Questioning what
is Right and Wrong
“Is it not true that no distinction leads to abandonment?”
“I just said you should overcome distinction.”
A
distinctive life makes for distinctive right and wrong. It is vital that as a
Taekwondo-Een you be a sound judge of what is right and what is wrong. This
will determine whether you use Taekwondo as a lethal weapon or as nourishment
to life. As previously stated, far from being a skill to save man, Taekwondo is
a skill to subdue and kill man. Only under extremely controlled use can it
realize its full potential – to contribute to society and offer a positive and
meaningful life.
There
are times when you may be momentarily overwhelmed by the temptation to use your
lethal techniques without reflection. At times conditions may cause you to
explode with an impulsive anger. You can overcome such dangers only through
rigorous training to fortify your character. Therefore, correct Taekwondo
training ought to include the development of good character along with fighting
skills. This is why from ancient times the masters never instructed those whose
characters were not sound.
Generally
speaking, seriousness is essential in developing your character. Thus,
TAEKWONDO, which demands character development, forces you to be serious. Who
would not be serious when contemplating skills meant to kill? In this way, the
morality and value of Taekwondo can never be obtained through the denial of
Taekwondo’s inherently violent nature. Rather, you obtain this morality only
after you have recognized Taekwondo’s violent and dangerous nature. This also
teaches you care and temperance.
An
old proverb tells us that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.
However, the Taekwondo-Een never constructs himself with his fist, but with an
ethical duty towards justice. In this case he uses his weapon in the service of
this duty, and so he will never be destroyed by his weapon. Then, where can you
find the ethical “oughtness” that supports justice? Is there such an objective
standard for judgment, distinct of what is right and what is wrong? Yes, there
is.
It
stands with no shape and no substance on the boundary between man and nature:
“respect what each man wants to do equally”. It is natural, both objective and
subjective, and it is a matter of choice. The Saint King named the substance of
ethical “oughtness” “benefiting everyone widely (홍익인간[弘益人間])”,
for ethics depends on man and everyone is deserving of respect.[1]
Thus,
the correct Taekwondo-Een, who considers man of the greatest importance, does
not employ Taekwondo to harm others but only to destroy the bad in them. This
implies a harmony of ethics and TAEKWONDO. Therefore, if a bad man cannot arise
after being felled by a Taekwondo-Een it is not because TAEKWONDO attempted to
kill him but rather because he could not live without the bad in himself. Every
man is deserving of help, but in this case there is nothing one can do to help.
This perhaps is an example of Taekwondo’s only limitation.
[1] I am not speaking here of ethics. To
speak more precisely, I refer to the objective criterion of morality, the
ultimate foundation of morality. A brief historical background to this question
may help clarify this. Many philosophers have sought to trace morality’s
origins and in so doing to establish morality on a firm foundation. They
attempted to explain the philosophical foundations in describing the world.
Their explanations went something like: our world is like this, so we should
live in this way. But other philosophers recognized the fallacy underlying such
reasoning. One philosopher, G.E. Moore, termed it a “naturalistic fallacy”, and
argued that any conclusion on the nature of “oughtness” must have at least one
proposition of “oughtness” as its premise. It other words, you cannot conclude
“one ought to act in this way” from simply “the world is like this”. From that
time, many philosophers began to suspect whether ethics could ever be a
science, or even a meaningful philosophy, and relativism overwhelmed ethics.
Other scholars investigated emotions as the foundation of ethics, for they
believed ethics could not be established on any rational foundation. I have
also investigated the objective foundations of ethics to conquer relativism,
and I have found my answer. Of course, it is a logical one. As it is logical
and abstract, it would be boring to explain it here. In any case, the footnoted
text refers to the logical, and so objective foundation, of ethics; the
borderline between the humanistic and the factual. (I apologize that these
concepts may be difficult for those with no interest in scholastic philosophy.
But you can see that the text has scholastic links, so it may prove worth
reading and thinking about further.)
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