In modern society, people face a wide range of circumstances in which it is necessary to know the difference between right and wrong, yet there seems to be no real agreement on exactly how to distinguish between them. Is it enough to simply do what we "feel" is right, or is there something more to it? Is there any real way of knowing for sure?

Few people will dispute the idea that the concepts of good and evil have been around since long before there were humans on Earth, and yet they can't even agree on the reasons for having this shared belief. Those who feel that the concepts are relatively new tend to see them as arbitrary human inventions designed to keep the ruling class in power and oppress the masses. By the end of this article, I hope to have shown just the opposite to be true.

One of the earliest forms of ruling class in human society probably resembled what we now know as the religious leaders. We can paint a reasonable picture of how this may have come to be by examining the wealth of knowledge passed down from those times, even in its diluted and distorted forms, along with an understanding of the inner workings of the human mind from a developmental viewpoint.

The human brain in general has a built in need to find a command structure in society even when none exists, and our instincts tell us that gods are the natural root of such a structure. It comes as no surprise that some of the earliest forms of law were based on the idea that the gods get to decide for us what is right and what is wrong. Of course, it was up to those who were closest to the gods to interpret what the gods had to say. The rest of human society simply had to take their word for it. Or did they?

As children, they asked they learned about the gods from their parents and asked a lot of questions that their parents amazingly always had the answers to. As parents, they answered such questions using knowledge acquired in youth, common sense, a little guessing, and as much imagination as necessary. In other words, they made up what they didn't know. It comes as no surprise that people soon started simply inventing new gods to change the rules in their favor. Those who were able to convince their children that such gods were real would get obedient children out of the bargain, and those who were able to convince other adults got obedient neighbors and relatives out of the bargain. The rewards for such deceptions would have made them seem well worth the effort, and if people made up something sufficiently believable, they might even convince themselves.

Humans still do this today with mythological characters and in many cases anything that they don't fully understand. The stories that are easier to believe are more likely to be passed on, and the stories that are easier to disbelieve are more likely to be short lived. Over time the stories are passed from person to person with slight changes, and the less believable versions are weeded out. By the time humans had developed communities consisting of more than just a single extended family, they would have had many such legends and myths honed to the point where they were indistinguishable from fact even under careful scrutiny and were the basis of their way of life. Such traditions had to have been shared by a tribe or clan in order for the members of that social group to get along, because a violation of the traditions by any member of society would have been considered a threat to the only way of life they knew and therefore completely unacceptable.

Social groups whose traditions didn't mesh would have had a hard time getting along together, so to avoid wars they probably did their best to keep their distance from each other. This would have worked out well in nomadic societies, but with the inevitable discovery that food could be planted and later harvested would have come the recognition that there was an advantage to staying in one place long enough for plants to grow. Agriculture would have given people a reason to settle down, nomadic tribes would have slowly given way to tribal villages.

A growing village would have required more and more land, until sooner or later the inevitable would have happened. Expanding villages began to overlap. This would have lead to a conflict of interest between villages as their lands began to overlap. We see the same kind of territorial disputes even among animals that don't grow their own food, but resolving such conflicts would have been a little more complicated with so much more at steak. Eventually, the people would either have had to settle their differences through agreement or through war.

Of course, agreement would be the more desirable way to settle their differences. Each probably did their best to convince the other that their point of view was the correct one. In a few rare cases people may have resorted to the "might makes right" mentality, but that would have been costly and was probably avoided for the most part. If the people of one village could convince enough of the people in their neighboring village to see things their way, the two villages could continue to grow and merge until they became a single village, and much of their culture would have merged together into a shared culture.

As such merged villages got larger and more complex, eventually their size would have reached a point where the belief system and traditions of one part of the village would have been able to remain significantly different from the beliefs and traditions of another part of the village, and a solution would have been required in order to avoid conflicts within the village. Since war within a village would have been very undesirable, people probably were willing to go to extreme measures to avoid it. Even to the point of allowing one part of the village to "make the rules" for the rest to follow. The most prosperous people would have been the obvious choice for rulers, since they were well nourished and had no shortage of healthy relatives to back them up in a fight if one were to be started, and also since their prosperity would have been seen as evidence that their way of doing things might very well be worth trying.

