The Human Perception of Good and Evil.
Please read completely and comment thoughtfully.
Say you ask the average person whether they liked a movie that recently came out. Some people will say things along the lines of “Eh it was alright.” But the majority of people who reply, especially young people, will either tell you they “loved it” and “it was awesome” or “it was terrible.” and they “hated it. Sure, there will be people who stay in the middle, but when forced to decide whether it was “good” or “bad,” they will have a tendency to choose either extreme. This is why we have “haters.” We as humans don’t like to say that something isn’t good, we like to say that it is terrible, even irredeemable so
Now imagine that we’re aren’t talking about a movie. The stakes are high and patience is wearing thin. Say this is a discussion about abortion for example. Are you going to calm down and be reasonable and realize that maybe your not completely right and the other person isn’t necessarily and evil pig? Maybe, but that takes brainpower, and when something takes brainpower over a large sample of people making the decision, the majority is going to fail.
For centuries now, the world has been developing a quick patch for this issue. If we dislike people who have strong, emotional opinions because they’re usually acting unreasonably, why don’t we just say that neither side is right, and the only thing that is morally wrong is saying that what you believe is right is right for everyone? At first glance, that seems perfectly reasonable, in fact it sounds like it will fix all kinds of conflicts. The problem is that just because people are too stupid too deal with complex issues of right and wrong consistently, doesn’t mean that right and wrong don’t exist.
People simply can’t avoid throw the baby out with the bathwater. But just because the water is the filth of human hatred and narrow-mindedness does not mean that the baby of true objective morality should go out the window. Why can’t we deal with other people doing something that is morally wrong without shunning and stigmatizing them? And why can’t we deal with our own sins and shortcomings without resorting to either complete shame or denial that what your doing is wrong? People say things that imply that killing a fetus is okay, not because it is objectively permissible, but because you “have no right to tell someone else what is right and what is wrong.” And yet under that well meaning assertion, morality itself crumbles.
People fear the unfair stigma brought down by strictly religious, but they have no problem condemning terrorists, murderers, rapists, abusers, bigots and racists. Why is this? Because they know these things are wrong and should be labeled as such. And yet as soon as we humans can relate to someone’s situation, we lose the ability to productively chastise them. We have no trouble vilifying child abusers, after all they “deserve” it. We conveniently turn a blind eye to their humanity because we can distance themselves from them. “If I had a child, I would never do something like that.” And yet someone did do something like that, a human being. We are all human beings, we don’t claim the right to condemn others for falling to the flaws of human nature that we ourselves also possess.
The human brain doesn’t like making complex moral decisions. We like to have things come in black, white, or a grey that indicates not both black and white, but the absence of either. We struggle with the idea that people who make mistakes deserve forgiveness, because we don’t want to need forgiveness ourselves. In this desire to turn what we like into what is truly good (because we like ourselves) we forget that people aren’t purely good or purely evil. A woman who gets an abortion does a bad thing, so our emotional brains, which have an extremely hard time balancing moral subtitles say that she is “bad.” And yet we know that she’s not. We see what led her too that decision and imagine ourselves in her shoes. We imagine her fear and indecision and can’t help but think that she is a good person making a tough decision. But then, our simple brains change tracks. If we empathize with that woman, she must be a “good” person, and therefore her decisions are permissible. The struggle rages until our moral decision making skills are confused into choosing one of the three options. Black, white, or an ambiguous grey where we inject enough reason into the situation to realize that black and white don’t work in a system of categorizing people into good or evil, but don’t inject enough reason to actually command our moral judgment intellectually.
Its easy to make quick, moral judgement based on what you feel. Its also easy to make rational arguments that ultimately result in all emotional moral alignments being false, and therefore relative to the individual. What is difficult, really almost impossible, for an individual to maintain, is a functional union of rational moral judgement and emotional moral judgement. The reason that we have so many issues with controversy in this day and age is that it is simply impossible to get everyone functioning at a high moral level simultaneously We fail at listening to our instincts about right and wrong, without making a mess of the very values we claim to protect. Only through the balance of our rational and intuitive selves can we achieve meaningful conversation about controversial topics that is compassionate and fair to everyone involved.
2087
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
