College in the Middle

And this is just a reminder that I've been doing college in the middle of all this.

This is what I wrote recently for my college class while holding a baby, talking on the phone and trying to catch up on my emails. I hope that it made some sense, but I hope more that I get full credit so that I can graduate soon.

By all admissions, ethics is not really a subject that we would call objective. It is subjective to everyone who studies it. Each person has his own sets of beliefs and experiences. People with the same or similar experiences have different beliefs. Take the Iraq war for example. There are definitely two sides to the story.

Though not all Muslims agree that this is true, there is such a thing as a jihad in the Islamic religion that purports that the unbelievers should be coverted or destroyed. It is believed that the most holy thing that can happen to one is to die while doing this.

It is totally unacceptable in our society to go around with a bomb strapped to oneself, but the media at least would have us believe that this is a common cultural occurrence over in Iraq.

This is an important topic for an ethics class because we are looking at so many different cultures and civilizations. The young child trained for the jihad is trained from the start of life that all non-Muslim people are bad. His enthusiasm for this idea becomes so great that he takes his life for it. His local ethics class would say that he is right. The local ethics teacher in our world would have all manner of problems with that. Ethics depends on the situation and the information in the situation. It’s the only subject that I know that changes with each person’s viewpoint and is still correct in its own way.

If the communication lines of the world were all bottled up and we didn’t have telephones or airplanes, ethical relativism would never be as important of a topic as it is now. As we go and dabble in the worlds of other cultures, we are forced to see what it is that they do differently. Many times, that different thing does not agree with what we do.

I’m not saying at all that I condone the things that other cultures do that agree with me. That just shows my local viewpoint of ethics. My viewpoint is that each person has a set of basic human rights that all people should respect. I also agree that there is a basic moral code that ALL people on Earth can agree with. However, to start, I have to be able to understand the cultures of the world around me before I can make a judgment as a student of ethics. And that’s why I study ethics in this class.