A short treatise on right and wrong

Many people in modern society spend very little time on the subject of right and wrong, in the moral sense. Some consider these issues to be insoluble, and therefore of no consequence. Others consider themselves to be living in the age of the superman and see themselves as Beyond Good and Evil. Still others use the practicalities, or the apparent expediency of the everyday to perpetually distract themselves from issues that would otherwise threaten their complacency. Many people would say that the world is so filled with horror, casual and malicious cruelty, and inhumanity that to seriously attempt to live a moral life is a sure way to court disaster and madness.

Any or all of them could be right.

The issues of good and evil are beyond solution because their solution is a living breathing target, something that moves and shifts in between the ticks of the most accurate clock you could build. We can never know the full import or impact of our actions, so judging their morality can be said to be beyond the scope of our abilities. We cannot ever really know how our actions will impact those around us, yet we are bound to act. In other situations we can now see how our actions are part of massive processes which have catastrophic moral implications, such as when a person considers their own "carbon footprint" and how their lives contribute to destruction on a previously inconceivable scale. Yet, despite the culpability of an individual in their participation in this extinction level event, nothing that they as an individual can do will stop the event. We as individuals have infinite responsibility paired with infinitesimal capabilities to prevent the overall outcomes.

Simultaneously, our powers so vastly exceed those of our ancestors who established our social mores of right and wrong, that to judge by their standards is very much like trying to evaluate the morality of a person through the eyes of an ape. What could Maimonides frame of reference allow him to say about the comparative morality of the use of nuclear power? In his time, someone with the ability to affect a million people's lives would be closer to a god than a mortal. How then could we ask him about the morality of right and wrong on the scale of global warming? It would be fair to say that a human being who had access to things like the internet, air travel, supermarkets, and modern medicine, was in the process of transcending the state of humanity that Kung Fu Tze would have recognized. Our concepts and application of the moral codes of our ancestors necessarily no longer fits us, for the simple reason that we no longer have the same capacities and limitations.

And yet, anyone who has studied Nietzsche beyond the most superficial levle would tell you that there is no such thing as existing "in the state of the ubermensch". The ubermensch is as much a living target as right and wrong itself. As Nietzsche himself said in Thus Spake Zarathustra "The ubermensch is a bridge into the future." It follows then, that while we are beyond the good and evil our ancestors conceived, we are still undeniably attached to those ideas. Just as one end of a bridge might penetrate an unknown and undiscovered country, yet the other end must necessarily be firmly anchored on familiar shores.

These insights are not particularly unique or unusually revelatory. Many people have observed the unmanageable moral position of the human animal. The obvious response to this clear contradiction between our moral responsibilities and our capacities is also clear "So what the $%#% should we we do then?"

Moral questions are, by definition, those which we cannot avoid. They are the questions of how we should choose when we MUST choose. Since the broader levels are so inherently paradoxical many people try to resolve them by focusing on the strictly mundane practical questions which inhere in everyday activity. And this is a highly effective way to live, since it replaces the unanswerable question "Is this the right thing to do for the world?" with the much more pedantic question "Is this the right thing to do for me?"

Unfortunately, while this is a practical solution, it has the same weakness which demolishes many compromises, namely it fails at the original goal. In this case, by lmiting the scope of the question we have made it into a question that can be answered, but we have also removed the key moral component! Because there are larger moral questions, and since this solution chooses to avoid them, there is a serious moral failing in the simple act of framing the question in this way!

I like to use this image
"There was an ancient Greek town called Ethics. It had the unique characteristic that it was full of intersections in which, no matter which path you took, you found yourself outside of the town."

So what should we do? What is the right way to deal with ethical dilemmas? The answer is nearly as unsatisfying as those that precede it. We must do the best we can every day. We must constantly wrestle with the problems which seem insoluble, while remaining aware that our task is distinctly Sisyphean. This is the true bridge to transcendence, the true route to transcending the conflict of good and evil. We must plunge in, with the knowledge that success is impossible, and yet continue to push ourselves ever forward.

The greatest threat of immorality comes when we conclude that we have pat, predetermined answers for what will always be right and wrong, for then we cease to think, and that which we thought was the good dies, and begins to putrefy.