What is Wrong?

Let us propose, for the purposes of facilitating communication, that each action we wish to examine has a theoretical and quantifiable rating of “goodness” associated with it. We’ll call this number a utility rating.

This rating would be determined by the following formula: Utility Rating = (Good) + (Bad), where beneficial consequences are factored in as positives, and harmful consequences are factored in as negatives. Perhaps we should look to a relatively simple example to help demonstrate the use of our formula. We will evaluate the utility rating of Alex killing Ian for his lunch one day during school.

	Consequence	Value of Consequence
Positives:	Alex would no longer be hungry Ian’s parents would no longer have to pay for college There would be more space in Ian’s house	+10 +30 +5
Negatives:	Alex would be ostracized from society Ian would cease to live Sean would be upset Ian’s mother would be upset (We could go on to list the effects on all items in the universe, but hopefully you get the picture)	-50 -70 -20 -20 (Several more numbers as the list goes on)
Overall Utility Rating:		STRONGLY NEGATIVE!!!!

In a somewhat cruder manner, our mind goes through a similar process any time we try to evaluate the goodness of an action. In the matter of seconds it takes for us to make a judgment as to the morality of an action, we cannot possibly consider every single ramification of an action (such as, “There would be more space in Ian’s house if he were dead”). Instead, we tend to focus only on the larger ramifications of our actions when judging morality. Of course, this whole discussion begs the question of who is to say what is right and what is wrong.

The Personal
(Subjective) Versus The Universal (Objective)

Each human being has different experiences and is physically a different person from one another. These two factors cause each person to have different personal moralities. Take any two people from around the world, and they can argue for hours over what is right and wrong. It only follows that human morality is subjective and unreliable.

Still, human morality attempts to emulate what we will refer to as a universal morality. Universal morality is the theoretical summation of every consequence of an action. There’s no way for any human being to know every single consequence of an action, so no human being can possibly perceive or understand the true, universal morality of an action.

Aside from being incomplete, judgments based on personal moralities are arrived upon through bias. When Alex attempts to determine just how wrong it would be to kill Ian for his lunch one day, he might overstate the magnitude of the positive consequence of his not being hungry, and understate all negative consequences that do not directly affect him. Such is the subjective nature of personal morality.

The Societal
Morality: A More Viable Alternative

We study the theoretical ideal of universal morality because it is what we hope to achieve through our society and the society’s laws. Although personal morality is calculated in a similar fashion to universal morality, personal morality is incomplete and biased for each person.

A third option is societal morality, one of the building blocks of democratic government. This mechanism defaults to the will of the majority to determine what is right and what is wrong, and thus what is legal and what is illegal, or what is socially acceptable and what is frowned upon. By allowing morality to be determined by the will of the majority, rather than by one person’s own moral judgment, we introduce many competing interests. In theory, many individual conflicting biases should cancel each other out to make the societal morality even closer to the theoretical universal morality than the average personal morality would be.

Beyond the Human Perspective

By abandoning personal interests and collectively creating societal laws, we have supposedly taken a step towards objective right and wrong. However, these laws are built around humans, not around the innumerable creatures that inhabit our earth and the universe. For any code to be universal, its laws must affect all beings, not just those that we know can think. This makes objective morality an even more abstract idea, because it is hard to imagine that a single code of law affects humans as it does the little bugs that get caught in our swimming pools. The process of creating laws for a society is not necessarily getting closer to true objective morality, but closer to a human morality. Our laws may not be correct, but they are good at illustrating how morality becomes more objective when we remove single parties. Societal laws remove the individual from the equation; universal, objective laws remove the human from the equation.