Morality, the Universal type

Morality is the trickiest subject to deal with in postmodern culture. Nobody wants to nail down what is right or what is wrong in a universal sense (i.e. nobody wants to say this is wrong for you and I). But people still want to deal with the categories of right and wrong, people want to use correct and incorrect to describe behavior and principles, even if more limited than in eras past. The existence of morals, which we will call the specifics of right and wrong, is held as a truth. But the definition of morals in a fixed sense is not a tenet of postmodern morality. It is the pronouncing and not the knowing that is wrong (funny how that word works) in postmodernism.

How does this work in practice? When we say we have encountered an objective “right or wrong”, we say the soul has in a figure of speech, hit itself against some immovable wall, or force, that is real but unseen. The soul cannot progress past this point without definite resistance from the unseen reality, and if it acts beyond this boundary it is with real and tangible mutation to its composure. If a person comes across a starving child while walking around in Africa, and has the wallet and time to give him food, most postmoderns would believe this person is morally obligated to fix the problem temporarily. This person should feed the child. If the person does not, there is a cruelty that makes other people shudder in disagreement with the lack of action that has taken place. For you or I to ignore the situation, a moral boundary would be transgressed. Some people feel unable to even think of inaction. Why is that? Is it something internal? If so then we are all bigots for thinking ill of the person who ignores the child. Is it something external? If so, we have found that there is an objective, universal standard at work.

People often try to sidestep this issue of objective morality by saying they do not believe in “wrong or right” but in mental “sickness or health”. To give an example, they would say murder is not evil, but it is only a sickness. What they are trying to do is avoid the standard of good and evil, which they do unsuccessfully, having merely redefined a spiritual problem into a physiological problem, still under the shackle of the standard “sickness or health”. We don't think the person caught the will to murder from a doorknob. It is a mood that is out of balance with what we consider wellness. (Sounds like a moral standard under a different guise) Sometimes people deny even this and talk about collective morality. An action is only good or evil as it relates to the collective will towards the goodness of evilness of particular actions. The people holding this view try to deny the objective and universal nature of morality by making it subjective and regional; derived from existence rather than bending existence to its dictates. This also is a weak attempt. For it to work, it still supposes that good and evil exist externally as categories. Good and evil exist unchangeably, different region recognize them with a slight variation. The only things that change are particular actions within the sphere of good and evil. Notice they do not say “some societies make good good, and others make evil good.” Such a view would be better defended, yet still weak and relying on external universal moral categories to give value to certain particular transient actions. It is also dishonest with the scope of our existence. People do not convene to decide their moral positions on issues unless they are politicians in danger of losing funding. Even when a large number of people act in a way contrary to the moral position of a person, the person can appeal to a third party standard in labeling such actions as wrong by appealing to a sense of morality rather than retiring to a polling station in order to make a judgment. Humans tend to shoot from the hip in moral situations rather than do extensive study in order to formulate an opinion on universals. Most research or inquiry is usually seeing if a particular conforms to any universal opinion. This assumes there is a universal external standard again, and is not proof of subjectivity.

Just an issue I have with peole who claim that different cultures have different morals. Although customs often differ, morals are often fixed issues. Perhaps the best example from history is the issue of stealing. Every culture has treated stealing as an evil as it relates to the local community. Just the identity of property and tribe have changed. White men could steal land from the Indians because they did not hold it as property. But Indians would steal women, food, and belongings from other tribes. Within the tribe there was little to no contention, outside the tribe there was. This is not an example of differing moral standards. Stealing was wrong, whether land or women or children were the property. This was an example of different designation for property. Europeans held that women weren't property and land was. The Indians, women were and land wasn't. Stealing is stealing in both situation.