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| Moses with the Ten Commandments (1648) by Philippe de Champaigne |
Obviously, views on right and wrong have changed over the years. Do you think what is right and wrong changes or just human notions of what is right and wrong? If wrong has always been wrong, shouldn't we be able to make moral judgments about the past using the same criteria that make sense to us today?
In the early eighties, it was not illegal to publish medical records without the permission of the patient, but was it morally wrong nevertheless? Do you think everything that is morally wrong ought to be illegal as well?
There are so many ways to look at this subject. From a religious point of view the bible is the only guide to what is right and wrong. From a scientific view what is right and wrong is determined by researching what is bad for you. Every person has different beliefs and different levels of education. Never will we see a time that every human agrees on what is ok and what should be law. I think that individual views also change about what is right and wrong. I know that it's not right to eat candy every day and I know it's bad for me but I would be really upset if a nutritionist tried to outlaw candy. I think publishing the medical records without permission should be against the law. I think people should be able to decide for themselves whether or not they want to engage in potentially dangerous activities.
ReplyDeleteMorgan Hicks
This is a difficult question to answer. I think it could go both ways. Maybe people see things differently today then they did then and maybe some things have always been thought of as morally wrong but since it wasn't "law" it was still thought of as okay. Today, in my opinion, people have taken more of an initiative to make law what is morally right and wrong because without it, people would do as they pleased as they did in Henrietta's time. With human nature being the way it is, having laws and such gives us an extra push to do the right thing. Society then didn't have that to hold them back from making these decisions of breaching people's privacy and rights in the medical field. Yes, they should have thought morally of it first, but then again, they really did view some things differently then than now, right? All in all, I think the person's motives for their actions is the ultimate decider: if they just didn't know or they knew, but chose to do the morally wrong thing.
ReplyDeleteChelsi Norris
Chelsi Norris
Just like laws change, people’s views on subjects change as well. It’s not right what everyone did in the past, but it’s hard for anyone to dismiss something they do every day as unlawful unless it’s questioned by authority in the first place. Everyone has different morals about what should be right and wrong and how laws should be governed. It’s hard to say one absolute correct answer to every question based on everyone’s right and wrong morals. Laws evolve often even today so we can’t really say we are one hundred percent right in all our moral judgments now. I’m sure there are some things we consider normal today that in the future will be wrong. We live in a different generation today than people back then, so how could we expect them to of been governed by the same laws.
ReplyDeleteAshley Huhman
I agree with Morgan that to approach the question from a religious stance the Bible is the ultimate guide to right and wrong and that makes the standards of right and wrong unchanging. They are plainly set in stone for you if you hold the Bible as truth. But, one cannot expect the whole world to agree on one book as a moral compass, therefore most everyone has their own opinion of right and wrong. I feel right and wrong are unchanging standards, but how people perceive them and how society punishes actions based upon right and wrong will always be changing. I also feel that some people silence their conscience to right and wrong which prohibits them from learning from the past as a guide to what is wrong. Laws regulating morality would be ideal just as world peace and ending world hunger, but in practical application are most always a failure as we see in laws that have failed with in our national legal system such as prohibition. People are always going to challenge these laws as we saw in the prohibition era, but the application of such laws is not always in vain and I feel sometimes are worth a shot because without a set of standards for society such as laws we would have chaos. Times have changed greatly since Henrietta's medical records were published and so naturally so have the laws as I feel laws will always be evolving.
ReplyDeleteAnna Talkington
I think it is human notion of what is right and wrong that change. Taking something without asking is, and has always been, wrong. And really that is what the people who gave Henrietta's medical records did. When they were children and they took something without asking they would have been reprimanded by their parents, it is the same principle, but now people take more notion of the rights of people.
ReplyDeleteStormy Wigley
...and me, I disagree with the question. "Right" and "wrong" are abstract concepts; they don't exist practically and never have. Morals are nice and all, but as several people have mentioned, they aren't universal--and that's okay. There are so many diverse cultures all over the world, all beautiful and different, and each has its own moral codes. Developed countries generally have similar laws now, because we communicate with each other and agree to certain standards--but it wasn't always that way, and universal morals are rarely a /good/ thing. I personally think what I think about right and wrong, but I don't believe my word should be law, because some people think differently from me, and they have the right to live as they please. I think that legislating morals is dangerous because rather than being "legal" or "illegal", a behavior is now "right" or "wrong"--something that no human can judge about another.
ReplyDeleteSome of you have referred to the Bible as unchanging source of determining right and wrong (for Christians, anyway). How would you (or any of the others who have commented on this post) respond to the argument that the question of how to interpret the Bible's notions of right and wrong is itself contested terrain? In other words, can't sincere, rational believers sometimes disagree about what the Bible claims is right and wrong? Don't human interpretations of the Bible change over time?
ReplyDelete