Please remember that you are choosing to read my opinions.

Morality has been the question of the week. Why? Well, the news is that our president is a man of morals and was elected as such. This post is not to discredit him as a moral man, or to discredit the people who voted for his as such, but to demonstrate how confusing it is to speak to someone about morality without knowing what they precieve morality to be. Lately, as we've seen in the recent election, that it can be somewhat futile to talk about morality without context.

The post below this had many different replies, some would argue that they all pointed to the same general conclusion, and that is somewhat true. I told several people they were wrong, I told several they might be right, and I may have told one or two people that I agreed with them, be it the absolute truth, or not. Why? Because there was no answer to the question that is going to suit me unless I'm the one answering the question.

I read quite a bit on the subject in order to discuss the meaning of morality, but I am still by no means an expert on the subject. I did find out there are more approaches to the topic than one. There are actually three main approaches to explain morality.

The first view of morality that I'm going to talk about is "moral relativism". Basically put, a "moral relativist believes that our moral standards are all relative, or that they are constructed from society, by customs, traditions, culture, etc, and can only exist within an accepted cultural boundry. Personally, I tend to follow this viewpoint fairly closely because I tend to believe that social influence is one of the biggest factors in behavior. To me, it is only common sense to assume that our morality arises from social influences, not something that is universal to all.

Wikipedia.com had this to say about Moral Relativism:

The next view of morality on the agenda is "moral absolutism." Moral absolutism says that actions are moral or immoral by their very nature, or in otherwords, inherently and inarguably good or evil. Wikipedia once against has something interesting to add. They say that "moral absolutists might, for example, judge slavery, the death penalty, and childhood female genital mutilation to be absolutely and inarguably immoral regardless of the beliefs and goals of a culture that engages in these practices."

This would be where a lot of problems arise. One group, under this view, could then percieve another group as immoral because they do things they consider immoral. Lets take incest as an example. Incest is the only behavior that mankind almost univerally agrees is immoral, except that mankind doesn't agree on what constitutes incest. I'm not even sure that the legal system in our country agrees, but you can be sure there are probably laws on the subject. Anyway, lets say that Country A pretty much agrees that incest is immoral between immediate and extended family and first, second, and third cousins, etc.Country B thinks that incest is immoral only between immediate family, and even allows marriage between first cousins.

Here, even though both countries think that incest is immoral, they disagree as to what constitues incest. Country A now thinks that Country B is a bad, immoral place because they allow such thing to occur. It's ok though because Country B thinks that Country A lives an immoral lifestyle of excessive and covetous behavior, right?

While neither view of morality is wrong, you can see where it can be misleading. By this view, and immoral action is bad no matter what the outcome. A lie is immoral whether the result is positive or negetive. Killing a person, by this view, could be considered immoral whether it is for country or profit. For more information on this viewpoint, do a web search on the philosophy of objectivism.

The third view I'm going to discuss is "moral univeralism" which says that there is an essence of morality that can be applied to all of humanity regardless of culture. It is fundamentally different from moral absolutism because univeralism allows for the fact that all cultures and all people are not the same, but have common ideas. For this viewpoint, incest might be considered immoral, but it would be understood that incest is not universally the same. It is basicaly a compromise between moral relativism and univeralism.

Wikipedia says:

So, how can 294,695,623 people agree on what morality is? Futhermore, how can those 294,695,623 people apply those ethics to the rest of the 6,104,027,576 people? It is clear by our discussion and the information that I've summorized that there are those that think it is possible, and those who think it isn't. I think that it is not possible. I believe that every story consists of more than one side, and depending on how you interpret the story, you come up with a different understanding. Our understanding of what is right and what is wrong is not absolute. The person in Country B thought they were right. Country A thought they were right. And neither country agreed that the other was right.

So, shouldn't we take this into consideration when we decide to place judgement on a person, group, or country? For homosexuality, who is immoral? Was Saddam immoral or did he believe his actions to be truely moral? How about Osama bin Laden and his group of terrorist? Were they immoral for attacking us? Did they attack us because we were thought to be immoral?

Right and wrong might not be as black and white as it is presented to be, and a careful approach to issues of morality should be taken. If you cannot understand that Country A and Country B are both right, then I don't think you can understand moral issues the way they need to be understood.

Futher reading:



http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/

This is a rather dense site, packed full of those words that get me all confused. It does, however, end up being very interesting.



http://www.centerformoralclarity.net/

This site is... well... rather disgusting actually. It did teach me that we stood up for christian values in the election this year, though, and that banning gay marriage is "central to Christian's faith". I've been so blind, I thought it was loving your neighbor and all that jazz.