Is the Sixth Commandment a Moral Absolute?

To many Christians, ethics are absolute. One of the things Christians cite to back up the view that ethics are absolutes is the Ten Commandments. These commandments are even said by some to be the only thing in the Old Testament NOT superseded by the New Testament. That is how absolute and final those commandments are.

It needs to be pointed out, however, just how non-absolute – how relative – the dicta in these commandments are. So relative are they, in fact, that God tells humankind to break them at certain points. In particular, it is easy to show this in reference to the Sixth Commandment, which, at very least, says, “Though Shalt Not Kill.”

Killing is prohibited by the Old Testament long before the Ten Commandments “came down” to Moses, though. In Genesis 4, the scene of the first murder in the bible – Abel over Cain – God curses Abel. A clear message is found in the text – if one murders, there will be consequences. (This does not mean that murder is prohibited, but that it is frowned upon by god enough to face serious penalty.)

Also, in Genesis 9, God gives a lesson to Noah on bloodletting. The bloodletting of animals is okay, but God is careful to make his opinions known as to the bloodletting of humans: “If anyone sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; For in the image of God has man been made.” [http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/genesis/genesis9.htm]

These words uttered to Noah have often been read to endorse the death penalty and, at first glance, that seems correct. The problem is that it suggests that ANYONE who sheds the blood of man will have his own blood be shed. That means that whosever takes a life – even an executioner – will be subject to having his life taken. With this in mind – that absolutely anyone that takes a life will be subject to death – does actually seem to be a strong endorsement, not of the death penalty (which requires the shedding of the blood of man), but of abstention from killing. (It seems more likely that when god said that whoever kills will himself be killed, it must have been meant that GOD would do the killing of the killer; not man. And God did take on the duties of executioner many times, most notably executing all in the city of Sodom for their “sinful” behavior. Unfortunately, he also killed innocents, such as babies, in clear violation of the stipulation that blood will be shed only by those who themselves shed another’s blood.)

Of course, if God’s intent to prohibit killing altogether is not clear yet, it is by the time we get to the Old Covenant and the Ten Commandments. The sixth commandment – subject to many translations – says, at very least, “Thou shalt not kill (or, murder). If God’s intent to prohibit killing was not clear before, it is now.

The problem is that from the appearance of this commandment on, God gives sanction for unpunished killing several times. In Deuteronomy 16-20, only a short chapter or so after the Sixth Commandment prohibits murder – God commands murder: “However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them - the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites - as the LORD your God has commanded you.” [http://www.growthingod.org.uk/dontkill.htm]

Not only is God unambiguously commanding his “army” to kill, he is commanding them to kill indiscriminately – “do not leave alive anything that breathes.” Thus, even if one wants to take a narrow interpretation of the Sixth Commandment, which would only prohibit murder, or, the killing of innocents, it is hard to reconcile that with such indiscriminate killing. After all, killing “anything that breathes” would in all likelihood entail killing innocents (such as babies). What is more, God does not punish his “army” for killing thus. If we are to believe the Bible, he rewards them by putting them in his good graces. That is far from the penalty set up in his warnings that the shedder of human blood shall have his blood shed.

There are many other examples of God-sanctioned killing, but in the interest of space, I will refer interested readers to an article summarizing them. [http://www.wcg.org/lit/ethics/War02.htm] The article concludes that:

Returning to an earlier point, we have seen how Old Testament ethics did not consider love and killing necessarily to be in opposition. One was to love one's neighbor, but if a neighbor committed certain crimes, your neighbor had to die. One was to love one's neighbor, but the blessings for obeying God's law included victory in battle, not freedom from battle.

The big question is whether the Sixth Commandment can be called, in any sense, absolute if, as it seems from the above text, God can give us permission to break it by his fiat. By any meaning of the word ‘absolute’ it cannot. ‘Absolute’ means binding on all-and-all-alike circumstance-irrelative (the opposite of person- or circumstance-relative).

A more troubling question is whether or not, if God can give people a free-pass to murder on His say so, those who kill and suggest that God told them to do it, should get a free pass today. Put differently, if a murderer today killed and then suggested, as the Israelites did then, that God told them to “not leave alive anything that breathes,” that we should give refrain from issuing a penalty for that killing. If we accept the Old Testament’s view, we certainly should give them a free pass. Christians, of course, will suggest that there is a difference between those who claim that God told them to do something and those who God actually did tell to do something. Of course, the obvious retort to that would be: “How can we tell the difference?” Doesn’t the person who does hear god and the person who only thinks they hear god have the same exact story?
Some have said that we know that those who invoke God as their order-giver for murder are mistaken because God does not order the killing of innocents. Yet, God certainly must have sanctioned the killing of innocents in Deuteronomy when he ordered the complete slaying of entire city populations. Surely there were at least a few innocents among those entire populations. And God himself killed innocents when he killed the first born child of every family in Egypt – even newborns. So, it is difficult to suggest that murder is wrong so long as the murderer claims that God told her to murder. After all, God DID tell many people in the Old Testament to murder.

