doctor with catatonic patient (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

I believe emphatically that this question about what we mean by the words "right" and "wrong" - or put another way, why our moral code is the way that it is - this is not a question that can be set aside.

From the nation to the person, some coherent code must be in place in order for us to function. Mostly, that code is programmed into the subconscious, while some parts we are consciously aware of, and consciously acting on. My point here, however, is that there is an operating code inside of every human being who is alive and functioning. 

People without any operating code in place can’t act at all. They are called catatonic. The scary problem for so many of us today is that the old moral codes that used to guide all human thought and action are fading. We constantly check and re-check – and check our ways of checking – all of what we believe all the time. Anxiety is just life today.

World War I was the first in a series of real-world shocks that have deeply rocked all our beliefs—beliefs about the value of our Science and, even more deeply, beliefs about our codes of right and wrong.

So let me reiterate: the worst fact about our moral dilemma in the twenty-first century is that collectively, the gurus of Science, though able to achieve amazing things in the realms of machines, chemicals, medicines, etc., have had nothing to say about how we should or should not be using these technologies. Many of them even go so far as to claim that should is a word that has no meaning in Science.

It seems bitterly unfair that the same Science that eroded our moral beliefs offered nothing to put in their place. But what seems more cruelly ironic is that at the same time as Science was destroying our religious and moral beliefs, it was putting into our hands technologies of such destructive power that the question which arises is whether any individual or group of individuals could ever be moral enough to handle them responsibly.

We are living in a time of terrifying uncertainty. I will re-iterate: we now have the weapons to scorch our planet in one afternoon—so completely that the chances of our species surviving in that post-apocalyptic world are effectively zero.

Furthermore, even if we escape the holocaust of nuclear war, we are steadily polluting our planet. We’re aware of this, but we can’t seem to stop, even though the vast majority of scientists who study the earth and its ecosystems say that the point of no return is rapidly approaching. For many scientists, the risk of environmental collapse is even more frightening than that of nuclear war.

Large numbers of us, in the meantime, “lack all conviction.” Without a moral code to guide us—one we truly believe is founded in the real world—we are like deer on the highway, paralyzed in the headlights, seemingly incapable of recognizing our peril.

Most reasonable, informed people today know these things. In fact, we are so weary of hearing what are called the “dire predictions” that we don’t want to think about them anymore. Or we think, get scared, then go out with our friends to get inebriated. There seems to be little else one ordinary person or even clusters of powerful persons can do. The problems are too big and too insidious for us—individually or collectively. Shut it out. Forget about it. Try to live decently. Hope for the best.

For me, these answers are not good enough. To ignore all the evidence and arguments and resign myself to the “inevitable” is to give in to a whole way of thinking I cannot accept. That way of thinking suggests that the events of human lives are determined by forces that are beyond human control.

I disagree. I have to. I believe true philosophers must. We have to try – to understand and then to do.