Do you see yourself as a moral and ethical person in daily life? If so what guides you and why?
Is lying by word or omission in the work place ok? Taking pens or copy paper? Taking unfair advantage of someone?
People aren't moral or immoral.
Morality is a property of decisions.
Humans are both good and evil not because of divine magic, but because humans are a bunch of eye-gougingly stupid knuckle-draggers who barely grasp the consequences of the various decisions we make.
All of us believe things that are wrong.
The wrong things that we believe become the premises for other arguments that lead to other conclusion. So one wrong belief can lead to a cascade of stupid that ends in a whole series of bad decisions. And yes, those bad decisions can include bad
moral decisions.
People with certain bad beliefs are vulnerable to starting a cascade of stupid that can lead to consistently bad moral decisions. This is why we perceive some people as being inherently evil. It's still the decisions that are moral or immoral, but because they make consistently bad moral decisions, we call them evil.
Nazis
Ever notice that Nazis keep using the word "Aryan" instead of white or Caucasian?
It's because of a particular claim of theirs: Atlantis proves that white people are superior.
Of course anyone with an ounce of education knows that you can't use an unproven and unprovable claim as the premise for other arguments. No one has the foggiest clue if Atlantis was ever a real place, nor do we have any idea how much of the claims about Atlantis were true even if the place did exist. So of course it's ludicrous to insist that Atlantis proves that white people are superior. It proves nothing of the sort. Atlantis can't prove
anything.
But once you accept that white people are inherently superior and that non-white people are inherently inferior, these assumptions become the premises of other arguments that support other conclusions, and it's not hard to imagine those assumptions leading to all kinds of networks of consistently bad moral decisions, such as the Nazi Holocaust, or the belief that Donald Trump is a competent leader.
The Nazis were not trying to make the world a worse place. They genuinely believed that they were making the world a better place by saving the superior white race from all those dirty brown people. They accepted a few bad conclusions that led to other bad conclusions that led to consistently bad moral decisions.
African Evangelicals
I lived in an Evangelical part of America. If you never did, you might not be familiar with some of their more unhinged notions about witchcraft. I did live in such a place. I saw the demented, terrifying gleam in their eyes whenever they quoted their favorite Bible passage "THOU SHALL NOT SUFFER A WITCH TO LIVE!"
And that really was the Bible passage I heard quoted most often while living in a predominantly Evangelical area. Not the passage about turning the other cheek, or the bit about treating the least of you, but the mandate to kill people who practice witchcraft.
At some point, American Evangelicals started sending missionaries to parts of Africa in order to compete with Catholic missionaries.
The Evangelical teachings about killing witches interacted with local African beliefs about witchcraft, which has resulted in the modern practice of killing children for witchcraft.
An estimated
thousand children have been killed so far. That estimate is years old, so the number could easily be higher by now. Most of the children killed were killed with either fire or acid. If you have the stomach for it, you can find a video on the Internet of a man kicking a burning child back into a fire.
These African Evangelicals are not evil people, nor are they bad Christians.
They accepted one truth claim that turned out to be false. They accepted the claim that witchcraft is a real thing.
Play a little game with yourself Start with the assumption that witchcraft is real. Then ask a series of follow up questions and see where that can lead you. For example, how do you know when witchcraft has been performed? How do you know who has or hasn't practiced witchcraft? How do you defend yourself from witchcraft? Because witchcraft isn't actually real,
every one of those follow up questions is going to result in wrong answers, that in turn lead to other wrong answers. It's not hard at all to imagine that one bad truth claim[ent]mdash[/ent]that witchcraft is real[ent]mdash[/ent]leading to the kinds of atrocities we see in European history, American history, or modern Africa.
I want to remind you that those Africans genuinely believe that they are making the world a better place by doing the things that they are doing.
If you asked them to stop killing children, they would almost certainly resist. To them, you would be asking them to stop making the world a better place.
Conclusion
So, am I a good person? No. I am not. People are not good or evil. Our decisions are good or evil?
Am I capable of making bad moral decisions? I do. I'm as much of a screaming moron as the rest of you bald apes using asphalt as a substitute for a central nervous system. Humans are idiots and I'm a human.
The
only defense against my own stupidity is being prepared at all times to admit when I am wrong about something.
Being prepared to admit that I could be wrong about anything is an important part of moving closer to truth, but it's also a critical part of improving the quality of our moral decisions over time.
I try to analyze past decisions and figure out where I went wrong so that I can improve the quality of future decisions.
Unfortunately, our world includes a bunch of people who don't go through life under the assumption that humans are idiots and we all have to be prepared to admit we are wrong about anything. Many in our world have decided that because they read a book written by a bunch of desert goat herders from a pre-scientific civilization, that therefore all of their moral decisions are right and that they don't have to analyze past moral decisions for possible mistakes.
And you know what?
That's a problem if we want a world in which people make more good moral decisions and fewer bad moral decisions.