Wrongdoing

Questions of right and wrong are basic to human being. As long as we're alive and functioning, we're analyzing behavior in moral terms. "Is this right?" "Is that wrong?", we ask. Persons have a need to know if they're right or not. If a person thinks their action was wrong, he or she will try to justify it or else apologize for it. Rarely will a person say they've done wrong and just accept it. We don't like to think of ourselves and our actions as bad. We want to be good. A philosopher or theologian queries the entire moral enterprise. "What is morality?", they ask. Certainly, lower forms of life do not have moral issues on this level. A chimp may criticize a neighbor or family-member for 'bad behavior', but would a chimp or meerkat or squirrel question the way that their species does things? A philosopher may look at the human species and judge it to be evil as a whole. A theologian may make the same judgment and say we need God to improve us, stop us from being bad. This higher-order capacity of the human mind is behind ethics as a discipline of study. So morality is observed in people and cultures and abstracted to a universal level and analyzed. Is there a consensus? There is not, I think. It is agreed that morality is proper to humans, but its content, other than basic words like right and wrong, good and evil, is debatable. Note that these basic moral concepts are dialectical, that is, they are opposites representing extreme positions for reasoning or argument about behavior. How are they to be applied? I live in the U.S.A., where civil laws might be used to judge whether acts are right or wrong or The Ten Commandments could serve to label acts right or wrong, though without the force of law. What is the point of it all? Whence cometh good and evil? Here is an answer: the idea of good and evil is intrinsic in our nature, yet there is nobody on Earth capable of explaining its origin scientifically. We evolved from primitive forms of life. Therefore anything pro-life is good; anything anti-life is evil. Does this sound scientific?