A Universal Set of Morals

Morality can be defined as ethical wisdom, or knowledge of moral science. To be morally correct is to make a decision that is appropriate, or “the right thing to do”. A person bases their morals on what kind of society they live in. Some societies may think something is morally correct, when another society may think the same thing is morally incorrect. The question is though, who is to say what is correct? Can there be some universal moral values, or is cultural relativism correct? For there to be universal moral values, the general population of every race and culture would have to believe in the same morally correct choices in a situation. Cultural and moral relativism is when morals and ethics are based on what culture or race you are, differing from other cultures.

In different cultures morality is based on religion and experience. Some cultures still take part in human sacrifice to whatever God they worship. In that culture, killing one of their own for their God is a good thing and praised by everyone. In most other religions in the world, killing someone is frowned upon and people will end up in prison for doing so. In the American culture, most people love to eat meat, especially steaks and burgers. There are some religions out there that worship the cows and to harm it would be a horrible sin. The United States has a very strict set of morals that they seem to live by, and they don’t have a lot of tolerance for someone to interfere with those guidelines. If a country is doing something that the United States doesn’t like, they will kick in the door and put a stop to it. Over in Africa, there is “ethnic cleansing” going on in Darfur. The government of Darfur doesn’t seem to be putting a stop to it, because in their culture it is morally correct to kill thousands of their own people. They see it as something that has to be done for the country. The citizens of the United States however, are very upset at the genocide that is taking place, and protests are held to try to put and end to it, asking people to take action to stop the mass murders.

Overall, I don’t think there is a universal set of morals that everyone can believe in. Changes would have to be made for the whole world to agree on one set of morals. You would think that it would be easy to think of some morals that the whole world can follow, like killing innocents and stealing is wrong, but things are a lot of complicated than it seems. In some parts of the world, like in the Middle East people really do kill innocent people in terrorist attacks. We think that is wrong over in the States, but over there the terrorists think that the people they kill are dying for the greater good. Stealing is considered to be wrong almost everywhere you go. This may be true, but then we root for Robin Hood to steal from the rich and give to the poor. Sure stealing is bad, but morally, it is for a greater cause. The rich aren’t going to miss a few extra dollars, but it will make all the difference to the poor. So even though stealing is illegal wherever you go, if its to help someone that really needs what is being stolen more than the original owner, it seems morally right.

So in conclusion, no matter what you believe is to be morally correct, there will always be some culture or tribe out there that will disagree with you. It is impossible to have a universal set of moral values that can be applied to the world, unless things were changed to make them work. But, if things were changed to fit everything into a set of values, that would be morally wrong to some people. People believe that they shouldn’t be discriminated for their beliefs, and if we made them change their rituals or customs to fit into the universal set of morals, that would be immoral in itself. So really, it’s a catch-22 in a sense. To have a universal set of morals, we would need to change the way people live and what they believe in, but changing what they believe in would be immoral. So overall, unless the whole world was the same religion and culture, a universal set of morals will never exists, because there will always be a culture that disagrees with at least one of the morals.