Morality is the glue that holds society together. Right? Or is it the cement we’ve walked ourselves into through traditions and behavior?

Talk to someone with morals different from your own and these are the kinds of questions you might start asking yourself. Why do I think that it’s moral and right for people to eat animals? Why doesn’t it bug me that humans drink milk from a different species, well beyond the age of needing milk? (Oh yes, by the way, you don’t need milk.) No, this post is not a plug for PETA which is actually a pretty crappy organization anyway, for a lot of reasons. But I found these questions, often used in arguments to support Veganism or Vegetarianism, were a good example of something that many people disagree with. If you watch even one episode of Mad Men, you’ll probably begin to realize that many of the things we consider to be a giant part of life in America are simply because they were sold to us that way. So, why would morality be exempt? If someone found it profitable to spread a falsehood and call it moral code, and then the general public just accepts that, how are we to know what is truly moral, or is there even such a thing as true morality? Considering that what you personally find to be moral is subjective to your upbringing (nurture) is there anything within us inherently (nature) that is prone to know what is right or wrong?

This is where many turn to religion; this is where the belief in a soul, a spiritual aspect to ourselves that transcends the physical and understand things before our brain really does. I’ll be honest, I do believe in this inherent ability to know right and wrong, but I do think it is subject to corruption based on upbringing or experiences throughout one’s life. Someone can grow up feeling that lying is wrong, but as they become an adult they realize there is a lot someone can get through lying, and they begin to question if it really is morally reprehensible to lie. Maybe it’s things like this, maybe it’s some part of adaptation to forgo morality if the ends justify the means. It depends on who you are. Some people don’t find morality useful at all: they live by a code of their own rules and regulations that make sense to them, but also keep them out of the trouble they don’t want to be in.

Maybe you find this topic frustrating or pointless, but I think it’s important to question yourself and wonder at why you view certain things as “good,” “right,” or “morally correct.” Does it really matter in the grand scheme of things if you shoplift a tube of lipstick from Walmart, one of the largest retailers in the world, when it isn’t even a drop in their financial bucket? It could be argued that it does, simply because if everyone were to just take one thing without paying, they would eventually lose a lot of money. On a one-person scale, morality seems to have more fluidity, but if you fit it into the larger context of things, morality keeps businesses rich and people from walking around town naked. So maybe it’s the glue that holds our society together, or maybe it’s the cement we walked into; it depends on where you’re looking at it. You don’t have to follow the rules, really. But you need to because if you don’t it’ll feel weird.