I believe childhood was the best time of my life, not because it was innocent, but because it was ignorant. Back then, I didn't care why people did what they did. I didn't notice their pretence, their greed, or their endless performances. Now, having slowly been initiated into this flimsy, fabricated performance we call adulthood, I've started to think and question, I wish I didn't.

One of those questions is this: Is morality a construct of man, or an instinct born with him?

To me, morality has always been the arbitrary line drawn between right and wrong which is taught, reinforced, and revised by society over centuries. Yet even within this teaching, there seem to be two kinds of wrongs.

There are those wrongs that are absolute and universally condemned like murder, rape, theft, oppression. And these are wrongs, that are instinctively immoral.

But then there are subtler wrongs, the ambiguous ones, deception, envy, infidelity, vanity, greed, hypocrisy, indifference or the pleasure we derive out of other people's misfortunes (what the Germans so perfectly call Schadenfreude). These are moral wrongs not because they destroy societies, but because they expose the frailty of our nature. They are temptations every human is susceptible to, no matter how virtuous one claims to be.

(When I discuss morality in this writing, I am referring to the subtle wrongs that expose human frailty, not the universally condemned, absolute ones.)

If morality is merely a human invention, it may serve only as a system of control and restriction to curb our darker, more primal and worst impulses. Now, if that's true, every one of us is basically amoral deep down. Not actively evil, but simply raw, instinctive, and unfiltered. Therefore, we can say that morality becomes nothing more than a social performance, a facade of civility we adopt for the sake of peaceful coexistence.

A crucial piece of evidence is that something that stood morally true, two hundred years ago, might not necessarily stand right in today's day and age, take for example Sati Pratha. Had morality been totally instinctive, it would remain constant. Hence, this also acts as evidence that morality is more of a social performance for peaceful coexistence than something that we have naturally gotten.

The fact that moral lines shift proves they are arbitrary inventions. If they are arbitrary, they can only be maintained through discipline. What is the mechanism of this so-called truce, named Morality? This idea finds its strongest home in the Social Contract Theory. It comprises mostly of three steps:

  1. The amoral default — It is believed that if humans were left completely alone, we would act purely on instinct and self-interest which is the 'raw, instinctive and unfiltered' state I mentioned, which lies beneath the surface. This would lead to trouble.
  2. The Contract — To escape this trouble, people rationally decide to create a "Social Contract." This is an unwritten agreement where everyone gives up some of their absolute freedom (like the freedom to steal or kill) in exchange for the safety of the civil society. This contract is what we call morality.
  3. The Maintenance — This refers to the required discipline and self-restraint we impose upon ourselves and others to keep the manufactured façade of civility from collapsing.

So, should we say that morality of subtle wrongs is a creation of man to simply live together or could it be that morality is something coming naturally to all, but dormant in some, and absent in a few.

I do not believe morality blooms naturally in anyone. It is more like discipline and self-restraint. Perhaps this is why adulthood often feels dull, hollow and performative. The moral world of men seems less a truth and more a truce.

Disclaimer: I'm not questioning the importance of morality, we need it to live together. I'm just trying to understand where it really comes from, whether it lies in human instinct or human invention. It in no way seeks to undermine moral codes essential for coexistence.

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