4 KiB
Morality
Morality is the sense of greater values of an individual and society from which it follows what's ultimately right, wrong, good and bad/evil on a greater level, for a "greater good", without succumbing to low instincts such as self interest, self preservation, immediate pleasure etc. Morality is what greatly distinguishes man from animal and allows him to act not on mere instincts and reactions to immediate stimuli, it is driven by the higher forces such as beliefs, logic, empathy, love, conscience, religion and science. Examples of moral (good) behavior include altruism, selflessness, communism in general sense, less retarded society and non violence, while examples of IMMORALITY (evil) might be capitalism, fascism, rape, pedophobia, genocide, marketing, proprietary software, nationalism and LGBT.
Morality is very similar to ethics, to the point of often being used interchangeably, however we may still find slight differences. While morality is seen as something personal and intuitive, greatly driven by conscience and judged on a case-by-case basis, ethics is perceived more as a set of informal, often unwritten shared rules to assure morality in a larger group of individuals, i.e. ethics is an agreement on a way of behavior between individuals, each of which may have slightly different personal morals. Ethics is also sometimes defined as the branch of philosophy concerned with examining morality.
Morality is much different from legality. Ideally it is said that laws should be the minimum (a proper subset) of morality, i.e. laws should be the officially codified, approved and enforced rules that ensure the very basic moral behavior is sustained, such as people not murdering others, however laws CANNOT with the best of our effort ever capture the infinitely complex nature of morals (no one can ever write down EXACTLY what is and isn't moral in every single imaginable situation that can arise in real world), so it is seen as inevitable that laws will always allow some slightly immoral actions (imagine e.g. someone giving a bad advice to someone else on purpose just to see the other one fail -- this may be legal but is likely immoral). This is accepted because the other option, i.e. law trying to prevent ALL immoral behavior, would be too restrictive and would also inevitably prevent a huge amount of moral, useful and essential behavior; imagine e.g. law trying to prevent giving bad advice by banning all communication altogether. However, this ideal of "laws as a minimum of morals" doesn't hold in practice because law is hugely abused and manipulated to serve the evil, so not only does it allow immoral behavior (which would be kind of OK), it BANS moral behavior (which is unacceptable from the idealist point of view), for example it is prohibited to share useful information ("intellectual property"), repairing (DRM), living in an abandoned house one doesn't "officially own" etc. Furthermore laws themselves in principle have a negative effect on morality because people unfortunately start replacing morality with legality; as laws get more complex and in control of our everyday lives, people only start deciding and judging actions based on a question of "is it legal?" rather than "is it moral?" -- indeed, if nowadays you accuse someone of doing something wrong, he will almost definitely reply something along the lines of "I can legally do that so shut up." Laws destroy morality, hence laws have to be cancelled (see anarchism) and we have to focus only on developing our sense of morality better.