You've Got the "Can of Worms" Part Right

Maybe an action can be judged by it's consequences, then again maybe not. What about secondary or unforeseen consequences? If your upstanding citizen who has fallen on hard times uses the three bucks to buy a bottle of cheap wine, passes out drunk in the alley, and freezes to death, is it our fault? Alternately, if he buys three lottery tickets, wins big, and uses the money to found a homeless shelter, do we get the credit?  Then again, what if we don't give the guy the three bucks and he subsequently passes out in the alley and freezes to death because he has become weak from hunger? It would seem that, once the three bucks leaves our hands, we are no longer responsible for it, assuming that we don't know this guy well enough to make a reasonable guess about what he is likely to do with our three bucks. But does that make us responsible for the consequences of not giving him the three bucks? What if there's another virtuous homeless person on the next corner who needs the three bucks more than this guy? Who's got time to go around surveying all the homeless people in Chicago to find out who needs our three bucks the most?

So far we have only considered the morality of the action, but Uncle Ken wants us to pass judgment on the morality of our motivation for doing the action. I'm not so sure that we have a lot of control over our motivations. It seems like a notion to do something comes over us, more or less spontaneously, and then it's up to us to decide whether or not to act on that impulse. Jesus said that, if a man looks at woman lustfully, it's just as bad as if he actually jumps her bones, or words to that effect. I thought that was unreasonable the first time I read it, and I still do. If I want to give our hypothetical bum a buck, but then I don't do it, do I get just as much credit as if I had actually given him the buck? I think not!

Furthermore, I question the assertion that ethics predates religion. Since both of them started long before people started keeping written records, I don't know how we could test that one.