Such conventions would have allowed villages to grow much larger than before and to literally swallow up surrounding villages as they grew, since the smaller villages would see that their gods had been good to them and wouldn't dare contest their authority. Well, it would seem that a time came when people started to realize what was going on. The ruling class was treating everyone the same way that parents were treating their children. They passed down the things they had learned from their ancestors, and made up the rest as it was needed. If their answers weren't good enough, "because I said so" was always a good fall-back, and if that didn't do the trick, "because one of the gods said so" took the weight off their shoulders.

This brings up an interesting development. If the ruling class claimed that "god said so" and the results were disastrous, they would have been held accountable and had an angry mob to deal with that they couldn't possibly stand against. On the other hand, they could select or appoint someone to interpret what the gods had to say. Any person selected for such a position would have been elevated to the level of ruling class status, allowing them to make the rules and pass them on to the ruling class, who would have kept them close at hand and taken good care of them as long as things went well. Of course, any natural disaster or crop failure would have been interpreted as the gods showing their anger, and the obvious solution to that would have been... kill the messenger.

Eventually, rulers would have learned to keep several such messengers around. This would have had several advantages. First, it would give the ruling class back their ability to "make the laws" since they could choose to listen to which ever messenger was saying what they wanted to hear, or hire another who shares their point of view if need be. Second, it would mean that killing the messenger could become a smooth functioning part of the governing process because there were plenty more where that one came from. Third, it would have given the opportunity for such messages from the gods to be passed around amongst the messengers and evolve into something more believable.

Even such complex forms of government were bound to be questioned sooner or later. Some people would still reach a point in their life when they realized that they were being treated like naive children, expected to believe and accept what ever they were told. Of course, the part of it that they were told when they actually were children would have been so set in their minds that they would probably never even consider questioning it, but they may have noticed when the ruling class would pass down changes in the rules, traditions, legends, religions, or laws that they grew up believing to have been long established as immutable facts.

Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. The people went back to making up their own gods and their own rules. Of course, this would have started out small so as not to conflict with or offend the ruling class. In a sense, smaller governments were immerging within the governed community, but without the stability or level of power that the higher government possessed. This was probably accepted at first even by the ruling class. Being a ruler of rulers would have made their job easier and afforded them power over quantities of people they would never before have dared to even dream of controlling. This system of multi-layered government eventually brought on situations that lead to major changes in the belief systems that had once been the only form of government known. One such change was the idea of going out and taking over smaller governments rather than just swallowing up those whose boundaries merged with their own. Another was the use of a "ruling class god" concept to keep the gods of the lower governments from being considered equal to those of the higher ruling class. This idea that the lower rulers could have lower gods would have eventually lead to the concept that people below the ruling classes could be safely allowed to go back to making up their own gods to rule over their immediate family, making the government's job that much easier.

Well, of course, sooner or later the people were bound to start fighting amongst themselves about which of their lower gods had authority over the rest of the lower gods and stuff like that. Chaos was bound to spring up. It was just a matter of time. Fortunately, there were ways of settling such disputes without war. In many societies, the laws were already being kept in written form, and it was also generally accepted that anyone who was an upstanding citizen could be used as a role model for interpreting the laws. In other words, if you could find someone that everyone in the area agreed was a good person, you could compare various ways of doing something with what that person would or would not do under similar circumstances, and thereby determine right from wrong.

Everyone had their own ideas of what was right and what was wrong, so such ways of finding a point of agreement were necessary. The underlying issue after all was survival, and war was therefore considered quite counterproductive unless it was seen as resulting in an agreement that would ensure survival of the greater community to a degree that was worth the losses associated with doing battle. People learned to decide what was right and what was wrong by using each other as examples, and it was generally agreed on both by the governments and by the people that this was an acceptable way of keeping the peace within a community, and by extension an acceptable way of determining what was lawful and what was unlawful.

