Morality

MORALITY

1968

                                                                                 

What is Morality?  A difficult question, for morality has many faces.  What morality is depends on who you are.  As you change morality changes. As a child, your morality is your parents.  Their moral code is your moral compass.  And when you enter school different directions are added to this moral compass.  These directions conflict.  Your mother dresses you in play clothes for school, knowing how easily a child gets tattered and dirty, but your teacher has a higher standard of dress.  Your sense of morality is no longer simple.

What is morality when conflicts arise?  In a home verses school conflict, your parents may communicate with your teacher and resolve the crisis.  Morality is worked out for the child and the child may feel it does not matter personally.  After all, it is all worked out by a higher authority.  But, also, when a child starts school, a relationship with other children begins.  The child makes friends and enemies.  Suppose some children ask you, as surely some will, to follow them to some exotic place such as a rail yard or an open quarry.  Chances are both parents and school have said stay away from such dangerous places.  You have been forbidden to go to these places and to go will disobey the moral code that was set up for you.  But your new friends want you to go, and to refuse may be an insult to them and lose you their very friendship.  They wait for your answer.  The taunt.  “Are you chicken,” they ask, and they flap their arms and cluck.  In this moment of decision, you could make friends or make enemies.

 We all prefer friends.  What will be your morality at such a moment?  What is to be your morality for the rest of your life?  For life is a series of such choices.  Should you join a major or minor political party?  Should you support a union strike or not?  Should you sell your house to a Negro or refuse?  Should you be a hawk or a dove about war?

Is there a common factor in all these moments of decision?  There is a constant in each situation faced in life.  Your parent’s gave you a list of “DOs and DON’Ts” to tell you how to behave.  Teachers gave you rules that told you how to learn.  Your peers told you what you must do to be their friend or enemy. Your decisions were made in relation to how other people would act toward your decision.  And each person’s decision is always in relation to other people’s lessons and rules.  Morality is not a “what”.  It is a “who”.  Who is morality?  

Everybody making their choice of behavior in relation to other people.  Morality is all human action, good, bad or indifferent.

(Note: Today I believe morality is a constant truth based on the Word of God and not relative to situations or to other people. The photograph was taken in the Rodin Museum, Philadelphia 2005.)