Morality Part 6: Inherency

INHERENT RIGHT AND WRONG

Let us go back to the beginning. Human beings are rational creatures of action with free will. Human beings are also animals. Our first attempt at establishing a scheme for determining morality was through our animal feelings of pain and pleasure. We thought that if an action resulted in more pleasure than pain it would therefore be a good action, while one resulting in more pain than pleasure would be a bad action, insofar as that pleasure and pain were measured across a group. Of course, our analysis ultimately led us to a dead end, and a close reading showed many demurrals along the way, and a lot of exceptions lurking at the edges. Maybe good and bad, morality and immorality, are something else altogether. Maybe we should be asking a deeper question: Is there anything such as right and wrong in the first place, or are we just playing a sophistic mental game?

Originally we defined morality as the assigning of values to our actions. A value of good is assigned to some actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should perform, and a value of bad is assigned to some other actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should not perform. We say that performing good actions is the right thing to do, and that performing bad actions is the wrong thing to do.

With this definition, we really don’t have to have right and wrong as platonic or absolute ideas preceding action. Right or wrong are our assignments of values to action, not the recognizing within the actions an inherent rightness or wrongness. Since humans are rational creatures of actions, analyzing our actions is a logical outcome of our rationality. Preferring some actions over others is, similarly, a logical outcome of our rationality. Since we are human, we have no choice but to perform actions. A claim that right and wrong precede the action is no different from the core religious question, is an action moral because God says so, or does God say so because it is moral in the first place. If the latter is true, then attempting to understand why is attempting to read the mind of God, a human impossibility. But if an action is inherently right or wrong, God notwithstanding, attempting to understand why it is right or wrong seems about as humanly impossible as reading the mind of God.

So, we have two possibilities. Either we find out what is inherently right and wrong, and assign those values to our actions, or we find out what our actions are, and assign values of right—actions we should perform—and wrong—actions we shouldn’t perform—to them. Since the former possibility is probably unattainable, we have no choice but to pursue the latter possibility. But the end result is probably the same. We are not pondering imponderables. We are pondering how to assign values to actions. We are not simply wagging our brains in the wind. We can proceed with our analysis.

We asked ourselves earlier, in analyzing the pleasure/pain of actions, would we be analyzing the act itself, or the results of the act, and we decided that we would analyze the totality of the two. What if we break things down, and simply analyze an action in and of itself? Is this a meaningful attempt at assigning a value of right or wrong to that action?