Foundations of morality

What is morality? Morality is a set of rules that define what is moral. While many people like to use some sort of religious texts to tell them what is and isn’t moral, I find it much easier to define morality based on a few common sense principles. The easiest way to define what is moral is to define what is not moral. In a nutshell, immoral actions are actions that inflict harm to other sentient beings (for the most part I’ll just talk about people, though these things can also apply to animals). Physically, people are collections of cells. Clearly any action that inflicts harm to this collection of cells is an immoral action. However some of these cells are neurons, which when networked together, constitute the brain, and the brain is the hardware platform that contains and executes the person’s mind. We could then argue that any action which harms the mind, also harms the person, and therefore is an immoral action. Finally, the mind often has a sense of ownership (people generally own a number of material possessions). So we could then argue that any action which harms something owned by the person, causes harm to the mind, and thus indirectly causes harm to the person and therefore is an immoral action. These are the three measures I used to define morality, which can be summed up as: bodily harm, psychological harm, and material harm. Any action that directly or indirectly does harm to one of these three things is immoral. For example, stealing someone’s car would take away their material possession and thus cause them material harm, and it would also give them negative emotions (anger, sadness, etc.) and thus also cause psychological harm. As another example, punching someone would cause bodily harm, and thus would be immoral.

While a complete definition of morality would have to consider cases of imperfect information (i.e. you’re not sure what the consequences of an action are), and also cases where you must choose between two possibly immoral actions (i.e. pick the lesser of two evils), this basic rule set is good enough for the purposes of this blog.

Anyway, its the weekend, so rather than write an entire essay, I’m going to go watch Spiderman 2.