Moral Health: 4/26/09 4:37pm

Moral health is being selfless and to do things that are justifiable to you. Exploring different ideas about moral health I have noticed that there are a lot of contradictions between different beliefs and most people have a general idea about what is normal, to their standards.

I personally find it extremely difficult to judge a person's moral health; there are so many things that need to be taken into consideration. For example you are in a situation: you are married and your spouse is dying of cancer. There is only one drug to save them, and only one place is selling it, which happens to be in your town. The drug costs $20,000 and it only costs $1,000 to make it. You save up $10,000 and try to bargain with the man selling the drug. But he will not sell the drug for any less. Your spouse will die if they do not get the drug. Will you break into the pharmacy for the drug to save your spouse?
There were many questions that flooded through my head when I thought about this situation: I would probably consider breaking into the pharmacy to get the drug because it is the cure. I think I would also be upset that it was so inexpensive to make the drug and it is being sold for a much higher price. But then I thought about the consequences of breaking into the pharmacy and stealing the drug. What would be the consequences and punishment of breaking the law? Also, how much do I care about my spouse, to put myself in danger to save their life? Is thinking of my safety before their life morally wrong? Does that decision make me a bad person or just a person who made a bad decision? If I love my spouse I would do anything for them, right? I thought about all of these questions when it came down to making a decision about stealing the drug. I decided that I would steal the drug to save my spouse’s life, making my decision morally right, by treating others the way I would like to be treated and not by putting myself first, but I found that I felt I was a bad person for breaking the law.
Kohlberg's Scale of Moral Development is one theory of moral health that I am unfamiliar with but find it an interesting way to describe and judge people on their morality. According to Kohlberg there are 6 stages of moral health:
Stage 1 is Obedience and Punishment
Stage 2 is Individualism-self-being [<^Pre-conventional]

Stage 3 is Interpersonal
Stage 4 is Social Order

Stage 5 is Rights and Social Contrast
Stage 6 is Universal [<^Post-conventional]

According to Kohlberg’s scale of Moral Development, I would say I am at Stage 3, Interpersonal because I decided to steal the drug in order to save my spouse’s life in the first situation.

There is another situation, Peter Singer’s Bugatti Dilemma: Where you work and save all of you money to buy a Bugatti with your life savings. Basically your car is all you have in your life, it means the world to you. There is no parking in a lot so you decide to park it on an old train track off to the side. As you walk away from your car you see a speeding train going down the track. You look ahead in the direction it is traveling and see a baby who is sitting on the track in the direct path of the speeding train. In that moment you have two options, you can either let the train hit the baby or flip the leaver to switch the direction of the train and send it speeding down the sidetrack and destroy your prize possession, you Bugatti.

My first instinct would be to save the baby and let the car be destroyed. But I would probably hate myself for a while because the car meant everything to me and it is worth my life savings. Although by letting the car get destroyed I have saved a life and therefore have made a moral decision, making me morally healthy. But there is still this feeling of selfishness because it is my car and I don’t even know this baby. I also thought about the baby, I don’t even know the baby personally and it is just one life. What if I saved the baby and it died young anyway? Then there was no point in saving the baby. I guess you can only base your decisions on what is currently happening in life and not on the future, because the future can always change based on the decision you make now.

Who decides what is morally healthy anyway? It frustrates me, if I make a decision that is considered morally unhealthy in our society because the decision I make may seem morally acceptable my personal standards.