What does it mean to be moral? How do we know if a particular action is right or wrong? If you think you know and you have your absolutes, you are a fool. If you knew that by killing one person, millions of lives would be saved, would you do the deed? That was the question that drove German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer to participate in a plot to try to kill Adolf Hitler. Was this action moral?
Bonhoeffer
had a neat ethical system and then he had to live it. Any logical absolutist system
will be crushed in the troubled waters of life. Dietrich escaped Germany with
his family as the failed plot was being investigated but the justly moral
Dietrich made another decision. Returning to his German homeland alone, he was
imprisoned and then hanged until dead in the closing days of WWII.
Was this
action moral or false guilt?
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