Okay, so history is my worst subject and perhaps my account of the past isn't completely accurate. Feel free to look into it yourself, if you think it's worth the bother. My point in all of this doesn't hinge on history anyway. I just wanted to paint a picture of my understanding of how things have gotten to where they are. I could continue from that point to the development of some major theologies such as ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman mythologies, and even into modern religions, but that would be straying too far from my point, and would make this writing into a rather large book. I want to keep it simple.

Humans have an instinctual knowledge of right and wrong that they've inherited from their ancestors. If you believe that all of the ancestors of humans were human, then you probably expect that instinctual knowledge of right and wrong to be well suited to the species, but in fact it's not. Human babies instinctually feel that what ever they can take is theirs and what ever they want to do is okay. They know right from wrong, but not in the sense that most adults do.

To baby humans, it's instinctually wrong for you to have something that they want and not give it to them. It's also wrong for something that they have to be taken from them. It's right for them to always get their way. It's wrong for them to feel pain or discomfort or hunger or anything unpleasant. It's right for them to take what ever they want. It's right for them to be treated like they own the world and everything in it. It's right for them to be loved and respected by everyone and given all the attention they want, when they want it. It's right for them to decide what happens when, in what ever order makes them happy. Yes, baby humans know what's right and what's wrong. They just don't care whether or not it's right for anyone other than themselves.

Of course, baby humans soon learn that they can't have everything be right for them, so they have to strike a balance and figure out how to get as much as possible to be right for them. They learn to manipulate people around them through sounds and gestures. They learn to get what they want by making loud noises until they are satisfied, and they learn to enforce such "good behavior" by showing how pleased they are with the people they have manipulated for having done what was required of them. They also learn quickly that they can punish wrong behavior by making enough noise and showing enough discontentment to make the people around them very uncomfortable.

Compare this behavior with that of the traditional ruling class adults, who declare loudly and clearly what they want and then reward or punish according to their whims. One distinct difference stands out. The ability to communicate clearly. Language is the factor that distinguishes a tyrannical monarch from a whining baby. Well, that and their chronological age. Some would argue that with that age comes not only language but also wisdom. My counter-argument to that is since they have consultants to do most of the intellectual part of their thinking, they can get by just fine on a minimum of wisdom. Of course, those who are under their rule may suffer from the lack of ruling wisdom, so to reduce the chances of retaliation it is important that they draw on the knowledge and wisdom of those appointed to provide it.

So this raises the question of who is right. Is the baby doing what's right? Is the tyrannical monarch doing what's right? Well, the answer to both questions would appear to be no, but as long as people put up with it, a reasonable assumption would be that they are doing what's acceptable. In other words, people must not consider it "very wrong" or they would do something about it, right? Well, okay. With the baby, that's probably true. A parent may resort to punishment if a baby crosses the line between acceptable and unacceptable. On the other hand, an individual subject of a ruler who's misbehaving isn't likely to do anything about it other than complain, and many rulers have simply dealt with such complaints by executing the complainers. It is only by standing together as a community and expressing their concerns together that a group of people can hope to correct the actions of a corrupt government that has crossed the line between acceptable and unacceptable.

We may never really know for certain what is right or wrong, but moral codes that have kept peace for long periods of time are a good place to start. The governments that have enforced and refined such codes are of historical value, and should probably be phased out slowly as society learns to govern itself again as it once did. The transition will be best if it is done smoothly and with careful planning. In fact, it would be a good idea to include the government in on the process, but to a degree that falls short of total control. There will always be hierarchical command structures within human society as long as human brains continue to see them as natural, but higher levels of government should be a last resort solution to lower level disagreements and should be arranged as fluid bodies made up of distributed parts that can function easily in fractional segments and disseminate their decisions amongst the whole. The idea of having a single ruling human in charge is archaic, and in today's world even dangerous. It's like letting a baby drive the car. Too much power in the hands of an ill-equipped individual.

