Do You Realise?

... That everyone you love will some day be gone? Man, the Flaming Lips are playing here at work and managing to somehow both mellow me out and make me feel just a tad edgy. There's something almost illegal about that. :D

So in case you haven't already heard, we have a new Pope - Pope Benedict the something-or-other. I realise that as a born Irish-Catholic I really should give more of a crap. But I haven't been a practising Catholic for years. Apparently ol' Benedict is a real moral conservative - just what this world needs right now is another "moral" conservative. The thing about moral conservatism, for me, is that it tends to ignore the moral side - ironically - in favour of conservatism. Because the fundamental flaw of many moral conservatives is very much the same as the moral liberalists - the base assumption that their philosophy of liberalism or conservatism is automatically correct.

Funny how we tend to like to short-cut our opinions so as to save precious thinking power.

You see, moral conservatives seem t hold the view of "if it worked before it should still work now." While Liberalists seem to hold the view of "If it worked before, it wont work now because we all different baby!"

The thing is we aren't that much different to humans almost 200,000 years ago when it comes to the essentials of life. Sure, we have socially evolved as a species - but even as early as the first signs of homo-sapiens sapiens there is evidence of social structure. Humanity now evolves through technology and society rather than physically - but these evolutions work in a different manner, it would seem.

Now to return to the whole moral issue - morality is pretty straight forward, really, it works on the whole harm none, treat each other as equals etc... type of mindset. How we chose to define these morals differs from culture to culture - but the actual morals themselves tend to hold true.

What conservatives want is to keep the definitions that they grew up with, because they appear to fear that if the definitions can be changed, then maybe all those morals they held on to aren't as absolute as they thought they were. Which in turn means that things they thought they couldn't do, because it was wrong, they might of actually been able to do after all.

Meanwhile, Liberals seem to believe that because these definitions are fluid - then they mean nothing and that anything can go, to the point of not having to think about morals much at all - because it must be right if everyone is happy - yeah?

But it strikes me that not everyone would be happy.

So what's the solution?

First, to recognise that morals are guidelines to help us navigate the dangerous morass that is ethics and morality. They aren't rules, they are the general benchmark from which to measure our decisions. It is silly to just assume that they are so absolute - it is, in fact, immoral. Morality isn't something you can be flippant about, it is part intuition, part common sense and part thought. Each case needs to be considered individually, because in some cases the morally correct choice can end up being different from what one would initially assume to be the right choice.

I have my own little yardstick that helps me with understanding moral choice - Intent. Intent is a very important aspect of morality - because it is your intentions that really show if you considered someone else or not, or if you thought about the consequences. So the first step in looking at a moral dillemma is to consider each party's intentions.

Then you need to consider how well each member considered the consequences - this is important because despite intentions, you can still commit an immoral act if you didn't really think about the consequences.

Then you need to look to your intuition to help guide you. Odd statement, I know, but a lot of morality involves thinking - if someone judged/treated me this way, how would I feel?

A lot becomes clear when you follow those guidelines. Like I said before, we all have the same moral values - we just define them differently. Everyone believes murder is wrong - but some people have different definitions about what constitutes murder.

The thing is, you need to then look at the reasoning and intention behind those definitions - because we choose these definitions. Even if it is to just follow what we have been taught - it is a choice to not question our beliefs. And I do feel that you cannot claim to truly believe something if you haven't questioned/challenged those beliefs and our own intentions for believing them.

Conan