I love you, dad

You are conflating ethics with morality and choice/action with effect.

The question posed was why do Bad things happen to good people? You noted that, from I assume a scientific perspective, bad things are just often random occurrences that people artifically label as "bad." My response is that Bad things are not random and result from a deviation from the natural order and that our sense of that wrongness from those deviations is not supernatural.

To put it in a more realistic scenario (I only used torture previously because even non-human species have been shown to avoid and punish torture). Let's say I begin to suffer from chronic dehabilitating headaches and these headaches force me to stop doing the charity work I have done all my life and I become depressed to the point of contemplating suicide. I have no family history, genetic disposition, history of drug abuse etc. What I did do was build a house in 2002 that used imported drywall from China containing volatile chemicals that have been emitting sulfurous gases, carbon disulfide, carbonyl sulfide, and hydrogen sulfide which have been absorbed into my body altering my chemical makeup ever since.

Is it by a random path that those molecules found their way into my body? Or is it a result of the actions of people disregarding their sense of wrongness? Yes. Am I also free from fault? No. Because I am part of and have benefitted directly from a culture that values paying the least at any cost and doesn't properly price environmental damage/costs into the marketplace. I could have built my house smaller for example paying a higher price for building materials.

I could speak to your other example of discrimination by sexual orientation in the context of natural law, but I would face immediate downvotes and this isn't really the place for that discussion.

We will just have to agree to disagree that human ethics hasn't really progressed that much in the last few thousand years. Natural law persists but what humans value obviously alters over time. That is, how strictly a culture decides to punish acts of torture of animals is a reflection of the culture, not evidence of its wrongness or the nature of the act. Personally, I believe that the slower rate of progress in removing Bad things from happening is largely that say unlike physics or chemistry, there is no way to improve the pedagogy of morality. With the introduction of mathematics and the creation of a universal language for scientific understanding progress at a remarkably faster rate was achieved in the last few hundred years because it is easily transmitted between generations. The only way moral education is imparted from generation to generation is by example. You can't educate morality beyond telling stories and parables and living by example so positive changes more in accord with natural order are limited in scope by time and geography.

I think if you surveyed those people who justify torture in our time if torturing their children was wrong, you would find overwhelmingly that that they would say it was, but that they believe they have a right or should be able to do it to "others" based on some circumstance (such as they did some other Bad act). Doesn't mean they know that the act of torture is any less contrary to the natural order or that it won't have consequences as a result, just that they are choosing to value something else greater (and, wrongly I might add). Similarly if you asked someone eating an omelette how it tasted before and after you gave them the experience of the conditions in a factory chicken farm, you would generally get a very different response. It has been shown actually to alter the perception of the taste of food in subjects and induces disgust, that is how tuned to the natural order humans are.

This story hits close to my heart. I lost my mother a little over a year ago due to chronic alcoholism. She had been drinking for years, battled post-natal depression and one day we convinced her she was really sick and needed to go to the hospital. Her liver was in the process of shutting down, she was so dehydrated and malnourished her veins had shrunk making it difficult for doctors to take blood or put in drips. I remember the day that she went to hospital I forced her to go to the doctors and every test they ran came back red, her cardiogram yielded a weakened heart rhythm and it was at that point she realised she needed to go to the hospital, little did we know it was too late to help her.

The doctors were shocked at the state she was in. He offered to call an ambulance, but my mother wanted to be driven to the hospital instead. I knew she would try and talk her way out of it by refusing an ambulance, but finally convinced her there was no way she wasn't going. She was obviously scared and we all told her that going to hospital meant she'd get better and she probably wouldn't be in there very long, I didn't expect she would be dying in hospital two days later.

As soon as she was admitted she went straight into the emergency ward. She was under watch 24/7, hooked up to machines that monitored everything. She was still very much with it, just not as energetic. She could hold a conversation, she just looked aged but wasn't delirious or anything. We thought she was going to get better, she was in emergency for one day before being moved to a ward where she wasn't being monitored as carefully. I think it was a mistake moving her to a ward so soon.

She never told anyone she was scared or needed help. Apparently she would call my dads sister and cry to her when everyone was asleep saying she was afraid of dying. My dads sister tried to take her to the doctors repeatedly, but I think knowing something was wrong and being scared stopped her from wanting to go to the doctors until it was too late.

She was on 4 saline drips (one in each wrist and one in each knee) to try and hydrate her body. I still remember seeing her lying there with 4 drips, I didn't even know they could do that. She started showing signs of recovery, was more level-headed, but tired and lethargic. She actually seemed like she was getting better, her pulse was getting stronger and the hydration she was getting was helping her, and then at 3am one morning after being in the hospital for 2 days we all got a call that she went into cardiac arrest and they tried to resuscitate her for 1 hour before giving up.

I often wonder if she would have lived longer if she didn't go to hospital. Part of me thinks that her body couldn't handle four drips pumping saline into her body 2 days straight constantly, she had a weak pulse and the fact her veins had shrunken to me thinks she should have stayed in the emergency ward for a couple more days.

She left behind her son (me) and 5 daughters one of which only just turned 8 years old. It's made my dad incredibly strong, I've never seen him cry before. I still remember that day vividly, he's had his fair share of alcohol related problems and has been battling depression and a nervous disorder his entire life due to being abused as a child but I think he's stayed strong for us. I am worried that one day a switch might flip in his head and he'll have a breakdown, but I don't really want to think of that.

I know how you feel Notch, you never quite get over losing a parent. I partially blame myself for my mothers death. She had a drinking problem for years and I did nothing. She was obviously in decline and although everyone tried to get her to go to the doctors, she wouldn't. Did we try hard enough?

Thanks for sharing your story Notch, I think there are many who have lost a parent due to an alcohol incident like yourself. It's hard to tell people you lost a parent to alcohol, let alone talk about losing a parent in such a horrible way.

People say drugs like marijuana are bad, alcohol is the worse of them all.

My mother was 48 years old.

Thank you for sharing and my deepest sympathy.

I hope you don't feel bad for not writing a blog post. It is not a requirement at all.

This post and comments here made me leave work early to go home and hug my kids extra tight this evening.