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I think I was most interested in our discussion last week by the idea that whether or not an action is morally right or wrong depends on the intentions behind the act.  I think that in class, we talked about this in terms of the difference between someone doing a good deed because they want to versus doing it because they feel they should, or they know it’s the right thing to do.  The argument made was for the idea that this action would be considered moral if the person was acting out of a sense of obligation (the idea that it’s the right thing to do), but not if they were doing it simply because it’s something they wanted to do.  I’m not sure how I feel about this – I can imagine arguing the case in a situation where we’re talking about a good deed being done, but not in a case involving something that is considered morally wrong.  If someone committed murder but did it because they wanted to, not because they realized it was the wrong thing to do, I’m sure most people would still think that they were acting amorally.  We often talk about people in terms of their morals, and a person’s morals reflect what they do or do not do based on what they feel is right and wrong.  If you want to do something it probably feels right to you, and if you don’t want to do it it probably feels wrong, so I would argue that wanting to do something and doing it because it’s the right thing to do overlap to a very high degree.

Somewhat related, I was also interested by the idea that something is only amoral if it is affecting other people, and therefore what you do when you’re alone cannot be going against our moral standards.  My emotional reaction to the idea of morality is generally that the worst thing someone can do is purposely hurt another person/animal without a good cause, and therefore if what you are doing isn’t affecting other people, maybe it’s not amoral.  However, what about the case where someone cheats on a take-home test?  To me (and probably to most of us, given the honor code) this seems morally wrong, but it’s being done in private and it’s really not affecting anyone but that person (unless you’re thinking about it in terms of grading curves, but that seems like a bit of a stretch).  Can you really make the argument that this wouldn’t be amoral, or is it just another type of amorality?