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So here's the thing. In all sorts of media--including some of my favorite properties--friendship and loyalty are treated as moral virtues in their own right. Loyalty to friends (or to family), keeping promises to them... These are often treated as something that has to come before what would otherwise in the abstract be the right thing to do. ("Do you tell a useful truth that would fix this problem, or do you keep your promise?" is presented as an actual serious moral quandary in MLP:FIM in one episode.) In one game I played, the first grim moral question placed before the player is "Do you let your dear friend be executed, or this entire group of innocent people doing something reasonable?"
...wait a minute. This is supposed to be a moral quandary?
See. It's times like these that I wonder if I missed a memo. "Emotionally difficult" I will grant, because it's natural--and I use "natural" here in the sense of "pretty much built in to how our brains function as social animals", not in the sense of "therefore best and proper"--for us to prioritize friends over strangers. There's that whole joke about how friends help you move, real friends help you move bodies, with the implication that true friendship is more important than, say, the sanctity of life.
But...that's a joke. Isn't it? Isn't the problem supposed to be the fight between the emotional reaction (loyalty to and connection to friends, and wanting to help them and make them feel better) and what's actually known to be right and true? When we hear about someone who committed a horrific crime, and whose friends covered up for them, we're usually--I think--horrified at the friends as well as the person who did the deed. You don't actually cover up for your friend's murderous act (weird corner cases of totally justified homicide aside) unless you're a bad person.
Except I'm not always sure it's meant as a joke. And so I wonder if I'm a little out of step with my culture, sometimes. I want to support my friends quite a lot more than I want to support "my" country, but the same restrictions apply. Morality > friendship--though god knows the kick of instinct and emotion doesn't mean it always works out that way in practice.
...wait a minute. This is supposed to be a moral quandary?
See. It's times like these that I wonder if I missed a memo. "Emotionally difficult" I will grant, because it's natural--and I use "natural" here in the sense of "pretty much built in to how our brains function as social animals", not in the sense of "therefore best and proper"--for us to prioritize friends over strangers. There's that whole joke about how friends help you move, real friends help you move bodies, with the implication that true friendship is more important than, say, the sanctity of life.
But...that's a joke. Isn't it? Isn't the problem supposed to be the fight between the emotional reaction (loyalty to and connection to friends, and wanting to help them and make them feel better) and what's actually known to be right and true? When we hear about someone who committed a horrific crime, and whose friends covered up for them, we're usually--I think--horrified at the friends as well as the person who did the deed. You don't actually cover up for your friend's murderous act (weird corner cases of totally justified homicide aside) unless you're a bad person.
Except I'm not always sure it's meant as a joke. And so I wonder if I'm a little out of step with my culture, sometimes. I want to support my friends quite a lot more than I want to support "my" country, but the same restrictions apply. Morality > friendship--though god knows the kick of instinct and emotion doesn't mean it always works out that way in practice.
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Especially since usually once assumes your friend is a noble person who would be willing to die to protect the larger group of innocents. Most of us at least talk that we'd walk into the burning building to save the orphans, you know?
You'll see the same quandry presented with one's children vs. other hapless innocents, and that's... usually treated as being more serious. Especially if the person in a quandry is a woman because of course a woman is supposed to LIVE for her children and she's not really supposed to be a moral agent beyond that.
But of course, all humans are some mother's child.
Along those lines, what really pisses me off are victim statements at sentencing, as if the DUI is 'worse' in any way shape and form because his victim was a 'irreplacable' pillar of the community - if it was just some loner high school kid no one liked with druggie parents who couldn't be bothered to make a tearful statement for the cameras, that would be okay and we should just let the drunk driver go?
Likability does not give a life more moral weight, whether it's 'your friend' or 'the sorely missed pillar of the community'. I'm not sure that innocence does, either, since it's not supposed to be my place to judge. None the less, of course, we all do.
Just my rambling on the subject.
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That said, I do think it's another issue--to an extent--with one's own child than with a friend. (Oddly enough, all the ethical dilemma versions of that which I've seen posed involved fathers and their sons, not mothers or daughters.) There is a personal responsibility for one's own child--where "own" can mean biological or adopted or otherwise--in much the same way that a firefighter has a different responsibility at that burning orphanage than a passing stranger does. I guess to an extent I have more sympathy for putting responsibility before strangers than I do for putting friendship first. Maybe it's because the latter seems more...optional? Emotional? I'm not sure.