Going back to the original question, can we regard moral maxims as absolutes if they are followed by the stipulation that the rule is only valid until the Law-Giver and -Enforcer decides you can ignore it? Would we accept a civil law as absolute that stipulates that rape is wrong unless a government official gives a potential rapist the go-ahead – in which case it can be engaged in penalty-free? Absolutely not! We would suggest that such a law is hardly a law at all because the law may be so easily obviated.

In fact, many Christians see the state prohibition on murder violated by the state’s sanctioning of abortion. They regard what they call this huge exception to the rule as compromising the absoluteness of the prohibition on murder. The irony, of course, is that God also sanctioned such a compromise when he authorized Israel to kill babies ALREADY BORN so long as they were not babies of Israelites, but of neighbouring cities.

Christians see such exceptions as compromises to the absoluteness of such a law. Yet, they still want to claim that the Commandments are absolute despite God being able to admit of exceptions to its prohibitions whenever He pleases. This allowance for exceptions based on God’s permission reduces the commandments from “thou shalt not,” to “thou shalt not…without my approval.” That means such Commandments are far from absolute, but become a matter of whether God decides to waive a particular rule in your particular case. And this, in turn, means that such Commandments are context-relative – decided by God on a case-by-case basis

Toward A Revised Definition Of Modal Possibility

Ever since Gottfried Leibniz gave his argument that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds, Modal Logic has been a burgeoning system of logic. The goal of this paper is not to throw out the definition of modal possibility, but simply to revise it. The current definition provides us with a sufficient condition for a proposition p to be possible, but not a necessary condition.

To review, a proposition p is said to be possible on the standard definition iff it is actual at some world a in some modal M. Another way to define it is through necessity. P is possible iff it is not necessarily not p. This is a good definition that captures a lot of our intuitive notions of possibility. However, as the definition stands, it is insufficient.

To illustrate, imagine a world b that is like planet earth in every respect except that artificial flight has not been invented yet. Let us suppose that the Wright brothers asked the question ‘is flight possible at world b?’ Surly we would answer yes. However, given the current definition of possibility, the modal logician would object. The modal logician would say something to the effect of: ‘since flight is not actual at planet b, it is not possible at planet b.’ Given the current definition, the modal logician would have to respond this way. However, this response should strike most, if not all of us, as absurd.

The rest of this paper will be devoted to developing a system to work with singular world possibility claims. First, we must amend the definition of possibility to capture all propositions which claim to be possible.
Modal Possibility:

(1) A proposition p is said to be possible if it is actual in at some possible world b
Or
(2) If the conditions at b are such that p could theoretically be actual at some point in the future.

Notice that on this definition some proposition p could be possible at some world but never be actual. However, in that world, the conditions are such that p could, in theory, be actual. Furthermore, this definition captures the notion of singular world possibility. The current definition of modal possibility is good for analyzing propositions for possibility within the context of a wide array of worlds within a modal. My addendum to the definition of possibility allows us to analyze propositions for possibility within the context of a singular world.

If we take my example of artificial flight, we can ask: at world b is artificial flight possible? If it turns out that flight is in fact actual at b, then our analysis can stop (surly if flight is actual, then the conditions are right for it to be actual; this is axiomatic). However, if we discover that at world b flight is not actual, we must ask the next question: Are the conditions such that it is theoretically possible flight to be actual in the future? Some of the conditions would be the laws of aerodynamics. If the laws of aerodynamics obtain, then this would ensure that artificial flight is possible; if the laws of aerodynamics do not obtain, then artificial flight is not possible at b.

My revised definition was inspired by Non-Wellfounded Set Theory. Non-Wellfounded Set Theory does not negate the theorems of Wellfounded Set Theory, rather, Non-Wellfounded Set theory lassos more sets that Wellfounded Set Theory ignores. My revised definition is analogous to the reasoning of Aczel and others.

Another advantage of adopting the revised definition of possibility is that it allows us to deal with more than mere logical possibility; it allows us to construct a logic for which to deal with questions concerning physical possibility (for instance). For example, let us suppose non-biologist asked a biologist who had an affinity for the revised definition of modal possibility this question: “on planet earth, is it possible for insects to grow as large as cows?” The biologist would answer that it was impossible, given the physical constraints which limit insects to only growing to a given size; it is impossible for insects to grow to be as big as cows. It is impossible for insects to grow as large as cows because the conditions are such that it is not even theoretically possible for insects to grow that big.

Some confusion may arise. When I talk about revising the definition of possibility to deal with singular world (as opposed to multiple world) possibility I am not talking about accessibility. What I mean, is not that some proposition p is possible at some possible world b in virtue of something’s ability to construct a consistent world from b; this would be absurd. Rather, I am saying that a given proposition can be possible at a possible world b without constructing a possible world from b.

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I have left out the actual construction of my system for now. I need more time to work out the theorems for the system I propose. Furthermore, this is a rought draft of my essay. I am open to revision if necessary (excuse the pun).