4 years ago

Environmentalism, equality, gun laws, lockdowns, these are all areas where people are interested in doing RIGHT, but end up with very different ideas of what morality looks like.
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Though it might not look like it on the surface, most of the problems in the human world today are all about how to tell the difference between wrong and right - but most people don’t spend a ton of time trying to figure out if their definitions of those words make sense.

What happens is that a lot of people, when they start to think about the difference between right and wrong, conflate legality and morality. It’s a reasonable confusion - there have been thousands of years of empire on Earth, all of which have asserted that rules about good and bad behavior originate from a supernatural authority, rather than from the individual. But in the modern democratic age, it doesn’t make much sense to look to laws for moral guidance when you’re the ones expected to build the laws of the future.

In the absence of a trustworthy top-down source - whether that’s an institution, God, or nature itself - individuals have to take on the heavy mantle of moral reasoning for themselves. It can be hard, in an atomized isolating world to make sense of this responsibility. The Western world is one of the most permissive societies in the history of your species and it might feel impossible to establish the difference between right and wrong.

In building a moral framework, you really have to look out for motivated reasoning, which means that if you reeeeeaaaally want to do something, it’s going to be really easy to convince yourself that it’s morally okay. That’s because reason is a post-hoc justification that animals generally give to their actions after the fact. As David Hume, one of Kant’s contemporaries argued, reason is slave to the passions.

Remember, the ethical and legal system in which you live right now isn’t the best version of the world - it’s just the latest greatest adaptation in the aftermath of the church, the rise of reason and nation, and the emergence of the individual. What comes next, humans?

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