Republic of the Philippines

BOHOL ISLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

Main Campus
C.P.G. Avenue, Tagbilaran City, Bohol 6300
Vision : A premiere S & T University for the formation of a world – class and virtuous human resource for sustainable development of Bohol and the country.
Mission : BISU is committed to provide quality higher education in the arts and sciences, as well as in the professional and technological fields; undertake research and
development, and extension services for the sustainable development of Bohol and the country.

Module IV – Conclusion

Lesson 9: Confronting My Ethical Behavior in Today’s World

Learning Objectives:
At the end of this lesson, the students should be able to:
1. Discuss the three problems in our moral bearing and
2. identify some traces for moral reforms.

Key Reading:
The Conversation. “The greatest moral challenge of our time? It’s how we think about morality
itself.” https://theconversation.com/the-greatest-moral-challenge-of-our-time-its-how-we-
think-about-morality-itself-92101

Introduction
It would be easy to conclude that there’s a deficit of morality in the world today. That if
only people were more motivated to behave ethically, if only they made morality more prominent
in their thinking, then the world would be a better place. But when it comes to pinning down a
single greatest moral challenge of our time, there’s not a lack of morality in the world; rather,
there’s too much.
In fact, the greatest moral challenge of our time is our flawed conception of
morality itself. The way we tend to think and talk about morality stifles our ability to engage
with views other than our own, it makes managing diversity and disagreement harder, and it
tends to lock us into thinking patterns that produce more instances of suffering and unrest than
they solve.

Right, Wrong, Black, White

Murder is wrong. This is not just a matter of subjective personal preference, it’s an
objective fact. That means if it’s true for me, then it is true for you and for everyone else too.
And if someone claims that murder is right, then they are mistaken.
 This is the way many of us tend to think and talk about many moral issues, not just
murder. We refer to moral facts. And we prove our moral stance is the correct one by
appealing to these facts.
Some of us justify these facts by appealing to commandments delivered to us by some
divine being. Others justify it by appealing to natural rights, or fundamental facts about human
nature, such as that suffering is intrinsically bad so we should prevent it wherever possible.
Many of us see morality as like a science, where we can learn new moral facts about the
world, such as when we discovered that slavery was wrong or that women ought to have the
same rights as men, and we updated our moral attitudes accordingly.

Three Problems
There are three major problems with this commonsense view of morality:
1. It’s wrong.
“It is not truly convincing that there is any objective source of morality.”
Even if you believe there is a divine moral source that can dictate absolute right from
wrong, it’s still down to us mere mortals to figure out the correct interpretation of its will. And
history has shown that disagreements over rival interpretations of divine goodness can cause
untold suffering, and still do today when dogmatists attempt to force their version of morality on
the unwilling.
2. One True Morality
The second problem is that the idea of there being One True Morality is fundamentally at
odds with the vast amount of moral diversity we see around the world. For example, in the
Philippines, there is widespread disagreement over whether the state should be able to execute
criminals, whether terminally ill people have a right to die, and how sexuality can be expressed
and practiced in private and public.
If you believe that morality is a matter of objective truth, then this diversity means that
most (if not all) people throughout the world are just plain wrong about their most deeply held
moral convictions. If that’s the case, then it speaks poorly of our collective ability to understand
what morality is at all.
3. Black and White Mentality
The third problem is that this view of morality steers us towards thinking in black and
white terms. It directs moral discourse towards proving other people wrong, or bending them to
our moral views. It makes it much harder, if not impossible, for people to take other moral
viewpoints seriously and engage in ethical negotiation or compromise.
This is one of the major reasons that social media, not to mention dinner table, discourse
is in such a terrible state right now. Those on one side simply write off their opponents as being
morally perverse, which shuts down any possibility of positive engagement or bipartisan
cooperation.
Moral Reform
So to respond to the greatest moral challenge of our time, we need to seriously rethink
morality itself. And the best way to think about morality is as a cultural tool that we humans
invented to help us live and work together in social situations. After all, we each have our
interests that we want to pursue. They vary from individual to individual, but generally include
things like being able to provide for ourselves and our loved ones, avoiding suffering and
hardship, and pursuing pleasurable and fulfilling experiences.
The best way to satisfy these interests is to live socially, interacting and
cooperating with others. But often our interests, or means of satisfying them, conflict with
others. And that conflict can end up being bad for everyone.
So morality is the set of rules we live by that seek to reduce harm and help us live
together effectively. We didn’t just discover it. It wasn’t handed to us from above. We had to
figure it out for ourselves.
Of course, we haven’t always thought about morality in these terms, so we’ve justified it
in any number of ways, often by appealing to religion or tradition. But we have not updated our
thinking about morality to purge it of the baggage that came with religion and the rigid cultural
conformity of the past.
We now know there are many ways of pursuing a fulfilling life, and the rules that promote
one version might conflict with the ways of another. So moral rules that encourage strong
communal bonds, for example, might conflict with the rules that enable people to choose their
own life path.
Also, the problems that morality is trying to solve vary from one place to the next. People
living in a small community in a resource-limited area like the Arctic tundra have different
problems to solve than people living in a modern metropolis like Sydney or Melbourne,
surrounded by abundance. If we apply the morality of the former to the latter environment, we
can exacerbate conflict rather than resolve it.
All this means that morality should be less about “proving” your view and more about
tolerance and negotiation. We need to learn to understand that different people - and different
communities and cultures have different conceptions of the good life. And we need to
understand that the problems of social living, and their solutions, don’t apply equally well in
every community.
It also means we must learn to become less morally dogmatic and more morally
adaptable. Above all, we need to abandon the idea that morality is about objective facts
that apply to all people at all times.
This doesn’t mean morality becomes an “anything goes” form of relativism. There are
ways to judge the usefulness of a particular moral norm, namely: does it actually help solve the
problems of social living for the people using it? Many do not, so deserve to be challenged or
reformed.
In an increasingly interconnected, diverse and multicultural world, it is more important
than ever that we reform the way we think and talk about morality itself. If we don’t, no matter
what other moral challenge you think we face, it will only become harder to solve.