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Are you a moral person?

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steve_bank

Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
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secular-skeptic
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?
 
Moral in terms of reducing the harm I do to others in my day to day life? Sure.

Moral in terms of self sacrifice? Not really.

For a guiding principle Ahimsa comes to mind. I don't even kill bugs if I can avoid it.
 
Yes.

I am a very moral an ethical person.

I care deeply about my fellow humans. I try to give back because I'm relatively privileged. In my case, I teach Maths and Science to kids who are struggling, and build or repair houses for Habitat For Humanity at the weekends.

Your silly, trivial question about filching pens is too trite.
 
I try to be.

There's a quote I've got saved in my head attributed to Confucius that goes something like "to do good not because of the reward you would receive in this life or in a life to come, but to do good because you enjoy doing good...that is to love good."

To me, that's kind of the heart of morality. To do good (or be good) not out of fear of retribution in the afterlife, but to be good because good is an end in and of itself.

I've failed in this quest many times, but I keep trying. If I weren't a moral person, I'd stop.
 
I try to keep to the golden rule, do unto others as you would have yourself.

Often hard to keep to and you don't always get anything in return. I feel if I do not try I'll end up being something I do not want to be. Most of the time I find the effort gets returned by others, even strangers. When you are consistent people notice it.

Nothing large, simple daily courtesies and acknowledging others. A simple hello and eye contact can turn around somebody's day.
 
I think I am a moral person. I obey the laws of the land and have courtesy towards others. I do not take what is not mine, and if I accidentally take a pen from work I take it back when I realize my mistake.
 
Ford said:
I try to be.

There's a quote I've got saved in my head attributed to Confucius that goes something like "to do good not because of the reward you would receive in this life or in a life to come, but to do good because you enjoy doing good...that is to love good."
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Or, "Virtue is its own reward." - which basically says the same thing.
 
fast said:
abaddon said:
fast said:
I'm not so sure there's a traffic law I haven't broke.
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But is that immoral?
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Of the one's I know I've broke, I don't think so.
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Agreed, breaking traffic rules is generally not immoral. I've been a motorcyclist for over 45 years, and have frequently done over 185MPH on public roads. That may be quite foolhardy, but it's not immoral.....but what if I got into an accident because of that speed, and killed someone? That feels immoral, but where does the line get drawn?
 
phands said:
fast said:
Of the one's I know I've broke, I don't think so.
Click to expand...

Agreed, breaking traffic rules is generally not immoral. I've been a motorcyclist for over 45 years, and have frequently done over 185MPH on public roads. That may be quite foolhardy, but it's not immoral.....but what if I got into an accident because of that speed, and killed someone? That feels immoral, but where does the line get drawn?
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The line gets drawn where the collective community you're a part of draws it. When put into certain contexts everything can be moral, but when people start coming after you with pitchforks that's when you have a problem.
 
rousseau said:
phands said:
fast said:
Of the one's I know I've broke, I don't think so.
Click to expand...

Agreed, breaking traffic rules is generally not immoral. I've been a motorcyclist for over 45 years, and have frequently done over 185MPH on public roads. That may be quite foolhardy, but it's not immoral.....but what if I got into an accident because of that speed, and killed someone? That feels immoral, but where does the line get drawn?
Click to expand...

The line gets drawn where the collective community you're a part of draws it. When put into certain contexts everything can be moral, but when people start coming after you with pitchforks that's when you have a problem.
Click to expand...

I would say endangerment. I think you're aggressively trespassing into others' space by putting anyone in danger and that can be considered immoral.

I don't consider I've done something immoral for speeding. But if I'm in an area where people are in danger of me hurting them, that... not law-breaking, but just the endangerment itself... is immoral.

If you want to phrase in terms of community agreement, then I think most everyone agrees they don't want other people endangering their lives.

I'm not sure how much vocal agreement matters though. I mean in ethics more generally. Some immoral acts are perpetrated by humans against nonhuman lives who can't verbalize an agreement. If humans were to join the community of life this century (better late than never) then we could consider other animal's (maybe ecosystem's) interest in life to be ethically significant.
 
I am only as moral as necessary to survive, which is the whole point of morality, anyway.
 
steve_bank said:
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?
Click to expand...

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.
 
'people are neither moral nor immoral' is nonsense. We make value judgements all the time. The question for the OP is how you navigate your day.

If you say you are entirely amoral without any awareness of consequences, I believe that is the definition of a sociopath.
 
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