One of the common topics that comes up in discussion on Yahoo! Answers is the concept of morality - roughly, right and wrong. This morality generally comes in two flavors: Objective and Subjective.
Objective morality is the moral judgment of an action by an external, impartial third party. In other words, objective morality requires someone completely outside and unaffected by a situation to render judgment of the situation.
Subjective morality is the moral judgment of an action by a party who may not be external or impartial. This would include judgment of actions by an individual, based on their personal beliefs, and societal mores and laws.
As an atheist, I must assume that all morality is subjective. In roughly 4.55 billion years, no religious group has been able to present any credible evidence for the existence of any omnipotent, omniscient deity, and so the concept of an objective morality is simply hypothetical; any human will find that their judgment of the situation is subject to their own personal beliefs, and that they are not wholly impartial to the situation.
Since morality is subjective - influenced by a number of factors, including region of birth, religious beliefs, environmental factors such as upbringing and social circles - then morality cannot be universal.
Or can it?
My personal moral code includes a simple tenet that exists in a number of major philosophies or religions. Witch's law simply states, "Do no harm." Confucianism expressed the concept of 'shu', or reciprocity: "Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself." Christianity later reversed this rule and included it in the Bible, as the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have done unto you."
None of these completely express my personal, core moral belief, however; they are too simplified, and assume that all people live by the same morality (and they don't). To state it simply:
The only immoral act is that which unjustly imposes upon the rights of another person (sentient being) to take the action of their choosing.
Oliver Wendell Holmes stated this more poetically: "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
What exactly does all that mean? At first glance, it may sound like that I'm simply saying, "'Do as thou wilt' shall be the whole of the law," but that is not completely true. Note that I clarify that an action may not unjustly impose on the rights of the second person. In other words, as long as the action you want to take does not impede me in taking the actions of my choosing (and, vice versa, my actions don't impede yours), then the actions are moral.
There can be some gray areas to this, of course. For example, a child may want to stay up very late on a school night, while the parent may force the child to go to bed. While the parent has imposed upon the child's right to act, it is not unjust for a number of reasons, the first and foremost being that education is incredibly important to the child's well-being (even though the child may not see it at the time).
As another example: Someone breaks into my house and attempts to kill me to take my belongings. In that instance, I consider it moral to defend myself with force, up to and including killing my attacker. His desired action (killing me) would obviously impose upon my right to take my desired actions (duh!), and so in that instance reacting in kind is not immoral, because it is done in defense of my ultimate right to moral action.
I acknowledge that this moral code, in fact, includes its own quandary, as in many cases it requires its practitioner to judge the morality of the action of others - but as I said above, I consider all morality to be subjective, and so this is an inevitability I accept.
Overall, though, I consider it a very rational code to follow - and numerous religions and other schools of philosophy seem to agree, at least in part. As I mentioned in a prior blog, this concept was stated by Aristotle as a key basis of law - reason, free from passion. When determining whether an action is moral or immoral, one must simply take a look at the action and judge whether the consequences unjustly impose on the rights of other people - and "unjustly", in this case, means that there must be some sort of direct harm caused to those others by the act.
Followed universally, I think that this concept would lead to an ultimately perfect society. However, I'm not optimistic (or deluded) enough to believe that, as a species, we're anywhere near ready to achieve this sort of clear thought.
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