What is Morality?

I think morality is the knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. It is the most important set of guiding principles that we have in society. It is the set of ideas that allow us to interact with one another and make our lives easier. Without morality we would always have to be in fear for our lives and our property. There would be no trust between people and without trust we would all have to be completely independent of one another. There is no way that we could have progressed as a species like we did without the underlying rules of morality in our societies. We would never have been able to become as social and we never would have developed the language and technology that we have today.

The idea of cause and effect plays a very big role in our ideas about morality and what is right or wrong. Cause and effect guides morality in that if something results in a good outcome; the action is generally seen as moral and a good action. The opposite is also true, if the effect of an action is negative, the action is generally seen as bad and immoral. The difficulty that arises in this type of thinking is that it is sometimes very hard to determine what cause is related to what effect and therefore what actions are good and what actions are bad. This is not always the case, but on occasion this can cause problems.

In the lecture there seemed to be a lot of different methods of determining the same thing, namely what is moral and what is immoral. I did not expect this; I was under the impression that there was one generally accepted way to view ethical dilemmas but obviously that is not the case. If the book and the lecture are any indication there is much debate over how to handle ethical dilemmas and there is no one universally accepted way or if there is we have not touched on it yet. It seemed that all of the main theories had their own drawbacks.

The one question that I had about the lecture was on the topic of unjust and immoral laws. Many people have said that people must oppose unjust laws but how are we to determine if a law is just or unjust? To some people a law might seem unjust while to others it will seem fair. On almost any law it is possible to find people for it and against it but that does not mean that every law is unjust. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught that laws were unjust when those that the law restricted had no say in the law but is that the only situation where the law is unjust? Is that even a situation where a law can be called unjust?