I’m enrolled in an online beginning chemistry class at Greenville Tech this semester, and my teacher initiated an interesting subject for the class to dialogue online in discussion board format. Mary Roldan writes the following for discussion:
“Do the potentially dangerous properties of chemicals outweigh the benifical [sic] properies [sic]. How do you make such a decision and where is the line drawn. Make an inital [sic] posting and respond to at least 2 other students.”
Many of the other students responded by correlating “dangerous” with “bad” and “beneficial” with “good” thus giving morality to chemicals. I don’t think the discussion meant to bring morality into the picture although it is closely related and almost unavoidable. I therefore responded with the following post:
The supposed “Goodness” and “Badness” of something means we have to ascribe some sort of morality to that thing. Chemicals in themselves have no good or bad. They are just chemicals. A chemical that is “bad” for plants might be “good” for killing weeds. Or a chemical that is “bad” because it destroys life might be “good” because it destroys life (e.g. warfare, abortion). I guess we have to determine what our morality basis is when we use chemicals. Chemicals aren’t “good” and “bad.” The way people use chemicals can be “good” or “bad” and even that is up for grabs depending on your basis of morality.
The ensuing discussion revealed that my point was completely missed; nevertheless, the entire discussion unveiled to me the lack of most people of a well-thought foundation of morality. My class basically defined “good” chemicals as those that preserved life and “bad” chemicals as those that destroyed life.
My question is why should we define “good” and “bad” in this manner? A sadist defines “good” chemicals as those that destroy life – the exact opposite of my class. Who is to say the sadist is wrong? This dilemma drives should drive us to the foundation of our morality. How do we define good and bad? And who is to say your basis of morality is the correct morality?
Since I’m a Christian, I build my foundation of morality upon an objective basis – a standard outside of myself. This objective foundation is defined by God who Christians believe does not change in character as humans change. A Christian morality isn’t (or shouldn’t if based on God) defined by the popular opinion about something and hence the irritating evangelical resistance to abortion and homosexuality. Naturally, some will argue that God is not a valid foundation for morality or that God’s revealed morality for man is either unclear or irrelevant to modern man. I’m obviously not an expert in this area, but I thought it was an interesting discussion especially in a college-level chemistry class (revealing that science often drifts into non-scientific realms).
