Activity 1

What do you consider to be the ethical basis for the statement, “Our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards . . . helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate in the next.” Do you believe the statement is a sound statement, why or why not? Explain your answer using material in Chapter 1. There is a part of this statement that makes it hard for me to agree with. The first part - "Our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards" is what I disagree with. What is this moral standard we are speaking of that we are turning on and off? I feel that every single person lives their life based on his/her own set of unique moral values. While we might perceive that a person is selectively engaging and disengaging moral standards, the person will most probably not see it the same way. To him/her, they see nothing wrong with what they are doing, they are driven by their own morality - right and wrong/good and evil. We have been taught that Hitler was an evil man, but is he really? He was fiercely driven by his own morality in everything he did, and if evil is perceived as an act or someone that disagrees with our own morals, we have met many evil people in our lives. I feel that we don't "selectively engage and disengage our moral standards", because we live by our own morals that are "right" to our individual selves. What is right for me might not be right for you - and that is where the disparity begins.