Many times during our discussions in class, and again while reading the text, the question of how we learn morals has been brought up. The argument is commonly between whether we must be taught our morals or we learn them by simply being a conscious human. These two options are always pitted against each other, but after thinking on the subject I believe that in that, you need to have a combination.
A note before I go further: Some may argue with me that I am forgetting religion as a source of morals but in order to understand and learn the ways of any religion you mush first be taught them. So for the conversation right now, let us say that religion is a method to teach morals.
While we are still very young, some of our morals can be taught to us by our parents or by myths and stories (even in the format of a book or film). If we were told a story in which a character steals an apple from a grocery vendor and then was caught and punished, we would be subsequently learning that stealing is wrong because punishment follows the action. The same thing with cheating, lying, and swearing( for most people).
At the same time once we reach a certain age and can understand the fact that eventually we will die, we realize that no person wants to die either and so there is an unmentioned agreement between most human beings (except under sever circumstances) to not kill each other. Such is that the moral to kill each other is learned. This is the same with many other species, they will not kill each other (or sometimes even other animals) unless there is an undeniable and unavoidable threat.
This combination of morals simply inherieted by instinct and taught (by the world around us) is nessicary for a well rounded person.
I think an important distinction should be made between learning and reiterating. Which is to say that movies, games, and stories are not necessarily there to teach us any morals, but rather to reiterate moral ideas that society finds agreeable. I think the same principle which you mentioned in the example of killing applies to other moral problems. If left to our own devices we would realize that we don't want people to steal things from us, or if we are invested in a relationship that we intend to be between only two people, we wouldn't want the other to go to someone else. We don't (generally) want people to lie to us (though in some instances, most people could find lying agreeable). We learn all of these things almost independent from media.
ReplyDeleteSo, I think that we are not necessarily taught our morals. I think we have an evolutionary set of morals which we come around to knowing anyway. Society uses the mediums of parents, media, school, and so on, to reiterate or fortify the agreeable, according to contemporary society, morals . We see this when we look at books and consider what parents taught their children in the days of The Bible compared to now. You won't see 'stone people for picking up sticks on the Sabbath' or 'stone disobedient child' in many recently written moral guidance books. If you do, you'll be told it's a metaphor or that it's irrelevant to our society.