Do all acts have a moral component?

Question

If I turn on a light switch, I'm using electricity (bad) and lighting the room (good)
If I pluck a flower for my girlfriend, I'm killing the flower (bad) and making my girlfriend happy (good)
If I kill someone, I'm satisfying my urge to kill (good) and I'm committing murder (bad)

Answer 1

one must also consider, what is the best path for you to take? What is your goal, for what purpose are you on this planet?

Answer 2

There are of course many moral systems.

I believe that morality relates to the consequences of our actions. So the moral component of our actions can be measured by the size of the consequence.

If we talk about will, then we can say the morality is determined by our understanding of the consequences. Stealing a million dollars from Bill Gates (the richest man in the world) should have less consequence than steal 20 dollars from a homeless man.

Notice I use the idea of understanding of consequence. It means that the distance is not important. So mistakes or accidents don't have a moral component, even if they could kill hundreds or millions people.

You understanding of morality is a little selfish. Lighting a room is not morally good, even if it benefits you. Using electricity is not bad, because it might use coal, which pollutes, but creates jobs, which can benefit other people.

So acts are not so important as choices. So to answer your question, acts have no morality at all, but our choices are what matter. The more we understand our choices, the more moral or immoral they become.

So this is why people idolise ignorance. It means all our actions are neutral, because we don't understand their consequences. But ignorance is the one act that condemns. We choose to not know.

Answer 3

An act is an event and is neither good nor bad. Man has the ability to assign either good or bad to any event depending on his point of reference.

This is one of the components that have impressed me about the TV drama Smallville. The writers have gone to great lengths in character development of Lex Luthor and Clark Kent. In the comic strip, Clark is obviously the good guy and Lex is obviously the villain. In the series, Lex did not start out to be a villain. He did not make on major choice to say, I want to be evil, but it was a series of poor choices that he made over a long period of time that in his mind, were choices that were good choices. Any moral component in an action is defined by the observer based on his understanding of good and bad. The criteria that he uses to measure the degree of good and bad are from influences that he has experienced since birth. The morality of the society he was raised, the role models that were available to him, his interpretation of cause and effect in direct relationships with other people and the world around him, 3rd party experience through myth, literature, and intellectual pursuits. A person in a society with a very limited variety of experience to draw from will have a greater division of good and bad as in the contrast of the colors black or white. Additional experience and maturity has the effect of blurring the lines to many shades of gray. It is not because the act is either good or bad, but because our ability to perceive these acts in that context. Morality is a concept and not a physical property of the interaction of matter in time space.

Answer 4

As many have suggested I think there are a number of acts that have no apparent or actual consequence.
But I think that as soon as another person is involved though, it is a lot harder to find acts that have no consequence.
I would bet that it's very hard to measure consequence in a whole range of areas. It would be like trying to see a single jigsaw piece and the whole puzzle of a few trillion billion pieces at the same time.

Answer 5

Read Aristotle. All acts do not have a moral component. Acts that have moral components need to be goal-oriented or purposive and performed as ends-in-themselves.

Answer 6

They only have a moral component if you or someone else assign it a moral component. But I think that in society, just about everything has a moral component.

Answer 7

If a lion eats a zebra. Should we consider that as a murder? Somethings can not be judge as good or bad, they simply are.

Answer 8

When you clip your toenails, how could that have a moral consequence?

If I ream out my nose with my pinkie, I am decongesting my airway (good). If I flick my booger in the trash, that is also good.

Answer 9

Looks logical as you say it.... just one doubt... what moral component when I answer your question?

Answer 10

All actions have consequences.