Moral Judgement - your rules or their rules?

A VEIL OF IGNORANCE - 

Moral Judgments – a social contract? 

Part I

In life we have been given two choices by our social standards today – to be a participant in life or become a spectator. One should not need to explain those two options as they are very clearly understood and explained. However, what is not clear is the grey area between the two lines and what decides whether you are a spectator or a participant in any situation or event. This is where you moral judgment comes into play and helps you decide your role in your life and society’s events.

For most people, moral judgments are based on particular requirements in their personal lives or background. Most people make their decisions on their own self-attained moral core values. They inject their parents or siblings views, their religious and political preferences and their own conjectured interest in what is right and wrong. Hence the approval of such moral judgment relies on similarities and common interests rather than facts or truths of the matter.

Using one’s own thoughts, you can see how your particular personal interest adopts and adapts your own ideology and how it carries weight in the ultimate decision making process. One can also see the chance of receiving flawed perceptions and avoid finding the truth thus this process is perpetual and ongoing in life. These decisions end up being social or sociopolitical decisions. They become in fact, a social agreement or contract in many moral judgments for the future. One might see, almost instantaneously, how such a sociopolitical contract could be flawed and not based on truth but rather, personal opinions and ideas. One could challenge such a moral judgment to be wrong and flawed in most cases regardless how one assesses or justifies the rules or principles of such a process.

This doesn’t mean you toss those ideological positions or proposals aside as they were developed by others who are thinkers and philosophers in trade. Their ideas and thoughts could be mixed in the moral judgment to create your own decision or position as a moral view. Remaining practical and impartial in the matter at hand, you can serve up these rules and make new ones as you explore the elements of truth, logic, common sense and morality of the matter.

A second and also important element of your decision making process is to closely examine whether those original impressions and persons who derived such notions or ideas were impartial in their writings is important as well thus you must challenge all ideas on full face value their concept is sound and impartial to the morality of our own rules. This is where you decide to become a participant or spectator – either you actively or passively choose to participate because your beliefs in the moral judgment or you become a spectator, someone watching from the sidelines and unable or not ready to make a commitment to the value or the idea.

For moral reasoning, the impartiality of such concepts is most important to rely on when drawing the abstract of the concept to believe in or live by in your life. One has to examine their particular interests, whether it is war or peace – life or death and right or wrong based on the moral scale you live by. One cannot replace or substituted these rules for you as your own person, unless you accept them as your own.

Hence you should become a ‘judicious participant or spectator’ to glean the most out of these concepts or ideas. Surely, you can see how you might end up being confused or find different versions of the truth or moral point of view. Here is the point in your decision making process where you examine the design, the desire, and the main feature of such a moral view and determine it against your own.

This is how any reasonable person can deduct their own moral views and draw up a social contract with society with these rules. However, common sense should remain intact to prevent ignorance and there must be a process in place to continue an evaluation or assessment of these values to determine consistency and sustainability of your own views on the matter.

The totality of moral reasoning is most fundamental when the perspective is constantly moral in your wisdom of the values and sensible to live by. Such a position should be based on justice, fairness and tractability and not selfish interest or self-indulgence. That would be overriding the non-moral view and conflicts with your core values and requires an adaptation of your own behaviors or thinking. However, since you have the prerogative right to change your mind, it is an important part of the reasoning process.

The difference for you as a person and a believer is the fact that most wisdom comes from a hypothetical approach or inexperienced event. This original concept is determined to be unproven in your own world and needs to be tested or confirmed. One should not and cannot adopt new or original perspectives without first examining the impact of such moral reasoning.

One has to repeat the process and apply the impartiality clause to determine principle and impact of social and political justice. You cannot simple accept another person’s viewpoint without examining it to be accepted at full face value thus your responsibility lies in the soundness, its socially applied effect and the moral code you live by.