Making Moral Decisions
Throughout their lives people encounter problems that they need to find solutions to. They often have to make decisions that will not only effect their own lives but the lives of others. It is not always easy to know what is the "right" thing to do. It is not always clear that there is a "right" thing to do. Making the wrong decision, whether it is a personal social or global issue, can often make the problem worse.
The meaning of morality
Morality is concerned with making "right" and "wrong" decisions. Most people have some ideas of what is right and what is wrong:
- A moral action is one that is considered to be right
- An immoral action is one that is considered to be wrong
- An amoral action is one that shows no understanding of the difference.
Is right always right and wrong always wrong?
Some actions are always considered to be right eg: helping someone who is hurt, or stopping someone hurting someone else. These are considered to be "absolute" moral values. Most actions have "relative" moral values. It depends why as well as what you are doing. We often find that we have to weight up the rights and the wrongs of a situation and then decide what is the "most right" or the "least wrong" thing to do. e.g: going through a red light if we were rushing someone to hospital using force to stop someone hurting another person
Who influences what we believe is right and wrong?
| Family | We spend more time with our parents and family than with anyone else, especially in out early years when we learn many of our ideas of "right" and "wrong" | "If I own up to breaking the window I would be in less trouble than if I lied and was found out - but I still had to pay for the cost of the window from my pocket money" |
| Friends | Peer pressure, or doing what we think our friends want us to, is a strong influence on us. | "She made me feel really guilty if I suggested wagging it" |
| School | School sets up rules of what is allowed and what is not. What is 'right' and 'wrong.' | "If I am chewing in class and I get caught I accept that I will get a detention" |
| Society | The way that we are brought up depends on the culture and the society that we live in. In different countries there are different things that are acceptable or unacceptable. | "If I lived in Saudi Arabia I could have up to 4 wives" |
| Religion | Britain is a Christian country and many of the rules and ideas of right and wrong are based on the "Ten Commandments" and the "Golden Rule" | "You shall not kill", "Do to others what you would like done to you" |
| Conscience | All the above things are mixed up inside us and we develop our own set of "rights" and "wrongs" Some people call this their conscience, others believe that our conscience is the voice of God inside of us. | "I just knew that it was the wrong thing to do" |
We can often be shocked by people who don't seem to "have" a conscience and don't find the things that we do wrong (or right). People who do things that the majority of us consider wrong are labeled as "strange" or "perverted" or "weird" or "evil".
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