the trick is to get people to think about if what they think is right is actually right.
Big disparity there for most people.

I think @Trillian and @Fly are right(lol), its all about the greater good, you must weigh your own ethics and the circumstances and judge the final consequences. I’m not sure if those were good examples though, I know you’ve already said, but some of those depend on ones ethical values and not what is definitvely “moral”

@WolfFang – You could twist that around, though, so many ways. If it’s all about the Greater Good for more people, was it right to “take so many hard-working Americans’ cash and give it to big bank executives?” I don’t need an answer for that (lest this turn from a moral/ethical discussion to a political/economic one, but the “greater good” can easily be turned on its head.

@Trillian: Utilitarianism isn’t always the best, though. For example, the majority would always rule at the expense of any minority. Then you get things like slavery and pogroms.

@laureth I don’t argue that it is the best school of thought, only that it is probably the one used to make the above decisions.

@laureth it was right if it was believed, based on ethical reasoning at the time, it was what ought be done.

@Trillian – Fair ‘nuff. :D

@laureth The way I see it is…there is a sort of absolute when it comes down to situations like this. An objective point of view on things that can serve as a compass to what is the most moral of decisions.

@WolfFang – and whose is that?

…hm? whose is what?

@WolfFang – you say, ” An objective point of view on things…” – whose view is that objective? Most of the time, that seems to be an argument for morality-because-God-says-so. However, views on the existence of God vary. ;)

I was thinking about the movie Sleepers. A priest, played by Robert DeNiro, gets on the witness stand and commits perjury to save the two murderers who he felt he failed as children.
It’s a hard thing to say where the line is, and when you should cross it. It is a slippery slope.

You’re right @laureth, Im not saying that we must strive for the opinions a God, I’m not saying a specific person has such absolute morality either, but people know what is inherently “right” or “wrong” it shouldn’t be that hard to calculate. Also people collectively can probably give enough objective points of view to accurately determine the “greater good”

@WolfFang – I think people always have opinions on what is right or wrong, but the opinions vary, based on upbringing, religion, ideology, and other factors. Some things are clear cut (like saving a drowning boy, even if it means ruining your good shoes), but other things are less clear (which is more important, the life of a fetus/potential baby, or the life and well-being of the mother?). These differences in the way people see the world make it almost impossible for people to agree on what is moral all the time (i.e., objective view). YMMV.

I think this is a time horizon issue. We can use utilitarian values, but we should include a notion of time. The greatest good for the greatest number now? Or shall we take into account the effect of decisions made now on potential goods that may (or may not) occur later?

It’s kind of like the issue of incentives for business. Most business metrics have rewarded leaders for maximizing the bottom line this quarter. The hell with the future. You make money for the shareholders now and you’ll be well rewarded. Those kinds of incentives create short term thinking, which is the kind of thinking that led us into our most recent economic crisis, as well as into other crises.

Some of the fixes being considered for the financial industry would disallow huge rewards for a single year’s efforts. Rather, executives would be compensated based on performance over years—perhaps five or ten or more years. The idea is to get them to think about long term high performance—presumably performance that is more stable and helpful to all of us.

This is really pretty much a similar issue to the question. I am perfectly right to make a huge profit now by manipulating some legal financial mechanism. Never mind that it will destroy the company in two years. I get mine, now. There are other leaders who look not just ten or twenty years down the road, but fifty and one hundred years in the future, and they make decisions now with an eye to laying the groundwork for a very successful business one hundred years from now.

For me, this is utilitarianism with a long time horizon, and I think it’s a pretty good way of making moral choices. The problem with this method is that it becomes more and more difficult to make very good predictions about the future, the farther away that future is. Sometimes you simply don’t have the knowledge to prevent huge mistakes. I don’t think Hoover would have done what he did if he knew the consequences. Bush II, on the other hand, I suspect of selfishness that allows him to line the pockets of his friends at the expense of the general public. I think he made a number of decisions without the best interest of the greatest number in mind. Long term or short term.

So, if we look down the road—literally in your first example—we see that the consequences of doing the right thing at this moment lead to pretty negative consequences just a few feet down the road. Gerald Ford may or may not have done the thing that healed the nation in pardoning Nixon. But at least he was thinking about the future. It didn’t make things worse, I suspect.

Hoover, as I said, couldn’t see very far into the future. We can see further as a result of his mistake.

What we need is increased knowledge. We need more study. Research. This helps us make better (more moral) decisions. This helps us understand when the right thing to do now will soon turn into the very wrong thing to have done. It is this lack of understanding of consequences that causes a large number of decisions to be made that seem sensible at the time, but turn out to be pretty disastrous.

