5) What Is The Best Moral System?

Every culture thinks they’ve nailed this question. Us here in the wicked West think we are on impeachable moral ground with every decision we take. We forget that just a few decades ago the English chemically castrated an English war hero for being gay. If we were so wrong just half a lifetime ago can we really think we’ve got it all right now?

There are a lot of debates within “morality”, not least – who gets to decide what’s right and what’s wrong? Even simple questions aren’t as simple as they should be. For instance, everyone knows that killing someone is wrong but even that isn’t 100% clear-cut. The “trolley problem” is a good way of waking the brain up and making it realise that it’s always more complicated than you think its going to be. The story goes like this:

There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.

Of course, despite it being horrible, you go for option (2). Now how about we change the story slightly. This time there is no second track, but there is someone standing next to the track. If you grab this poor bloke, who doesn’t know what’s going on, and throw him under the train he will be killed and the five others will live. So should you throw him under the train? This time you probably said no. But it wasn’t so simple was it?

Another scenario goes like this:

A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor.

You know the answer, but you also don’t really know why you feel like that.

As with the free will question above, I personally think that morality is man-made and as such can’t be easily explained in pure scientific terms. Morality doesn’t fit into humanity’s complex modes of behaviour and even more convoluted societies because it’s overly simplistic. Even the classic “do unto those as you would have done to yourself” doesn’t really work: sadomasochism for instance.

Basically philosophy is trying to break our brains and science is trying to break philosophy. These battles will be a long time fought as science won’t be proving or disproving god for quite some time to come.

If, like me, your brain feels a bit swollen and sore after all that thinking, why not relax and look at some beautiful pictures for a while. You deserve it mate.