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Originally Posted by horn
Maybe. I've heard people say such and such action is immoral irrespective of context on quite a few occasions. i.e. "hitting a woman is never ok".
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I doubt people mean that though. They mean "hitting a woman is never ok, at least not in situations you're realistically going to encounter".
I would say torture is never acceptable, but of course it's possible to imagine some absurd 24 style scenario where terrorists have nukes in all the hospitals in the world and only one man has the code to stop them going off, and the only way you can get the information...etc. But that's ridiculously unlikely to occur to anyone, let alone me, so I'm fine with my absolute statement on torture.
A basic premise of any discussion on morality is that you're talking about the actions of human beings on some level. If you're talking about how you might design advanced robots in order they did no harm then it's different - you have to be exact and specific with every clause because there's no common-sense/intelligence to draw upon. With human beings, there should be no mindless application of rules without regard for the context. So "never" might not mean "never" if you distort the situation enough.
And so, in a discussion, if you say:
"Imagine you're walking down the street and you see someone about to beat up a pregnant woman, do you try to stop them?",
I'll say "Yes, of course." But then if you say
"Ah, but the woman was Adolf Hitlers mum and you had just been sent back in time - lol, owned you just caused the deaths of millions"
Well...that doesn't mean I was wrong, it just means your scenario is stupid.
If you're not trying to win some contest then I'd say a key part of any debate is trying to understand what the person meant in a flexible manner that's fair to them, not seeing if you can mis-apply their moral axioms to absurd scenarios to see if they result in outcomes they oppose.