A Note on the Concept of Morals

Morality is complicated fickle and wavering because it is a social construct. For those of you who didn't take the intro to psych classes in High School (assuming you went to a well funded school) a social construct in a nutshell is anything that wouldn't continue to exist should humans disappear in an instant. For example laws, if every human disappeared the animals left behind wouldn't bother to learn our laws. Morality is a social construct the proof hidden between cultures, stuck in our personal history, and impossible to pin to any clear definition due to its fluidity.

Many Americans like myself are taught that horses are creatures meant to be kept as friends and pets. Yet there are plenty of other cultures that a quick search on the internet will reveal consume horse. In Europe and Japan, American horse meat is called a delicacy. Though to us this is considered a morally compromised practice. On the other hand this can be considered just another animal, if some don't care what happens to the cow or the pig why would the horse be different?

War, something littered throughout our history. Violence is how we communicate when we feel misunderstood, wronged, or in some more cruel cases simply out of greed. In a more modern use of war we like to imagine ourselves more civilized than before and that such a tactic for resolution is a failure of diplomacy by one side or both. Killing we know as wrong but when our sovereign, our leaders give us permission to fight for our or sometimes just their values. So killing is fluid morally, as all things can arguably be due to the fluidity of morality. An unending argument of right and wrong as our perspective as a collective grows and changes.

Bernard Gert has defined Morality in his piece "The Definition of Morality" as "Descriptively to refer to certain codes of conduct put forward by a society or a group...". For Merriam-Webster it is defined as "Sanctioned by or operative on one's conscience or ethical judgment...". Between the two of them there isn't a huge difference beyond the perspective of where moral's would come from. Morality is defined by the group or society while to be moral or of moral standing is decided by the individual. In which case the famous fictional character Hannibal Lecter doesn't adhere to morality however is a moral person. For those who don't know much about Dr. Lecter he is a cannibal serial killer deeming himself as righteous in his dietary habits, seeing humans as falling into either one or both categories, his livestock and his equals. While most humans would consider this the ultimate taboo, to (granted a fictional character) Hannibal this is no more wrong than if a bear were to eat a man, or if you were to take an organ donation from the recently deceased.

In short eating horse is both morally correct and morally incorrect. To kill isn't wrong yet is one of the most immoral acts. To be moral is dependent on what you consider wrong and right while the concept of morality is a societal construct we are constantly amending and debating. The world is not and will never be black and white, learning to live with our shades of grey is one of the greatest tricks of growing up. So I dare you here to challenge what you consider wrong and right and find your moral rules, instead of trying to squeeze into what your culture may call moral.