How do we know that what we do is RIGHT or WRONG?

💡HELLO STEEMIANS!💡

I am back today on Steemit because I want to clear my mind with you guys. I need to switch on the small lamp I have got in my brain and begin to think again.

What is MORALITY? How do you know that what you are doing is right or wrong? Shell we talk about it? And moreover, is there a "moral sense" in the brain? And what if it had its evolutionary process? Let's start from the top.

"Principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour."

This is one of the best-known definition which you can find on the Oxford dictionary. And yet we could not provide an equally clear definition of morality from a scientific point of view.

Although many studies have been conducted, and there are measurements of brain activity during a moral choice, it is difficult to say whether this exists and what its evolutionary significance is.

People move, or perform an arithmetic calculation, and these actions can be verified and quantified. We can not say the same for moral choices. Again, and above all, a movement and a calculation can be performed correctly or incorrectly, right or wrong. This verifiability allows experimenters to "search the brain" to find the areas that turn on to perform these tasks. In the case of moral choices, since the rules differ from culture to culture, it is not possible to verify whether a person has correctly performed a "moral task".

In short, there is no "right result" at all when it comes to issues of this kind.

Many think that morality does not exist, or at least it is not a natural endowment of man and that it can only be learned a posteriori.

Let's try to do a "MENTAL EXPERIMENT" to try and answer our key question: is there a moral sense in people? If so, how would you benefit from the evolutionary plan for survival?

Imagine that a machine was invented which could duplicate a person exactly for what he or she is at that precise moment. Try yourself: you are facing your exact duplicate,
how would you behave?

We take two extremes: if such a thing happened to subjects like a mafia boss we would witness, in a few moments, to a deadly duel. On the contrary, if you imagine someone like the nice guy next door it is easy to imagine that the two would agree in a very short time on what to do.

What do I want to demonstrate, or rather point out?

We know very well who we are deep inside, so we know how to behave in front of ourselves. We know each other so well, that we could predict how we would behave.

In the same way, when we are confronting ourselves with others, it is quite evident that a capacity to understand the situation and to choose with whom to ally or not is a necessity imposed by nature.

In general, when it is possible to hypothesise a condition (even imaginary) in which an idea, or a possible object, is necessary in nature, it becomes logical to look for that thing, both in natural phenomenona and in our moral sphere.

This procedure is called "mental experiment" and has been used many times in the history of philosophical and scientific thought. Ultimately, there is an analogy between our predictions of our moral choices and more scientific issues like how life on earth began, or how the mass is formed.

Democritus - the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher - imagined the existence of atoms precisely thanks to a mental experiment: take a quantity of matter and divide it repeatedly until you get parts so small that they have become invisible.
Then he asked himself: could the mass be constituted by the sum of so many "nothings"? Evidently not, so there must be some elementary constituents of matter that we do not see. He called them atoms and so we continued to do until today.

Science and Ethics are often seen in opposition to one another. One should produce the means, the other should judge over the ultimate purpose of these means.

We are rarely asking ourselves whether something we do is right or wrong, and often let the next scientific advancement rule over our lives. In the past, we allowed the atomic bomb to be produced and to kill 70.000 human lives - instantly.

"Morality makes stupid. Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussibility of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes stupid."

This is the end of the utility of Ethics in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche. This passage is from 'Daybreak'.

Nietzsche exhorts everyone to be less judgemental because we could not know whether our actions, or just our intentions for that matter, are bad or good. It is anyone's guess if we are acting good or bad, because we cannot predict the consequences in the long run. Are the effects of the atomic bomb positive in the long run? Maybe, it reduced the risk of overpopulation? No. This is not what Nietzsche really thinks and neither do I.

He rather pushes us to reinvent our moral conduct and base it on other values, not to abandon Ethics tout court.

Do you know a better way to judge your moral behaviour? Is there a scientific way to calculate my moral behaviour? I would like to know!

Thanks for reading,

Ale + Elli