Moral philosophy

Philosophers and other kinds of deep thinkers have debated for as long as debates have been preserved in writing over whether people are inherently good or inherently bad. The answer too this very badly posed question has profound implications for how society should be structured and governed, how we should teach and raise our children, and how we should interact with others. 

If you think about it for a moment, which most people don't, you'll see a basic problem with the "people are inherently bad" position. In order to come to that conclusion, you must have a moral standard that allows you to make that judgment, so you must be inherently good. Hmm. Of course you could argue that people can know right from wrong, they just don't behave accordingly. That's still a difficult position to maintain logically but I don't want to get into analytic philosophy here, just reality. 

 

Studies have consistently shown that when disaster strikes, people become cooperative and even heroic in helping each other. The "veneer of civilization" doesn't break, and people don't start pushing women and children aside to get to the lifeboats or hoarding food while their neighbors starve or anything like that. Exactly the opposite. In laboratory experiments, people are usually fair to each other, even generous. Most people read Lord of the Flies in high school but hey, it's fiction. In real life, in the 1960s, a group of Tongan schoolboys were shipwrecked on a remote, rocky island and they created a highly cooperative, industrious little society that enabled them to survive in excellent health until they were rescued more than a year later.

One problem is that people watch the teevee news. If it bleeds, it leads. Good news is no news, because when people are well behaved and nothing bad happens, that's just normal. Crime, betrayal, and lies are news precisely because they aren't the norm. What makes us most different from the other apes is precisely that we are so cooperative. The bad news is that for too many people, this stops at the tribe's edge. Our most important challenge, our highest imperative, is to expand people's circle of humanity, to get people to see all others as also equally worthy of dignity, respect and generosity, not just those within some arbitrary enclosure. Can we do it before it's too late?