Morality: Good or Evil?

[Ogar]

Question for debate:

Is a belief in morality a beneficial or detrimental influence on the world?



I understand that a lot of people do beneficial things in the name of their moral beliefs, but all of the most heinous, destructive events I can think of in history seem to have been strongly influenced if not directly caused by people believing that they needed to impose their moral beliefs on others instead of using their morality as a guide to live their own life.

Now, I will admit an amoral person may not be inclined to do all of the charitable things done by the religious and moral. However, I think that is more than offset by the fact that, without the justification of a sense of moral authority, an amoral person could never commit atrocities like the Holocaust or the Inquisition.

Thoughts?

[Avariel]

Honestly I think a good moral standard would be just treat others like you wish to be treated. Of course, that is a little biased on my side. I suppose you could also argue that some people want to be treated wrongly, for whatever reason. I think as a whole, though, that rule could be a fair call.

Treated "Wrongly?"

That is exactly the problem with "treat others as you would wish to be treated." It works on levels of "I don't want to be killed, so I won't kill anyone." "I don't want to be stolen from, so I won' steal from others." But once you begin treating others a certain way only because you expect to be treated back in the same manner, you're projecting your "morality" on to them. For example people who address strangers as "Sir" or "Ma'am" tend to perceive people who don't do this as rude or lacking respect, even though said people may be incredibly respectful, but in a different manner. Simultaneously there are others that would become offended if you called them "sir" or "ma'am." Essentially by claiming you'll treat others as you would expect to be treated you're setting up a universal standard by which being treated "good" and being treated "bad" now have to be measured; and if others are also following this adage then they may expect to be treated quite differently from you for different reasons, and you would perceive this as being "wrong."

It still may be useful, but I think most standards of "good" and "bad" form when groups of people band together and attempt to work together as a whole rather than as individuals, thus such things like killing, stealing, and creating other forms of chaos would be detrimental to the society's survival. Trying to base it on an individual person's expectations of how they should be treated and what's right and wrong wouldn't work once more people came into the picture; and it obviously doesn't stop individuals from "doing unto others" whatever the heck they want to do

[Homicidal_Cherry53]

Without the illusion of objective morality, it would be almost impossible to create any kind of stable code of laws, and, by extension, government. So basically, without morality, there would be anarchy, so I would say that it is generally a positive force within the world. That is not to say there aren't exceptions, but they pale in comparison to a total breakdown of order.