A fairly common occurrence that I notice when talking with people about politics, theology, or morality in general, is that people tend to take situational ethics and make principles out of them.
Now a lot of you might be thinking: "What is the difference?". The difference is that a principle is a moral rule that is true regardless of application. Situational ethics refers to moral rules that are only true in certain situations. If you are a Christian an example of a principle would be the 1st commandment: you shall have no other gods before God. There is no crazy situation where you should in your heart put anything at a higher value that God. An example of situational ethics would be the statement that you shouldn't kill people. Generally this is true, however in situations such as war, self defense, defense of others, it would take a fairly twisted individual to say it is always true.
A clear cut example of how I've seen people switching the two would be on the issue of respect for the office of the presidency of the US. When George Bush was president he was the object of tremendous rage and mockery. Many people said that even if you don't like his policies and don't like him as a person you should still hold back out of respect for the office he was holding. Then when Barak Obama was elected everyone traded places. The truth of the matter is in this case is that no one thinks the office holds respect apart from the person holding the office. If a wicked man is in office, it is right to tear him down. If a righteous man is in office it evil to tear him down.
The easy way to avoid this is, whenever you think that you have found a principle, make up extreme theoretical situations and see if it still applies. For example, if Hitler came back from the dead, got elected as the president, and started killing Jews, would it still be wrong to compare him to Hitler out of respect for the office he held?
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