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Further to my previous
post. My own situation of distress arose out of a situation that
focussed on a problem in this area of moral law. Originally what
happened in my situation is that I went to the assistance of a
person in distress. In this case it was a cousin of mine who had
been defamed in a very serious way in a public newspaper. (In
his eventual court case he was awarded the highest damages for
defamation in this State's legal history. The matter was not trivial.)
As things turned out my
going to his assistance caused me to end up in a situation where
I also ended up in distress. This largely occurred because I did
not have sufficient resources on my own to be able to solve my
cousin's problems. I called on the assistance of a number of other
people. One of these other people chose, instead of rendering
assistance to in fact further denigrate the person originally
in distress and also to denigrate me. This enventually led to
a significant number of other people who had already rendered
assistance withdrawing their assistance and the whole situation
degenerated catastrophically for a large number of people including
my cousin and myself. It is not an exaggeration to say that at
a number of points in the verbal confrontations that arose in
this sorry and distressing mess this precise phrase "am I my brother's
keeper" was debated. I could in fact show letters where there
was debate on this exact biblical phrase and what our various
moral responses should have been, or were, in this scenario.
The person who in fact I
allege acted wrongly did, on a number of occasions, endeavour
to argue that we are not our brother's keeper and there is no
moral obligation to go to another person in distress. He did seem
to be able to understand that it applied in the case of a traffic
accident but he could not seem to translate the general moral
principle over to the situation where someone was caught up in
a different kind of "accident" or "event of wrong-doing" (in this
case the original defamatory act). I do not know if it was the
lack of physical injury or what that made it impossible to explain
that this situation was morally no different to had my cousin
been injured in a traffic accident and required serious medical
assistance.
I have since come across
many situations where people do not seem to be able to reason
through moral principles -- or translate a general moral principle
to specific scenarios. They can accept that the Law of the Land
says you have to stop and render assistance after a traffic accident
but as far as they are concerned that only applies to traffic
accidents. Other sorts of accidents do not carry any similar moral
obligation.
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