The Problem With Morality

The world would have been much easier to deal with when everyone just had a spear.

Do you ever feel like its too much? Like we’re too smart and can reflect too deeply? It feels sometimes like we’re at a breaking point, where our powers to create and produce, and our analytical capacity have grown so much, but without the capacity to remedy the contradictions we find. We have developed the world to a point where we have no arguments to fully account for it. Everyone is right and everyone is wrong and we are caught in the middle, able to realise this, and able to realise that there is nothing we can do about it.

For example. We can produce a vaccine for a disease, but we test it on mice in order to maximize the benefit experienced by humans. We have to use animal subjects because to use human subjects would be immoral. We have the capacity to perform this experiment, but we also have the analytical powers to see a real problem with this - we have no valid reason to believe that it would be moral to save humans over mice. But we have no capacity to solve the issue. It would be immoral, given our ability, not to produce this life-saving vaccine. All we can do is ignore the moral issue that the moral necessity of the vaccine creates. It really just comes down to the preferences of those in a position of power.

It seems that whoever designed morality did not account for a species either this smart, or this stupid. We’re tinkering in a broken system and ignoring the problems whenever we find it convenient.

I’m reluctant to say that there is really much of a difference in the way that we behave from that of our cave-dwelling precursors. We just have more complicated spears.