Morals or how we should act is often done on a case by case study…
Abortion is bad… unless its to save the mother life…
Murder is wrong unless sanctioned by the state…
stealing is bad unless it saves a life…
smoking dope is illegal until it isn’t…
gay marriage is a sin until it isn’t…
we can find exceptions for every single activity we might think of
as being “immoral” “illegal” “evil”… exceptions abound in our moral code…
but in the case of us individually trying to understand what it means to be
moral… but morality isn’t a private, individual, separate matter…
morality is part of our individual actions, yes, but morality has
a city, state, national implications…… it isn’t very narrowly defined…
and yes, morality has implications for us as human beings…
my individual actions has implications within the city I live in…
I don’t exist alone…if I did there would be no need for morality or laws
morality isn’t a me thing, it is a we thing…
and what is good and bad and right and wrong and evil is tied up
into our collective understanding of what it means to be human…
and that is why exceptions are made in the case of morals…
because there is not one size fits all morality……
morals/morality has a social component… in other words, morals and morality
are often changed or understood in terms of changes in our economic, social,
political, philosophical, historical evolution………or said another way…
how we should act is modified by our social, economic, political, historical,
philosophical engagement with society……
our environment influences our morality……
now we tend to think of environment as being something the air, land, sea,
the environment… but here environment isn’t about that…
when I go to my crappy job, that store is an environment…
you have your set properties, the check stands, the shelfs that
hold the products, you have the refrigeration units to keep the ice cream
and milk cold…you have your movable properties, the shopping carts,
the employees, the products themselves…each item is part of an environment…
and I exist as part of this environment and when you enter the store, you
become part of that environment too…
there are rules in shopping… you don’t take the items without paying for them…
but many do steal… in many ways…both customers and employees steal…
but the “rules”, the morality of navigating a store aren’t just determined by
an individual, it is decided in part by the store and its rules,
“no shirt, no shoes, no service” is part of those rules and part of the rules
of the store is decided by a sort of group decision within the store…
if someone steal in the store and a customer see’s it, they might
report it, they might not, a complex series of decisions may play
a role in whether a customer will report it or not………
but within a larger group of people, you will have someone report it…
that is the dynamics of larger groups… someone in the group will report it…
and morality is part of all that… it is an ever shifting, ever changing set or
collections of rules, both formal and informal… but it isn’t individually
mandated… rules, morals, morality, laws, customs are all part of a dance
within a dance between individuals and groups, state and culture…
to name a few participants in this ever moving dance we call morals…
there is nothing fixed about it… it isn’t a set group of actions…
it isn’t a final, unchanging method… morals are kinda like human beings…
in the fact that morals are a transitional thing, from one place to another…
so what should our final thought in morality be?
who knows because it is always in transit, going from here to there…
but where here is and where there is, is open to debate…
the evolution of such things as gay marriage and the use of weed
has shown us the temporary nature, the transitory nature of
morals and morality and laws and legal and illegal……
what is legal today, might not be tomorrow and what is illegal
today may be legal tomorrow… but that leaves us another question…
what is the relationship between the illegal/legal and morality/morals?
at every step the road become much more cloudy and disturbed…
and where does one find clarity?
some might find it in the legal system and some might find it in
the religious and some might find it in the historical and some
might find it in the philosophical… where we start all over again…
it is a cycle…that has no end…
Kropotkin