Socrates is the father of philosophy. He was the first to go out and question the ideals of his fellow Greeks and try to discern where they came from. In his time, there was not a recognizable term of morals; nothing defined. Today, we are aware of our morals, but little has changed from his time to ours in terms of how we are taught morals. We are still taught as children that these are ‘our morals’ and that they are better than ‘their’ morals. We fail to examine other culture’s beliefs, or new trends in our culture. Only at a colligate level do we began to examine what it is that we believe. How it influences what we do and why. Then we begin examine ‘their’ ideals and beliefs and, with an open mind, truly question whether it is better than our own.

The conflict of morals has been responsible for many atrocities. The belief that because it is ‘our’ moral that it is the ‘right’ and absolute moral that all should follow. Especially in the realm of religion. Not only has it caused many tragedies, but it is used against us. In short, the intolerance of other morals stagnate a society, cause an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality, resulting in suffering for ideals.

What should a society do about this? What can we do? These morals that cause so much pain, the morals of universal truths, are who we are. It is our culture. What we need is an evaluation system of morals to be taught at a younger age. To not only be taught morals, but the fact that these are values that influence our society and that there are other ways of achieving the same end. To achieve even greater ends than what our moral aspire to.

If we were to teach our children how to examine morals instead of presenting them with an absolutist set of morals, then when they grow into adults they could evaluate new ideas and see what they are really worth. Instead of natural distrust of what they do not understand, they could see that other culture’s ideas, or other changes in their own society, could have some merit that they were unaware of. As it is required with an absolute moral, there can be no exceptions to the rule. To even listen to something that would question it would be to undermine your own moral faith, as it were. This causes intolerance and forces individuals to accept the same things that their parents accept, and their neighbors accept, and their society accept, until there is no more individual thought of right and wrong. Nowhere is this more eloquently put, in our readings, than by Joan Didion in her Essay On Morality: “You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is “right” and what is “wrong,” what is “good” and what “evil”.”(Didion 183)

This explains why the common person to give up their integrity so that they can preserve order, the familiar and “loyalty to the social code” (Didion 183). That when change does happen, it happens in a violent manner because the resistance to the new values is so strong, that people literally die for their beliefs.

Nowhere is this scenario more apparent in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, where he responds to clergymen who told that his actions were “unwise and untimely” (King, 142). In it, he tells that the people who have held them back the most are not the people who violently declare their morals, but the people who silently suppress theirs. This is affirmed by the quote “…white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice…Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection…an attitude…of time that will inevitably cure all ills…Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability;…” (King 148,149). Here, it is seen how he points out that the majority of whites sit and do nothing; they pacify and lie to themselves by saying that time will achieve what they cannot. That this change of values he is demanding is being challenged by an absence of integrity, and that progress will not happen by affirming the old system of values.

This is an example that shows fairly well how the old system is kept because the new ones are rejected in favor of what is known and what is taught to be a universal truth. The civil rights movement of the 60’s was a hard affair for both parties involved and caused much suffering and violence, even the death of the man who was unafraid to speak the truth of what he knew. If the same groups of people were taught that all values have an equal amount of importance and it is up to the individual to evaluate what is and isn’t moral, would this have happened? Perhaps. There will be people who always decide that ill-will and selfishness are more important values than others. However, I am not advocating that we remove all morals. That we simply give children a system to evaluate morals and then refuse to tell them the difference between right and wrong. I am more saying that we should add an additional moral value of change. We need to stop teaching them that the values we know are the only ones acceptable. Instead, we should teach them a system that will cause them to question their own ideals, to understand their own motivations, to question other’s ideals and motivations, and then to evaluate if that is what should be done. That concept is lacking considerably in our culture today.

This system is briefly touched on by Stephen L. Carter’s Essay on The Rules about the Rules. In it, he describes integrity and how to achieve it. The three steps he requires for achieving integrity, which are: discerning right and wrong individually, act upon what we conclude and to be unafraid to say why we chose our values. The first step is the one that is most crucial to evaluating moral philosophies. It is also what our society lacks today as stated in Peter J. Gomes’ speech Classic Virtue and the Character of Fellowship. In it, he speaks of how citizens of old knew exactly what they stood for, while citizens of today complain about leaders when they do not know what it is that they follow.

Even if I were to concede that there are absolute values and universal truths, the need to question ones’ values is necessary to achieve the importance of them to the individual believer. As illustrated in Mark Clayton’s Essay A Whole Lot of Cheatin’ Going On, even when students are taught that cheating is wrong, they still do it. The problem is corrected only when the universities have extensive seminars and pamphlets about the moral issue. Only when it is explained why we have such a value do people begin to employ it. It does no good to have a moral of the story without the story, and to believe unwavering in things that are not proven.

Believing in the things that are not proven sounds a lot like faith, does it not? Faith is something that we, in our Judeo-Christian background, value as something essential and is a large part of the blame for blind beliefs in morals that we hold to be universal. Faith means no questioning, no doubts, and no second-guessing. However, in order to truly understand something, you must truly know it. To know something is to ask questions and find your own answers. I think, in our society, that faith has been misconstrued from believing what you know to be true despite what others believe into blindly believing what you’re told. Religion is a large part of our moral basis, and the problems that we wrestle with it is no where more evident than in Anthony Brandt’s Essay Do Kids Need Religion? He perfectly describes the answer to the problem that I am posing when he says: “Teaching our kids how to ask the right questions may be the best we can do.” (Brandt, 197) Although I tend to agree with his critics that this seems to be a bit wishy-washy of a statement that does not proclaim any great conclusions; it is what morality needs. The ambiguous nature of morality cannot have absolute great conclusions that work in every case for every person. It cannot because when we have tried to do so, it has been met with grave results, such as death and regression of society.

Progress may not be the same thing as change, but is very close to improvement. Improvement can be achieved through continual questioning of who we are and why we believe in what we do, and if that is a good idea. If we had this approach to ourselves and others, than perhaps essays like Carol Gilligan’s Concepts of Self and Morality would be heralded and seriously thought about. This essay could very well have been put on the back burner of society’s needs because it questions the moral nature of men and women. It causes the current status quo thinking that a woman’s morality is like that of a child to thinking that just because women approach ideas differently does not mean she is an intellectual inferior. With the evaluation of her ideas and acceptance, society can progress; improve to an overall greater moral goal.

Just like when the father of philosophy sat among his people and asked them what was important and why, we must do now. To do anything less is only to clasp to things that we hope are right, to deny our children truth of why things happen, and to cause our society to crumble underneath the moral weight of the comfortable familiar. People need to understand what it they believe in and who they are, have the integrity to act out upon that, and be unafraid of other’s beliefs.