ruby sparks
Contributor
Surly thoughts could be moral or immoral. If you are a character of the society you will act upon your thoughts right, If thoughts are moral you will be nice and if your thoughts are immoral you are a bad guy. Just like a movie script.
Yes. However, those arguing that 'thoughts alone' can't be immoral would say that so long as you don't act on them, it is ok. On the face of it, this seems a well-founded position, and by and large most would go along with it in principle, including me. It wouldn't matter, from that perspective, whether it was extremely rare (perhaps almost impossible) that our thoughts did not affect our outward behaviour in any way because it is nonetheless possible for it to at least substantially be the case (I can think of raping and torturing babies, but never actually do it).
In that way, the thoughts only create the potential for outward behaviour, as in being a trigger. If you were to counter your own bad thoughts, you would have effectively cancelled any badness at source. Perhaps, as Jarhyn suggests, it would be immoral not to do that countering, to allow the bad thoughts to continue unchecked. Even if the 'inner countering' were merely done on a harm-prevention basis, I think we could say it was moral thinking, and if so, good thoughts (eg my mentally deciding not to rape a baby, because it would be wrong if I did) can be moral, in and of themselves.
The issue of whether we have any free will at all, or at least the question of how much agency we actually have, hovers in the background, of course.
I think that our moral intuitions recognise that it is almost certain, perhaps even causally inevitable, that our thoughts will affect our outward behaviour, to at least some small extent. Is it even possible for us to hate someone, a neighbour or a partner, a daughter or a parent for example, without it ever manifesting in any way? That may be why, if someone is racist but never outwardly acts on it, we would nevertheless tend to think it is wrong to hate other people for no reason except their skin colour. Who here would say that hating someone for no good reason is totally ok just because you keep it to yourself?
Furthermore, our legal systems take our thoughts into account when judging how immoral some outward behaviour is. I think this is why both intent (and possibly remorse) for example, will affect sentencing. So maybe thoughts, as a component, can affect the degree of moral judgement.
And then there is the question of whether we have any moral obligations to ourselves, but that is a slightly separate issue. Were we to include it, then even 'thoughts alone' could cause direct harm.