When People Do Things: The Ethics of Actions

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.--Steven Weinberg

Interesting guy. Guess for his statement to be true, you have to go in for the Socratic thing, "To be is to do." So, in Weinberg's construct, if you do evil, you're evil, if you do good, you're good. That's a little harsh, I think. In fact, I could even argue that if you're starving, it's evil not to steal. If your child's life depends on some expensive medication you can't afford, is it "good" to let them die, or "evil" to steal what you need?

Of course, Sartre's point was, "To do is to be" -- or, and I'm taking some liberties here, existence is based on action. Each action, then, defines your existence to that extent. In that respect, a bad action is just a small component of your existence, not a defining one. So, a bad action doesn't make you all bad? OK, again, I could argue that George Bush was wrong to argue his Manichean Paranoia, that he could do evil means to reach good ends. Torturing people is evil, no matter why you do it.

Which leads me to one of my favorite quotes, by Kurt Vonnegut, who I miss deeply:

"To be is to do"--Socrates.
"To do is to be"--Jean-Paul Sartre.
"Do be do be do"--Frank Sinatra.

Vonnegut on the Daily Show

From Kurt Vonnegut on the Daily Show:

"I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy—because we’re experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that’s what’s going on now."

Kurt Vonnegut is up in heaven now

From A Man Without a Country (Vonnegut 2005):

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke.