I need help on a morality topic!!?

Question

If some one has a gun to your head and tells you to kill another person. Is morally right according to the catholic church for you to kill that person to save your own life. If any one can tell me where I can find information one this topic it would be a great help, Thanks!

If some one has a gun to your head and tells you to kill another person. Is morally right according to the catholic church for you to kill that person to save your own life. If any one can tell me where I can find information one this topic it would be a great help, Thanks!
According to the catechism when your life is in jeopardy you are not responciable for all your actions

This is for a morality class essay that i am clueless on. If anyone has any sources were I can get factual information that can be used in an essay

--THIS INFORMATION IS TO BE USED FOR A CATHOLIC SCHOOL MORALITY CLASS--

Answer 1

+ According to the cataclysm you are only responsible for some of your actions. Are there alternatives here?

Answer 2

How would this be a great help to you? Are you planning to be in this particular situation? If so, how are you supposed to kill this other person? With a gun? With a knife? With poison? With a bow and arrow? Why do you want to know if it is morally right with the catholic church? Why not a Methodist church? How about a Mormon church? Maybe a Scientology church? Is any of this beginning to sound as stupid as your question sounds to me? Is your question a morality question? Or simply mockery? Because I believe that any Christian would be too busy praying to worry about killing someone if there were a gun being held to their head, and putting their faith in God. You see, there is an appointed time for you to die. God has that set. Killing someone WILL NOT change that appointed time. You simply DO NOT concern yourself with it! Fear not that which is able to destroy the body and not the soul, but fear that which can destroy the body as well as the soul. The very hairs on your head are numbered. It is in God's hands. Not yours. Not a man with a gun's. Understand? I will be totally shocked if you do.

Answer 3

When I was a Catholic, the answer to that question would have been NO. I might stop to consider whether that other person might be a danger to others.

Then again, I might, as a martial artist recognize that a gun to my head isn't much of a threat as it takes about 1/2 of a second between the time I move, for them to notice the movement and pull the trigger. It's fairly easy to disarm them if the gun is actually at my head. If they are farther away, I might also consider the situation regarding what weapon I have, and what my chances are.

I might also recognize that if the person with the gun wants the other person dead, that he will likely kill them as well. If he kills me, that other person was a witness, and will likely die even if I don't kill them.

In the end, it seems to me that the greatest chance for survival would be to disarm or eliminate the one doing the treatening. He certainly knows that my killing someone under his duress makes me merely his weapon in a murder. He would still be responsible, and the only way to insure his freedom would be to kill me anyway. Under duress, I am neither legally nor morally responsible if I have no way to prevent my own death other than killing the third party.

So, thinking it through, I realize that in no way will my life be likely to be spared if I kill that person. I realize that in no way is the other person's life guaranteed if I do not kill him. My only option for survival (morally or otherwise) is to find a way to attack and disarm the person with the gun.

Probably the answer that you're looking for though, is that one can't be held legally or morally accountable for killing while under duress (after having eliminated all other options).

Answer 4

As a Benidictine once told me: it is *never* right to allow the ends to justify the means.

I guess this would mean you shouldn't kill the individual. For the finer points of your arguement, get the Catholic Chaticism (spelling bad, sorry). It's a printing of all the "teachings" (for lack of a better word) of the Catholic Church. This is where it's set in black and white the Church's stance on Birth Control and other topics.

Answer 5

I don't know what the Catholic Church says about this. They should say that all human life is precious and you shouldn't choose yourself over someone else. I'd pray and get shot in the head instead of killing another person. At least that's what I hope I would do if in that situation.

Merry Christmas.

Answer 6

You cannot be moral at the point of a gun. That's where morality cannot be practiced. To practice morality, you have to be free. The horror of religion, any religion, is that it wants to teach moral precepts from the unreal or surreal instead of reality.

Reason, not religion, tells you that the moral act to perform should be to revolt against the person who points the gun at you. The heroic action is to fight the oppressor, not to take the life of another innocent person. Imagine if the other were your child!

Reason tells you to oppose yourself to evil, and that evil is the oppressor of freedom. It is possible that the gun pointed at you was empty, a mere threat. Nonetheless, your responsibility is to eliminate oppression, so that there is freedom to make moral choices.

The despicable passage in the Bible where God commands Abraham to kill his son in order to prove his unconditional allegiance and faith to God, is a similar example. Abraham would have been heroic and moral if he had refused the commandment.

If the Bible had been written by men of reason instead of men of faith, morality would have been taught with examples that require freedom of choice based on real life situations, where people solve problems through negotiation and trade, not at the point of a gun. What can you do when a murder enters your house and takes members of your family hostage? You work to create a society where innocent people are better protected from such deranged individuals. Such situations are not issues that teach morality, because they are emergencies situations where your choice is to succumb to the power of evil or to die a hero.

Answer 7

I think that the moral thing to do in any culture or religion would be to give your life for another. This may not be a personal belief of any person but in sociaty we are dictated by our government to have a strict code of morals, I believe in Anarchy and feel that anything can be solved in a peaceful commute.

Answer 8

I don't believe it's condoned by the catholic church in the situation you discribed, nor any other church, but it is the primal instinct of man for self preservation, and under moral laws of the land, prudent concept, most courts would not condemn you for this action.

Answer 9

I'm trying to kill the guy who is threatening me. I have no reason to believe that I am walking any how. So why kill the guy you don't have an issue with?

I don't know how the Catholics feel about it, but I ain't that chicken sh**. If you are, how do you see that as moral?

Answer 10

It is better to die, doing the right thing, than to live in sin. I'd rather die trying to save someone. Be my luck I'd go home and on the way get into an accident and die anyway. Might as well go doing a good deed.

Answer 11

Jesus' comment comes closest: "Love your neighbor as yourself." I. Kant's Universal Imperative is a slight revision: "Do unto others as you would have them do to you."
As you may know, this is not an idle question as the so-called Lord's Army in Ghana regularly practices this test of loyalty, even among family members.