How Immoral of You!

The Question of Morality, and Immorality, in Humans

We all witness people calling out others immoral and unethical all the time. We do it all the time, too. But from where do these standards of morality emerge, and why do we need them?

This article is a natural sequel to What Should Be My Next Step?, with an attempt to understand morality in light of the outstanding work of Thomas A. Harris, M.D., in his book I’m Okay, You’re Okay. For understanding these concepts in detail as well, you might have to refer to the book itself, but for the sake of this article, the hope is to keep it as brief as possible, but still adequate to address our topic.

We learned in the previous article how we need to work out a system of values, as we can’t make decisions without an ethical framework. We will firstly establish why do we even need the standards of morality and then we will discuss how can we realize them.

Need for Morality

As we discussed in the previous article, our Adult state learns, or acquires updated data, by testing the archaic data of the Parent and Child states with the reality. So now we will have to understand the realities that help us in testing the data and updating it.

One reality that we have is our past — the experiences that we have been through provide some data on the basis of which we can predict the experiences in future to some level of certainty. But is this reality enough? If we depend only upon past experiences, and we respond to stimuli always in the way that we have in the past, there is no possibility of change or growth. Therefore, if we wish to grow, we need some other framework in addition to our past to help us decide how to respond to various stimuli.

One such reality is the framework of morality — a way to decide how we should act in different situations.

Understanding Morality

The Golden Rule states:

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
- Matt 7:12

It does seem like a good way to decide how we should deal with people. However, Harris points out that we are for the most times unaware of what we want for ourselves, or why we want it. That makes it a problem, as we may not be able to decide what to do unto others, and even if we do decide, we may not be sure whether we would like having them do unto us the same.

Harris adds that given that people do not want to live unrelated to each other, one has to create their own essential humanity, while creating with it all human dignity simultaneously. For that, we need to determine the worth of the people, which can neither be proven scientifically, nor we can rely on either Parent or Child states for agreement as to the value of persons. For that, we need an emancipated Adult state.

To an emancipated Adult state, all persons appear equally important. It does not mean that one has to be good to everyone all the time, but how we choose to behave with them should be rooted in the recognition of them as equally important. It is about taking responsibility of not just yourself but of everyone else as well. For example, driving your vehicle wisely on the road is not just to keep you safe, but to keep everyone safe. Because every life is important, not just yours.

But if we are always being this nice to everyone, what about the evil? The problem of evil, highlights Harris, is another reality of the world. The first position that every child takes, as we discussed, is I’m NOT OKAY — You’re OKAY. So there is some intrinsic badness within all of us. It is only after the realization that taking the first position was a wrong decision that can lead to us understanding that we do not have to keep playing games.

Religion and Morality

By now, we have established that there is definitely a need for a moral and ethical framework for us to be able to deal with people. We have also established that we need to acknowledge the importance of everyone, which we can only do if we have an emancipated Adult state. But we have to deal with the problem of evil as well, as it may make it impossible for us to be good to everyone.

It takes only one generation for a good thing to become a bad thing, for an inference about experience to become dogma.
— Thomas A. Harris, M.D.

And dogma, he says, is the enemy of both the truth as well as the persons. Why is that?

Although we all have our respective religions to guide us about the good and the evil, but according to Harris, the interpretation of the religion should never lead to dogma. He adds to it by defining the truth as “a growing body of data of what we observe to be true”. This means that the truth can be subjective, as no one can be aware of the absolute truth completely. And even if they do, it might just take a single generation to distort it for the rest of us.

So when we are not sure about what we learn about religion from others, is it possible for us to have a religious experience ourselves? Harris defines transcendence as “an experience which is more than myself, a reality outside myself, that which has been called The Other, The All, or God”. In order to have a religious experience with transcendence, we need to block out the Parent, so that the Natural Child state may be able to recognize one’s worth and beauty as a part of the God’s creation, without possibility of any judgement or prejudice.

Another way of having a religious experience is by adapting to the Parent state. This means to take up the mission of gaining approval of those who present themselves as the pious representatives of the God. This leads to salvation.

Once again, we may not have reached a consensus on what a religious experience exactly is, we are aware of many a reputable men having reported themselves having had a religious experience. So we cannot deny that it is a possibility.

Moral Values in Action

In light of the above, my personal inferences are:

1. Whatever we consider as ethical behavior, we should focus on making sure that our actions should reflect that behavior consistently with everyone. So we should not be looking for situations where we do not have to truthful, honest, fair and anything else that we define to be our moral values.
2. Reality testing of these values requires us to be upfront and empathetic — we should not hesitate in taking up for discussion any matter related to ethics with anyone, as such experiences may lead to better understanding of the moral values for both of us. However, we have to be empathetic in reaching out to them because the intent of this discussion should be the learning of both of us and not to demean the other person. This may even result in redefining our moral values, as the data of our Parent and Child states may get updated.

To summarize:

1. The reality of our past experiences is not enough to help us decide how to interact with other people. We need an ethical framework.
2. Our emancipated Adult is the only hope that can guide us to create a framework of morality for ourselves.
3. Moral values cannot be defined absolutely, as they should not be dogmatic. Morality should however be based on the principle of “I’m important, you’re important”.
4. Our actions should reflect what we think of as morality.
5. We should be open to learning more about morality and redefining it if needed.