IS IT THAT SIMPLE...???

The decisions that we make everyday to do whats "right" and not to do whats "wrong"... Whenever a question is at all complicated and cannot be settled by following some simple rule, such as thou shalt not steal or thou shalt not bear false witness, it is evident that the decision cannot be made except by the thought of consequences. The word rightis very ambiguous and it is by no means easy to distinguish the various meanings which it has in our culture. Owing yourself to the variety of these meanings, adherence to any one necessarily involves us in certain paradoxes when we use it in a context which suggests one of the other meanings. This is the usual result of precision of language; long as the paradoxes are merely verbal, they do not give rise to more than verbal objections from each other.

The question we have to ask ourselves is what do we mean when we understand the moral sense of words? If these are to make a definition of the right way how to act, we cannot say that they consist in judging that such and such acts are right, for that would make our definition a bit contradictory. We have to say that the moral sense consists in a certain specific emotion of approval towards an act and that an act is to be called right when the person, at the moment of action, feels this emotion of approval towards the action which he or she decides to perform is right or wrong.
There is certainly a sense in which a person ought to perform any act which he approves, and to commit any act which he disapproves. It seems also undeniable that there are emotions which may be called approval and disapproval. Now with this theory, whether adequate or not, they must be allowed to contain a part of the truth. What is right, then is in some way dependent on consequences.

The most natural position to start from would be that the purpose of the right act, under any circumstances, is the one which will have the best consequences. We can recognize this as the most valuable choice or the most fortunate act, then it will be the one which will produce the greatest example of good over evil, or the least excess of evil over good (for there may be situations in which every possible act will have consequences that are on the total bad side). But we cannot show that the most fortunate act is always the one which is objectively right, in the sense that it is what a wise man will think that he ought to do. For it may happen that the act which will in fact prove the most fortunate is likely, according to all the evidence at our disposal, to be less fortunate than some others. In such a case, it will be wrong to go against the evidence, in spite of the actual good result of our doing so.

There have certainly been some men who have done so much harm that it would have been fortunate for the world if their nurses had killed them in infancy. But if their nurses had done so their action would not have been objectively right, because the probability was that it would not have the best effects. (Hitler-Stalin-Saddam)


This argument reminds us that even in the issues of abortion debate, we should regard the woman as a person and not just as a container for the foetus. We should therefore give great consideration to her rights and needs as well as those of the unborn and as just as well to our own.

Pro-choice women's rights activists do not take a casual attitude to the foetus; the opposite is usually true, and most of them acknowledge that choosing an abortion is usually a case of choosing the least bad of several more bad courses of action.

A pregnancy to a woman is perhaps one of the most determinative aspects of her life. It disrupts her body. It disrupts her education. It disrupts her employment. And it often disrupts her entire family life at no matter of the age.

Many people regard the right to control one's own body as a key moral right. If women are not allowed to abort an unwanted foetus they are deprived of this right. This leads some people to claim is that it is unethical to ban abortion because doing so denies freedom of choice to women and forces 'the unwilling to bear the unwanted'.

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