When does the morally right thing to do become the wrong thing to do.
Simple. When it hurts others more than it actually helps.
In the examples of 2 and 3, the recourse of punishment would not have helped anyone else in the long run. As for the first example, I would argue that the right of way would not give you license to plow into someone. You are always, suppose try to avoid an accident if possible. Plowing into the idiot of the second car could also kill you.

@wundayatta This is true. It sounds like Wizards rule number two.(I think it’s number two) “The best intentions can sometimes have the worst consequences.” Very sound reasoning.

Right, like I said, some things are just morally right like saving a drowning boy, but for things that are not as clear cut, like @Pandora said, calculate if it hurts others more than it actually helps, and when applicable, is it hurting more people than it could could possibly help. I also agree with @wundayatta, more knowledge will help us reach better, decisions and such objective points of view I said befor

I’m still way back at Nixon.

Havn’t thought about Nixon in years!

I, as one who maintains that there is an absolute standard for Right and Wrong, say that the morally-right thing is always right. Laws are largely codified morals.

@Nullo – So if there’s one bad man in a city (say it’s Osama bin Laden, for example) and the only way to kill him is to level the city and all 100,000 other residents, that’s the right thing to do? Or is it the morally right thing to do to save 99,999 people?

That’s the thing. Looking at so many moral dilemmas, there are ways to frame each way of looking at it as the right way. How do you decide which way is the objectively right way?

(I suspect you will say God and the Bible guide you. But how do you extrapolate from that to so many modern-day situations without losing the essential meaning behind it, much like people try to extrapolate from the Founders’ words what they would do about the Internet, for example?)

@laureth
I think that you misunderstand the nature of morality.
Destroying the lives and property of 99,999 innocent people is morally wrong. However, that does not affect the moral rightness of capturing or killing the one bad man; it just encourages you to come up with another plan.

I’m afraid that yours is a lousy example; we developed the technology and techniques suitable for manhunts on our way to developing city-killing weapons.

It’s not meant to be realistic – it’s only meant to be a moral thought exercise.

What inspired this question was various discussions with people on the Right who’ve told me that it’s immoral to bail out the failing banks, with hard-earned American taxpayer money (well, deficit spending, really, but who’s counting?) thereby allowing fat cat executives to get multimillion dollar bonuses and benefits and get to keep their job while workaday Americans have to work hard to pay that money. It’s as if they think that if we had not bailed out the banks (keeping the cash in play) and done the whole stimulus song and dance, that we’d still be in the same not-so-good but-still-improving economic state that we’re in today, with less of a deficit. In fact, I believe that a lot of the Tea Party crowd is incensed about this.

However, without doing all that bailing of out, I suspect it wouldn’t be as comfortable as it is right now for most of us. Without cash circulating (and with a side order of deflation), we’d have a Great Depressionlike situation where more people are out of work, people who can’t feed their families, and basically a whole lot of people suffering that aren’t suffering nearly as bad right now. And I have to wonder if they think that the act of bailing out banks was so, so bad, bad enough that they would rather stand in a bread line in order to effect what they see as a moral and economic punishment on the banks. To me, the idea that they would do this to me and my country to exact some kind of moral justice is almost unthinkable.

And that is where the question comes from. How much damage to the economy are they willing to do, in order to insure that the bad banks be allowed to “rightfully” fail. Or, would putting the country at risk of a second Depression be so much worse for so many more people that bailing out banks (and GM and Chrysler) topped by stimulus spending then becomes the “right” thing to do, even if the executives get off scot-free.

It still was not the right thing to bail them out, but like @Nullo said, it encourages us to come up with an alternative. Now given that if the banks were allowed to fail, we probably would not be in as “comfortable” a situation as we are now, but who’s to say that ensuring whether we are comfortable is the best thing anyway, maybe it would have, in the ultimate scheme of things brought about a change for the better. The people who helped drive the economy down in the first place that proftted can be linked to worse things than just getting rich, and they will probably do the same thing again in the future.

So maybe it would have been a good thing to risk bread lines, deaths from starvation and the like? I’m sorry, I can’t see that. At least, not from street level. Sometimes the “ultimate scheme” is the important thing, but I don’t know if I’m willing to suffer Depressionlike circumstances to teach bad rich people a lesson.

I know what you mean, but really, we’ve kinda painted ourselves into a wall here, for a true total solution there really is no easy way out :(...

A malum per se is something that is inherently wrong regardless of the law (slavery would be an example) whereas something might be seen as inherently good but prohibited by law (malum prohibitum), an example being rescuing Jews under Nazism.