Thread: Questions on Morality... What's your take?

I've promised The Fishy to toss in my two cents, so here they are.

First of all, in our conventional way of thinking of good and evil we tend to mix the ethics with the morality. To some they are the same; to me they're not. Morality has strong cultural basis - what is considered immoral in one culture is accepted in another. There is, however, a set of universalia that we all abide with, consciously or not, for as long as we are sane. This is what ethics is concerned with. We humans are born with an ethical code of sorts; it's basic article, if it can be called that, would read "thou shalt not kill". Every sane human individual unconsciously steers out of the situation when he or she is forced to kill anyone. Sociopaths have no problem with this, but then, they are not sane. That's why the U.S. Army devised a training system to break this natural pattern of behavior.

The second article reads: "Thou shalt help another human being in need." It needs no explanation; it needs neither learning nor memorization. I've read in the newspaper about a teenager who saved a person from a burning house, just because he happened to be passing by. The town authorities called him a hero; he didn't bother with that. He admitted that he did it without thinking about what he was doing - it just happened.

Mike Huckabee said in one of his speeches that "Human nature is essentially selfish". Not so; we become selfish only when our nature becomes corrupted with culture. That's an important point.

When we abide with the laws and customs the culture imposed on us, we're cut from our human nature which - being what it is - transcends cultural barriers. When we see a person in need we go on and help him; when faced with conflict we avoid killing the opponent, all this provided we are sane. But crippled individuals don't think this way; they think, for example, that killing a person from a different background - ethnic, cultural, religious - is fine, because it's sanctioned by their own culture. This is the way to lose track of the ethics, to lose our freedom and to lose our humanity.

And that's my opinion, if anyone cares.