Morality

So what makes an action inherently immoral? Or is there even such thing as an inherently immoral act? I'm thinking no... Let's take an example, there will be many in this post because I'm typing to try and organize thoughts. The act of killing a person. This is not immoral, in my opinion, in the case of euthanasia, so is not an inherently immoral act. Lying is struck down if it is done to spare feelings, also stealing if it is justified, so really...there are no acts that are in and of themselves intrinsically wrong. I don't think that an act can be judged based only on it's consequences either, though. Say you're mailing a birthday cake to your mom and through some mishap it ends up arriving at the house of someone whose mother has recently died and then that person feels really sad. That wasn't immoral, the consequences were unfortunate but the intent was not to hurt. Can intention alone determine morality of an action? If you intend to hit someone in the face really hard and break their nose, but you miss and end up swinging into the air and falling on the ground like a fool and then the person laughs...was the act of hitting still wrong? I don't know. When watching a film in slow motion of a person being unjustly murdered, say by lethal injection, where is the point where you can say "There! Right there, that is immoral!" Obviously it is wrong to kill someone who doesn't want to be killed, but does the wrongness start before the needle gets anywhere near them, back when the executioner fills it with the...stuff? Or is it when the decision was made to kill the person? Is it when the needle enters the skin, or when the person dies? When is the immorality?

What I'm really getting at is this: there are people (I haven't spoken to them, but I'm sure they exist) who feel that drinking every night for a week straight for the sole purpose of drunkenness is wrong. I don't understand why. What makes it wrong to be drunk? In fact, I would say it is good. I think that I might think that the only things in life that are inherently valuable are those that are tangibly pleasurable, and drinking is one of them. That doesn't mean that those are the only things that have value, but they are the only things that have value in and of themselves.

I was also thinking about this today because I was deciding what to give up for lent. Now, I'm not Catholic, lately I'm barely even Christian, so I have no obligation to give anything up and in past years I usually don't. But I was thinking that I would give up Ranch sauce (this is a big deal for me, I use ranch at every meal) and then I was thinking how that might suck, but then I thought that it was a good thing to do anyway. And then I thought....why? Why the hell would it be good to give up something that I love for a month? But there is a certain feeling that flat out hedonism isn't exactly the most rewarding lifestyle. You can sense it, you know that there would be something missing, a certain depth of thought and intensity of emotion. I think that I will give up the ranch, and then in 40 days I'll appreciate it even more, maybe that is the purpose for me. If you don't appreciate what you have, it loses it's value. Bam! I'm glad I typed this out, I feel much better.