Morality. Are we born "moral"? Are we born with a "moral intuition", a playbook that is then reinforced or reimagined on our journey to adulthood--or is morality acquired when our consciousness lights up and we begin to experience life within our moral circle?
The terms moral and ethical can be confusing and are often used interchangeably. As near as I can tell, morality and morals are a human's ability to distinguish right from wrong, and ethics and ethical behavior are the roadmaps, the blueprint that societies and groups impress on their members.
Our views about euthanasia, the treatment of animals, and abortion are a few examples where personal and societal moral beliefs collide. When you add religious and cultural influences the entire question of what is moral becomes even more complex.
Roe v Wade is a classic example. When you stir in religion and politics, we end up with culture wars that have led to political and social divisions and violence.
One theory suggests that we have an innate--call it genetic if you will--sense of right and wrong--that along with a native empathy is stamped into our psyche at birth. We arrive innocent and uncorrupted. Unfortunately, that doesn't last long enough. Parents, siblings, relatives, strangers, religion, culture, and our environment begin to chisel away at our moral block of granite. Do we "...suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune..." and remain unscathed, or does our moral compass realign along the way.
Were you raised by a saint or a sinner or by someone somewhere in between? My guess is that most of us were raised by the "somewhere-in-between-ers", saints and sinners wrapped in the same package. There might have been some sort of religious upbringing involving sacred texts, with rules, regs, and rituals to help guide us. What was learned and what was practiced weren't nearly the same and humanity, in general, has done a pretty good job of violating every commandment in the book leading to a lot of confusion.
Were you raised in a loving, nurturing, two-parent household, a dysfunctional two-parent household, or a one-parent loving or dysfunctional household -- wealthy, upper-middle-class, middle-class, or poor? Would you say that the environment you grew up in indelibly marked you and mapped how you've navigated through your life?
Literature seems to focus more on the unfortunate, Dicken's Oliver Twist rather than Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie. Chaos, strife, and the morally ambiguous seem to attract more of an audience. I wonder if we humans are somehow subconsciously seeking to elevate our own moral sense by dwelling on the less fortunate. When you consider the "young you" and the "current you", where on the moral pyramid do you land?
What say you? Let me know in the comments.
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