The Moral Person

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The Moral Person

The Ability to be Good

Imagine you are an average person living in the city and you have to take the train to work to save money. You board the train, finding yourself an empty corner with no one around so that you can have a piece of mind. As you place your bags under your seat, you find a thick leather wallet full of money. Nobody is faced in your direction, nobody would know if you took it. What would you do it? Would you take the wallet or would you return it?

Just like the complexity of our conscious mind, the ability for us human beings to make moral decisions is deep. Sometimes we could be put into a situation where we might know what the moral thing to do is, yet we still might do the opposite. There are many situations where a person’s mind would be in a conflict and the moral or ethical environment around us plays a huge part as to why this is so (Blackburn 1).

Good deeds come from a positive influence, a person’s mentor, when defining his or her ability to do something good. Jeffrey Kluger, author of What Makes Us Moral, says “just as syntax is nothing until words are built upon it, so too is a sense of right and wrong useless until someone teaches you how to apply it”. We could compare ourselves to a concrete foundation with a leaning tower built on it. The foundation would be the influence from our parents and elder family to mainly do good and the tower is the rest of our moral environment’s influence to do both. We have that basis of what is the moral thing to do, but as we grow in life, our moral environment can pull us either way.

Different environments or cultures have certain ways to keep its people on a moral level, or moral code. Some environments take the phenomenon of Good Samaritan laws that require passersby to assist someone in need as a preservative to do something good (Kluger 151-152). Those incidents where people would see another person getting hurt after falling down or getting robbed without noticing and wouldn’t do anything about it, would change. The Samaritan laws forces a person to step in, thus, bringing a sense of morality into a written form of laws that should not be broken. The Roman Catholics or the U.S. military use shunning as a preventative to do something bad (Kluger 152). Shunning is another word for kicking out a person and banning them for something bad that that person has committed, humiliating the Shunned of their pride and taking away the family that they had within that environment or culture. The moral or ethical environment makes it a necessity to check us as to what we should do or have to be doing to keep our cultures on a good path so that our cultures can survive.

Basically, we must be good for our culture to stay good. Our experiences we live by and the teachings we apply to our lives effect this ability and it’s up to us to choose that moral path.

 

Why We Disregard Morality

We human beings are very consistent, in terms of staying within the moral guidelines, when it comes to our family, community, or workplace. We usually keep our irrational impulses within ourselves so we can prevent an unstable environment. But when we decide to counter that, we feel the need to alienate someone so that it is easier to disregard morality as a whole. Why is it that the notion of the “other” plays one of the biggest role to let us do what we know is bad?

A good example of this notion of the “other” would be when people would kill one another and wouldn’t feel too bad about it. Whether it is a gangster or a soldier, the killer would never say “I killed that person” or “I shot Freddy in the head”. This would tell them that they had just killed one of their own. To make it more possible for the killer, they would have to say “I killed that nigga” or “I shot the target in the head”. When we make it so that the “other” is not related to us in any way, we open a part in our brain that allows us to go past the extremities of breaking the rules for our moral code and in our ethical environment.

In the book Ethics, Simon Blackburn gives us a perfect example of the Nazi concentration camps and how the ethical environment that enabled Hitler to spread his ideas into the minds of the Nazis. Hitler said, “How lucky it is for rulers that men cannot think”. Blackburn proves that in Hitler saying this, he himself was blinded by the invisible environment and this rising climate gave him his power to manipulate the Nazis, including himself. He says the only reason Hitler came to power is “because people did think –but their thinking was poisoned by an enveloping climate of ideas, many of which may not even have been conscious”. Still, when it came to the trials to put the Nazis away, it proved that people still had the ability to apply their morals to the situations in front of them. There were those Nazis that didn’t shoot their neighbor, or turned a blind eye on an escape route.

Then there are times when we must disregard morality in order to survive. Linh Kieu Ngo tells a story about Fifty-five Vietnamese refugees who had left their communist country on a boat to escape to Malaysia. Just after they all boarded the boat and made their way onto sea, the captain of the boat got shot by a coast guard. The captain was the only person who could navigate to Malaysia and after weeks of being lost in the ocean, these people started to die of hunger and thirst. They were then forced into eating the ones who had already died to survive and they would even drink the body fluids to quench their thirst. It is a horrible story but even in their last days of their lives, they still held on to what morals they still had by respecting the dead by the ways they eaten them, but they had to disregard the known fact that eating one of their own was completely wrong.

Blackburn says our moral or ethical environment “determines our conception of what is due to us, and what is due from us, as we relate to others”. Those of us who live in modern constitutional democracies become so preoccupied with rights, we start to no longer care about what is good for us as a whole and what our duties should be (Blackburn 5). This would be another reason people disregard morality. For example, a man could see worry and a sense of the need to hurry in another man’s face at a stop sign, but because of his “right”, he will take the lead and feel no remorse. When people live under a set of rules within a democracy, we feel that we apply such goodness in obeying the laws that we deserve more from the system than others and we will disregard our morals to get “right”.

From the situations we go through to the genes we inherit from our parents, our morals run deep. These qualities we have give us the ability to go to the extreme kindness we can offer to another person, such as donating organs, to extreme cruelty, such as mass murder. It is our paradox and we as human beings must pay more attention the ideas behind morality for a better future for mankind.