Morality: Why It Is Important For Your Well-Being

There is a fundamentally destructive tendency that has crept into our society. Today we have the tendency to value people who can “get the job done no matter what.” This sounds innocent enough until you realize that sitting behind this valuation is the misguided dogma that all that matters is results. There is the common and pernicious belief that the ends justify the means.

This idea that the ends justify the means was used to justify the horror show that was the Nazi regime. Hitler had an ideal that he felt was of extreme value. He had the ideal of a perfect society containing only the most pure humanity. He had a conception of a utopia for his aryan race. He used this ideal to justify and sanction genocide and destruction of an unspeakable proportion. When we allow the ends to justify the means we immediately loose all morality.

What is morality? Morality is the restriction we place on our behavior with the help of the ideas of right and wrong. Morality is the requirement to be appropriate, to do the right thing. When we allow the ends to justify the means, considerations of what is appropriate and right become secondary. The results become the primary concern, irrespective of what is appropriate and what is right. Morality then cannot fulfill its function as the restriction upon what we as human being can do to each other. We have lost morality, we are in the realm of the blatantly and dangerously prudential.

Morality is absolutely essential for society. The economic collapse we experienced in 2009 is as good evidence for this as anyone can hope to wish for. See “Building Trust in Business by Trusting” by Dov Seidman. The oil that enables the functioning of society is trust. Trust is the assumption that the person I am engaging with is to going to observe what is appropriate, irrespective of what is prudential.

A society in which people are untrustworthy and in which people do not trust is doomed to be riddle with social ills, it simply can’t function harmoniously. People cannot co-exist if they do not trust each other and if they are not trustworthy. Trust and trustworthiness is the fabric of social cohesion, it is the glue that turns two people into one family and two families into one community. Without a firm commitment to morality such trust is a fanciful pipe-dream. This is the purpose of morality, this is why it exists.

We need to save morality then. We cannot abide by a belief that sanctions side-lining morality to achieve a result, no matter how apparently divine the result might be. The price we pay for this is literally our society. Fortunately we have reason to believe that being moral is in fact the most prudential thing one can do. Watch “Why Self Interest is Not in Your Interest” for a justification of this claim.