The Difference Between Moral and Non-Moral Issue
Every day we are to choose what way we should go; decide do or do not; make first step to answer complicated questions. We have to face the problems and deal with them. We have to take new issues every hour. The most difficult and the most important questions we ask ourselves are the questions about morality. Because our answer for this questions truly defines who we actually are. It often said that morality makes people better, because their actions are aimed to the goodness, kindness, changing world to better and helping people. Moral is a very wide area of knowledge and today we will focus on some narrow topic to research it. I will talk about the spheres where the morality can be applied and where it can be not. So we will talk about moral, non-moral, and, clearly, immoral issues. Ernest Hemingway said: “About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after”. This is not a definition of these terms, but it makes everything more clear. So, there we always have a problem with moral and non-moral issues – what are they, actually, and how can we differ one from another? It is important to know the answer for these questions, because it’ll be easier for us to deal with moral and non-moral issues. I think, that the main difference between moral and non-moral issue is in the possibility to apply the category of morality to one or another issue.
The question of moral issues and morality as itself is very important. Morality is the one of the main themes in philosophical, ethical and sociological studies. For example, the most famous and respected writers and philosophers wrote about the problem of morality. They are Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Confucius, Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jurgen Habermas… They did a great job because today we have plenty of structured systems of morality, which can explain, what the morality is, and how it can be provided in our life, and what influence it has on us. The morality was even considered as an argument in the discussion about the existence of God. The amount of works, dedicated to the question of the morality, is obviously great, and this can persuade us in the importance of the questions of moral values. Focusing on the hypothesis that I’ve formulated in the introduction, I will explain my ideas using the help of great philosophers, writers and scientists, and I will illustrate my point of view with some examples.
I should start with the understanding of moral issue. We can know about morality from ethics, anthropology or psychology. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2002) says that morality is a term that can be used “either descriptively to refer to some codes of conduct put forward by a society or, some other group, such as …