Sunday, November 21, 2010

“Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose” - F. Nietzsche

Did you decide to wake up this morning to shovel the snow? Or did you just sleep in thinking that someone else will get it done? How about eating breakfast this morning? You could've easily just slept in to eat brunch. All of these decisions we make in life are guided by personal morals. Morals have been established by our very first homo sapiens and continuously revolutionized to better fit our technology advancements and needs in society. Without morals guiding our lives, any day can descend into chaos for individuals which on a greater scale of the billions of people living on the earth, societal chaos. This manner in which we behave are innate to humans as well as being learned and influenced as we mature. The decision simply whether or not to open our eyes at birth was never taught to us, it's how we behaved at birth. Many may argue that everything that we now understand was taught to us as we mentally develop. That may be true such as how we were taught to brush our teeth but the decision whether or not to brush your teeth is solely dependent on the person. Our morals tell us generally that all humans should have a clean appearance which would then affect our decision to brush our teeth. But as humans currently understand, a lot of our morals are indeed learned through human influence. An example would be whether or not it's right to smoke. No person is destined to smoke at birth. It is when we learn how smoke can harm your body which we then decide if we should still smoke or not. Majority of people will oppose that morals are innate to humans but it is only when we think about each of our actions, even as simple as brushing our teeth, can be traced back moral to moral till we see being clean as a moral factor to our decision.