An issue that has been debated for centuries. A topic upon which humans may never come to agree. Morality. What is morality? Who determines morality? And lastly, do people even need morality? These are the questions people ask each other and themselves everyday, whether consciously or unconsciously, whenever they are faced with making choices. By examining the first two questions, why people do need morality will be answered.
In order to properly examine the last question posed, “Do people need morality,” morality must first be defined. It is generally agreed upon that the simple meaning of morality is “a system of ideas of right and wrong conduct; the quality of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct” (“Morality”). Then the question arises: what is “right” and what is “wrong?” Who sets that standard? Some advocate moral relativism—the belief that each person makes moral choices according to a set of standards he or she sets individually. Others proclaim that universal morality standards exist to which all creatures adhere.
Since morality is based on a code of values of “right” and “wrong” or “good” and “bad,” the next step is to define these terms and where they come from. One must first take caution to clearly distinguish some terms that are often used with morality: ethics, integrity, values, and virtues.
Thus morality would be the set of codes by which one discerns right versus wrong in the first step of Carter’s definition of integrity. “Values,” as delineated by Lobo, “are that which one acts to gain or keep,” while “virtues are those actions one takes to acquire one's values.” And thus something “good” has “positive” value and is sought to be gained or kept, while something “bad” has “negative” value and is thus avoided. These words are “evaluative judgments.”
Since each individual makes these evaluative judgments, it is impossible to argue that all individuals will come to the same conclusion regarding any given set of options. Why is that? Because each person has their own perception of what is positive for them and what is negative for them. For Martin Luther King Jr. the positive goal he sought to achieve was the equality of all races, to undo the unjust laws of segregation which he defined as any “code that is out of harmony with the moral law” of God (146). For Peter Gomes “citizenship [is] the highest right to which an individual could aspire,” advocating his idea that a moral person was a good citizen and a good follower (206). These perceptions are shaped by individual life experiences, society, education, religion, and some would even add genes. These various factors and more form that little voice in one’s head telling him whether or not something pleases him or is favorable to him. That voice is called the conscience.
With each person’s unique conscience he or she makes arbitrary assignments as to what is good and what is bad. “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," remarked Hamlet (Act II, scene ii). In the form of written laws a population often takes a majority consensus to set standards of goodness and badness by which future events will be judged. From there good and bad are further separated by different degrees of goodness and badness. This system is reflected in the laws of punishment in the United States. For a crime of vehicular speeding, citizens are punished with a monetary fine for this is seen as a small offense by U.S. laws. For theft citizens can face jail time—a more serious punishment for a more serious offense. And for what American society has deemed the most heinous of crimes--murder--United States laws mete out the death penalty. But the conscience involves not only the mind but the heart as well, since these value determinations of good and bad are also the result of emotional responses. This is often the root of never-ending debates over the morality of abortion. All of these factors combined form one’s mercurial sense of morality.
Morality lends to better survival statistics in a society because it lends harmony to a society. Many religions today will say that what separates human beings from the lower animal forms is this extra quality of intelligence and decision-making ability that allow them to conquer their inferior brethren. Humans control and dictate their behavior beyond the basic instinct level of other animals, often inhibiting themselves from acting as they would naturally due to the moral codes they uphold. Whereas animals know only to eat, sleep and reproduce; human beings know to eat, sleep, reproduce, fly to the moon, dive into the ocean, in essence to reach beyond their naked abilities. Humans choose to live, whereas animals merely live. “Moral codes are devised to conform to some drives of human nature and to oppress others,” says Wilson, “Ought is the translation not of human nature but of the public will, which can be made increasingly wise and stable through an understanding of the needs and pitfalls of human nature”. This volitional choice and the faculties of self-analysis and self-improvement give humans the ability to communicate with their peers and establish a common set of agreed upon morals by which people then write and rewrite into laws, and form then reform into religions and governments to coordinate a harmonic civilization.
Why do individuals subject themselves to following this moral code? Because as sociable creatures, humans necessarily seek acceptance from those around them. Individuals who do not conform to the environment are shunned and outcasted and so morality often works on a negative feedback cycle where the fear of being shamed prevents possible offenders from breaking with the established moral code. This is how many laws are enforced, whether for good or bad. Moral values such as these established in one generation are then passed onto the children by the parents, oftentimes presented in the forms of religious chronicles like David and Goliath or favorite bedtime stories like Aesop’s Fables. Each of these sermons and stories carries with it a moral lesson: “be honest,” “do unto others as you would have done unto you,” and millions more. By imbuing impressionable children with these morals, parents provide their kids with a guide on how to interact with friends and teachers in school. Later on this training is brought into the real world, into society and these children pass it onto their own children, and so the cycle goes on.
But morality is a double-edged sword—when used it can have both good and bad outcomes. A sense of morality is the first step in transforming wrongs into rights. Had Martin Luther King Jr. not “challenged a nation to restore its sense of justice by ending racial discrimination,” the United States could still be mired in the un-American mindset that placed the white man on a higher ladder rung than the non-white man. Each of the madmen that Joan Didion accuses of this perversion claimed to have followed his conscience, doing what he discerned to be right. These men include the likes of Timothy McVeigh, Charles Manson, and Adolf Hitler (181). Then again, these classifications of hero and madman depend on whose opinion you are polling.
In twenty-first century American society many deplore the alarming decline in morality, index-fingering this degeneration as an explanation for all the evil prevalent around every corner, on TV, in politics, in broken families. Amongst a creature that seeks order, only a strong sense of morality can provide those guidelines to set people’s hearts a bit more at ease. In addition to its biological and empiricist reasons for being, this impression of security, predictability and non-anarchy is perhaps the most vital reason for the existence of morality, its worth and need underlined by the very people who cannot stop debating over it.