Morality
It's amazing. All the controversy and conflict and failure and tragedy. All a part of one long fight over an idea and how best to teach it.
Moral
"A moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim. As an example of the latter, at the end of Aesop's fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, in which the plodding and determined tortoise wins a race against the much-faster yet extremely arrogant hare, the moral is 'slow and steady wins the race.'
The use of stock characters is a means of conveying the moral of the story by eliminating complexity of personality and so spelling out the issues arising in the interplay between the characters, enabling the writer to make clear the message. With more rounded characters, such as those typically found in Shakespeare's plays, the moral may be more nuanced but no less present, and the writer may point it up in other ways (see, for example, the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet.)
Throughout the history of recorded literature, the majority of fictional writing has served not only to entertain but also to instruct, inform or improve their audiences or readership. In classical drama, for example, the role of the chorus was to comment on the proceedings and draw out a message for the audience to take away with them; while the novels of Charles Dickens are a vehicle for morals regarding the social and economic system of Victorian Britain.
Morals have typically been more obvious in children's literature, sometimes even being introduced with the phrase, 'The moral of the story is …'. Such explicit techniques have grown increasingly out of fashion in modern storytelling, and are now usually only included for ironic purposes. As Oscar Wilde observes wryly, The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.[1]"
Morality
"Morality (from the Latin moralitas 'manner, character, proper behavior') has three principal meanings.
In its first descriptive usage, morality means a code of conduct held to be authoritative in matters of right and wrong, whether by society, philosophy, religion, or individual conscience.
In its second, normative and universal, sense, morality refers to an ideal code of conduct, one which would be espoused in preference to alternatives by all rational people, under specified conditions. To deny 'morality' in this sense is a position known as moral skepticism.[1]
In its third usage 'morality' is synonymous with ethics, the systematic philosophical study of the moral domain.[2]
Ethics seeks to address questions such as how a moral outcome can be achieved in a specific situation (applied ethics), how moral values should be determined (normative ethics), what morals people actually abide by (descriptive ethics), what is the fundamental nature of ethics or morality itself, including whether it has any objective justification (meta-ethics), and how moral capacity or moral agency develops and what its nature is (moral psychology).[3] In applied ethics, for example, the prohibition against taking human life is controversial with respect to capital punishment, abortion and wars of invasion. In normative ethics, a typical question might be whether a lie told for the sake of protecting someone from harm is justified. In meta-ethics, a key issue is the meaning of the terms 'right' or 'wrong'. Moral realism would hold that there are true moral statements which report objective moral facts, whereas moral anti-realism would hold that morality: is derived from any one of the norms prevalent in society (cultural relativism); the edicts of a god (divine command theory); is merely an expression of the speakers' sentiments (emotivism); an implied imperative (prescriptivism); falsely presupposes that there are objective moral facts (error theory). Some thinkers hold that there is no correct definition of right behavior, that morality can only be judged with respect to particular situations, within the standards of particular belief systems and socio-historical contexts. This position, known as moral relativism, often cites empirical evidence from anthropology as evidence to support its claims.[4] The opposite view, that there are universal, eternal moral truths is known as moral absolutism. Moral absolutists might concede that forces of social conformity significantly shape moral decisions, but deny that cultural norms and customs define morally right behavior."
Liberal values hold that freedom is the best way to teach this idea. Illiberal values hold that force is the best way to teach this idea.
All the controversy and conflict and failure and tragedy. All about this one idea and how best to teach it.
Hundreds of millions of people over the course of history have died because of this fight about how to teach about this idea.
And, yet, despite all the controversy and conflict and failure and tragedy, the illiberal forces who have dominated this discussion for much of humanity's history still insist that they have finally, once and for all, proven the superiority of their means.
And, still, there is controversy and conflict and failure and tragedy. "That," they say, "is proof is just how much our means are needed. It will never go away without us. But, really, it will never go away. That is how much you need us."
Hundreds of millions of people have died, been tortured, been imprisoned, been censored, been silenced, one way or another. All based upon this logic of the need for force to remove the controversy and conflict and failure and tragedy from our midst.
"That is how much you need us," the proponents of force and illiberalism as governing values tell us. "It will never go away without us. But, really, it will never go away."
All of that tragedy. About one idea.
Sad. Amazing. And needlessly tragic.
Love,
Ben
