The Importance of Context When Evaluating Morality

Recently I began to understand what it means to concretize abstractions (courtesy Ed From OC on The Forum). It means that you increase your understanding of a concept (or an "abstract", I'm not sure what the difference is) by creating a bank of experience or examples. For instance, one can describe "red" but you don't really understand what it represents until you've experienced many examples of red, and have explicitly identified these examples as red. The more examples you amass the clearer you're understanding of red is. For example, if a red ball is identified as red, you can't initially know if "red" refers to it's color, orientation, shape, material, textural/biological characteristic, the sound it makes, etc. But when you have many cases you can identify the pattern and label it "red". I think that is what integrating is, you take a large mass of data and identify patterns and relationships. (But that's another topic.)

And so, one fine day, with my new found definition of concretization I found my self saying "I'll just have to make a little compromise". It struck me immediately that I have never liked compromises as such and I hate the idea of doing it myself, yet I was not feeling particularly loathsome about this specific compromise. Which seemed a horrible contradiction. So I identified my warrant (or premise) for considering the action immoral. It was: all compromises are immoral. Well, in this situation, I had had to choose between two cds I liked because I didn't have enough money for both, which I don't think is immoral in the least. I was confused, at first, as to what was wrong with my warrant. When I realized that it was missing a qualifier and that my situation didn't apply to that qualifier. The qualifier being: ...when you sacrifice a value for a non-value. I was simply choosing between two values (which is often necessary) but didn't "sacrifice" a value. Not only did I explicitly identify two types of compromise and the morality for each, but it also became a good example of the importance of context. Or, a concretization of the concept "context". Because in order to distinguish between a moral and immoral compromise I had to identify two different context, or "in this situation", without that I could only have concluded that either I am base (because I seemingly had no objection to immorality) or that morality is arbitrary.