How Different Morals Influence Our Modern Society

Morals, in the loosest sense of the word, represent the dichotomy between good and evil: It is a system imbued with certain "moral values", as affixed by man through cultural, secular and religious implication, as a rough guide to codify and control human behavior.

The Need for Morals

One of the traits of animals living together in herds or prides, be it as a means of protection (safety in animals) or, in the case of carnivorous beasts, to improve hunting rates, is the abiding of certain rules and regulations. The matriarch or patriarch in the elephant herd, for example, would often be the first to drink water from any river it has come across; the same goes with the alpha male lion, who grabs the first bite out of every kill by his pride. Clearly, a social, hierarchical order exists.

As social animals, the early homo sapiens probably developed certain rudimentary rules to ensure the cohesion and congruence of individual tribes. As tribes began to evolve into townships and cities, the exponential growth of human civilization would have been the pretext for the further development of mere tribal regulations into civilized codes of conducts. Morals serve a two-fold purpose in modern society: To enhance social cohesion through mass persuasion and lawful enforcement of secular modes, and prevent societies from descending into chaos and anarchy.

Given the peacekeeping role that morals holds, it would be prudent to identify the two distinctly different stereotypes of morals that have lived side by side since the advent of modern civilization.

Absolute Morals

Absolute morality requires the belief in that, certain actions are deemed wrong or evil, even though the consequences of that action may directly or indirectly benefit someone or society in general.

That certain actions could be judged so rigidly, would require a train of thought that would be more or less devoid of logical and rational thinking, and most likely based on doctrines and religious teachings.

Homosexuality, for example, is adjudged to run afoul of religious rules, as holy texts and scriptures, such as the bible, frown up such relationships. The rule itself is not a vindication of neither rational nor scientific thinking; rather, it is a rule passed down from generation to generation, propagated and spread along the lines of religious biased-ness.

Relative Morals

Relative morality is a concept of shifting values: That the basis of good and evil is not to be adjudged by the mere act alone: The consequences of the action determines, or plays a role, in determining the morality of an action.

In short, morals as universal truths do not exist. Because of the fluid nature of relative morality, absolute moralists tend to harbor the notion that relative moralists are "immoral" and perhaps confused about the whole concept of morals.

It is a difficult concept to grasp, too, simply because there is no single or any form of codification to strictly define a relative moral.

Say, for example, a man is stuck in a flood; he has been rolling in a boat for days, with no hope of rescue in side. He comes across an abandoned grocery shop. Absolute morals dictate that he should not steal from the shop under any form of circumstances, however extreme the predicament he may have been stuck in. The relative moralist would juxtapose the position between survival and mere petty trivialities, and insist that the man has every right to break into the grocery store. Throw in a few kids and pet dogs in tow, and the relative moralists would make a decent case out of it.