For the past few months, I’ve been attempting to define morality, its mechanism, and how people invest in this concept. However, something funny happened on the way to the circus…
What is good? What is bad? For the religious amongst us, what is evil?
Murder is usually defined as bad, but, in what context? As soon as we depart from a generalisation, the statement ‘murder is bad’ soon looses its meaning.
Obviously, murdering someone before they murder you is self-defence. How about murdering others before they become able to murder us? This question leads us into some very paranoid lands. Perhaps this then indicates that pre-emptive strikes are not only bad, but evil, too.
One topic often brought up in Star Trek is the right to survive, but I’d like to address the ‘right’ part of this. How do we define right from wrong? Who ‘deserves’ to live and die?
These are all tricky questions with ghastly answers. What I’m discovering is that most of these seemingly clear questions are actually rather murky, mostly because we colour the situation with a blanket of morality.
As far as I can tell, there is only the biological drive to grow and thrive, to exist into the future via offspring, and the access of resources to ensure these drives.
Our western, fossil fuel powered civilisation conducts murder routinely, both directly and indirectly. Weakening others to gain ourselves more power is prevalent in this capitalist, commodity-driven society. I observe one-up, one-down power relations daily.
Does this global community deserve the right to flourish?
Morality?
This seems to be a ruse to guide people into a certain way of believing how people ought to behave and isn’t useful in deciphering how people actually behave.
Western culture is predicated on self-empowerment yet survival is based on adaptation and cooperation: the interacting webs of both ecosystems and of physical systems depend upon a multiplicity of unique components functioning in harmony, each playing its part for the overall health of the system.
As the wealthy accrue larger percentages of wealth, more people experience unliveable conditions.
Perhaps, then, I would propose that morality may be a gauge of health rather than of discrete actions, and certainly not a matter to be decided in a post-life scenario.
It appears to me that ‘being moral’ is somehow slightly pretentious, and slightly disconnected from reality. Being the ‘source of morality’ does require a set of very thick blinkers, or perhaps rose-coloured spectacles.
To see the world as it truely is, discovering actual drives and motivations, gall is required. We are biological creatures.
Are we moral creatures?
A D R A N 