Saturday, September 13, 2014

Good? Bad? In Between? What is morality? Am I being bad by giving this post a weird title?

Morality is a really complicated issue that lies at the heart of everyday life.  I believe that the mainstream form of morality exists because of religious traditions throughout the world.  Even though all people might not continue to practice these religions, and most governments don't claim allegiance to any of them, most peoples' personal beliefs, and most government's laws are based on the ideas of good and bad from the major world religions. This most basic system of morality that most people follow revolves around the reasons for actions: good things are selfless, and bad things are selfish. In this system, there is no designated amount of selflessness for something to be good or bad, and there isn't a way to account for multiple reasons for an action. So say you tallie up the reasons for an action and then sorts out the ones that are selfish, and the ones that are selfless. If there are 5 more selfish reasons than selfless ones, is it a bad action? How about 3? Or 2? Or 1? Maybe one of the selfish reasons is so terrible, it outweighs the larger amount of unselfish reasons? Or maybe if even just one reason is selfish, then that is enough to make the action completely bad? If you try to argue the last one, then you could say boring, miserable, unpaid community service is a bad thing, because the person doing it gets a feeling of satisfaction from helping other people. These kinds of questions are unavoidable, and therefore morality is a fuzzy and subjective matter. In reality, there is no good side and dark side, there is just what happens and whether anyone thinks it benefits anyone else.

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