On Morality (An excerpt from "Things I Have Learned")

If you flip a coin, and it comes up heads, that is right. If you flip it and it comes up tails, that too is right. It is the nature of a coin that if it is flipped it will be heads or tails. If you flip a coin and it comes up “rainbow trout,” that would be wrong. But that cannot happen, because it is simply not in the nature of coins to do such. Anything that actually happens CANNOT be “wrong” in any sense that is meaningful to the universe at large. There is no “right,” there is only “right for me.” No, not even that, just “seems right to me.”

Religion is NOT the basis of morality. Morality evolved from the necessity to distinguish between White Hats and Black Hats; once certain impulses have negative connotations and others have positive ones (say, the difference between the feeling of hunger and the feeling of orgasm) the world gets divided into Right and Wrong by the individual. This tendency was co-opted by societies as bodies in themselves to preserve their own structure through the creation of laws and rules. There's a reason every society on the planet has had a taboo against killing another one of Us - a society that allows its members to go around killing one another won't last. Killing one of Them, on the other hand, has always been, if not openly encouraged, at least not particularly discouraged. The problem is where Us ends and Them begins, something every society and individual has to judge for themselves.

Some people will try and argue that there is some sort of Universal-Morality-By-Consensus: “Every society in human history has considered murder WRONG. Therefore, murder is intrinsically wrong, aka EVIL.” But already there is a magic trick going on in the words: literally, murder is "wrongful killing." Note how an intrinsic "wrongness" has at this point crept into the definition of the word, so you can now offer the proposition "Murder is intrinsically wrong" and technically it's true, when in fact there is still nothing intrinsically wrong with KILLING per se. And in fact, this is where the difficulty in making it a universal law comes in: what’s the difference between killing (which is okay) and murder (which is bad)?

The Problem of Definition has again reared its ugly head. Everybody has different views of the same abstract concepts (Plato’s “perfect forms”). For people thousands of years ago, human life was sacred, but the folks in the tribe over yonder hill weren’t really human, so it was okay to wantonly murder them. In the middle ages, human life was sacred, but non-Christians, or people not of one’s particular sect of Christianity, I should say, weren’t really human, so it was okay to torture and enslave and murder them. In the pre-Civil War South, human life was sacred, but slaves weren’t really human. To your average sociopath, the only real human is the sociopath himself, or herself. Proponents of the death penalty think convicted murderers aren’t really human. The Nazis didn’t think non-Aryans were really human, and they considered their mass genocide to be nothing more than a large-scale pest extermination. But on the flipside, Vegans and their ilk have expanded their concept of “humanity” to include all members of the Animal Kingdom. For that matter, most people consider their pets to be honorary humans.

So you see, human life is sacred to everybody, but no one agrees on what a human really is. When we say “human,” we really mean our tribe, our species, our nation, our family, our race, our gang, our pets, whatever. The abstraction “human life” is the same, and everyone considers it sacred, but the definitions are always different. In the end, it all comes down to Us vs. Them, with wildly differing subjective views of what constitutes Us and Them. The Problem of Definition prevents human word-magic from ever becoming completely real (think of Orqwith bleeding over into the world and be glad) but it also leads to some major misunderstandings. Here we see that almost EVERYONE considers the killing of a member of Us to be intrinsically WRONG, but who is in the Us is entirely a matter of perspective. We create these abstract notions to explain the world, and then turn them into concrete cages with sharp borders. The universe knows no absolutes but we always try and turn an infinite scale of gray into black and white. It is how our minds work, both a great strength and a great weakness. The Double-Edged Sword strikes again!