Fine moral distinctions

I find myself sometimes troubled by narrow moral distinctions in the Christian, and sometimes more specifically Catholic, tradition. Lying is wrong, but deception—perhaps including verbal deception—is not. Intentionally killing the innocent is wrong, but redirecting trolleys onto innocent people can be acceptable. Salpingostomy is wrong as a treatment of ectopic pregnancy, but salpinectomy is right. In each of those cases, of course, there is a defensible moral theory justifying the distinction, and in fact in each case I accept such a theory. But I still feel troubled.

There is an old Polish joke. After World War II, the Soviets are shifting the border between Poland and Russia. A farmer used to have a farm in Poland, but now the farm is going to be half in Poland and half in Russia. The farm is given a choice of which half he wants. He says: “The Polish half, of course. Russia is too cold.”

Of course, when you divide a continuous landmass into countries, there will be places where a step in one direction will get you into another country. And the climactic conditions are going to seem pretty similar. They will seem pretty similar, but they won’t be exactly the same.

Similarly, if you divide the space of human actions into, say, murder and non-murder or into wrong and non-wrong, one will find pairs A and B where A falls on the bad side and B on the good, and yet A and B are pretty similar. That’s just how it is. As long as we have moral objectivity, classical logic, and continuity among actions, this is unavoidable.

This does not mean that the distinctions will be arbitrary. If there is a roadside honor-system vegetable stand and a bunch of carrots is $3.50, then there is indeed a distinction between stealing by paying $3.49 and giving a fair payment of $3.50, even though the actions are very similar. Nonetheless, non-arbitrary as the distinctions are, they may not be major.

We should thus not be surprised if there are fine moral distinctions. There have to be.

Of course, we might dispute over where the boundaries lie. One might propose different boundaries: perhaps instead of saying lying is wrong while mere deception is permissible, one will say that both are permissible when needed to save lives and neither is permissible otherwise. But the alternate distinction will also have close-by cases. Why is it, on this story, permissible to lie to save oneself from death but not from torture? And what does it mean to save a life? One is never certain that a lie will save a life. What probability of saving a life is needed? There is no way to avoid boundaries between cases that will seem similar.