The bottom line is that everything we know about right and wrong stems from the basic idea that what it right leads to survival and prosperity, and wrong does the opposite. The big question is in what it is that we are protecting the survival of and helping to prosper. The general consensus of modern religions seems to be that the difference between good and evil is that good is what god wants and evil is everything else. Some have went the extra step of adding in that evil is what the devil wants. Personally, I have a hard time understanding why anyone would want the opposite of good, but of course there are religions that teach people that evil is the right thing to do, and uses the same old system or promised rewards and punishments to enforce their will. Who benefits from such religions? In the short term, probably those in charge of them. In the long run, nobody. Other religions still teach that god decides what's right and wrong, and that we should all give generously to god. Who gets what the followers of such religions give to god? Well, a little goes to a lot of different places, and a whole lot of it goes to the people in charge, but I have yet to see any evidence that any of it goes to god.

Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of well intentioned people in positions of religious authority, and there are a lot of good things done in the name of various religions. I'm not saying there's no good in it. There may even bee good people at the very highest levels of some religions and governments. In fact, there most likely are. I'm simply saying that it's about time society learned to evolve beyond the need to be placated into obedience and threatened into submission all in the name of some higher authority that in all likelihood was made up for that very purpose and might very well never even have existed. As the church gets richer and the government gets more powerful, humanity as a whole suffers for it, not because such institutions are doing evil, but because they are doing for us what we should be doing for ourselves. They are controlling aspects of our lives that they have no right controlling, and we are letting them because we don't know how to survive any other way. In the mean time, society continues to grow and merge and change, resulting in elements that neither the church nor the government is prepared for, and we sit back helpless waiting for those in authority to protect us from situations and conditions that their very existence has fostered and they can do little or nothing to alleviate. We need to take responsibilities for our own actions, and teach our children to do likewise. We need to learn the difference not as scattered individuals but as a society between "right for me" and "right for everyone" because there is no right or wrong without context, and the evolutionary context of individual survival has long since been superseded in human society by the social context of life in a multicultural world where political borders are arbitrary and unnecessary other than to keep governments from fighting with each other. Perhaps it's time we consider taking the weapons away from the babies in charge, and keeping them under the control of mature and responsible communities that know how to use them if necessary but won't take them out just to play with them.

The human brain comes with a lot of instinctual baggage, but fortunately we are able to overcome much of it through a combination of the fact that our instincts are better suited for creatures that we probably evolved from than they are for us, and the fact that we are able to compensate for bad instincts through learning. Our instinctual tendency to put personal gain above all else can be overcome, by learning that group gain is more productive. Consider a group of toddlers given ample stacking blocks to build what ever they want, and the difference in results between when they work together as a team and when they work as rival builders. The team may build several small structures peacefully and perhaps even one or more larger structures that no individual could have built alone. The rivals take turns taking blocks off of each other's stacks to place on their own, as if there weren't enough to go around. Well, the ancestors of humans most likely did have to live through times when there wasn't enough to go around. If food was scarce, there was little or nothing that could be done about it. As a species, we have gained a lot of knowledge since then about the world that we live in, and we know that if there's not enough grain or vegetables to go around, we're better off to initiate a cooperative effort to grow more and a cooperative effort to find alternative sources of food in the meantime, then to fight over who gets to eat and who gets to starve. Instincts tell us to be selfish, but our ability to learn allows us to rise above that way of thinking and do what's right for the community.

Some people have taken that a step farther and learned to recognize that what's good for humans in the short term but bad for the ecology that humans live in is inevitably bad for humans in the long run. We need to stop thinking as races of a species and start thinking as people in a diverse global community that includes many forms of life. We need to learn to recognize that if pets are brought up in human society, and learn to be functioning members of society, that they should be acknowledged as people too. Beyond that, we need to recognize that there are many ways to contribute as a functioning member of society and that our acceptance of a person's role as functional shouldn't be restricted to only those people who fill traditional roles such as a "9 to 5 job" or what ever the traditions happen to be at any particular time and place. Anyone who makes someone else's life a little more comfortable without hurting others in the process is a functioning member of society. Anyone who does good for the community without hurting the world that community lives in is a functioning member of society. Anyone who contributes to the good of the world to any reasonable extent is a functioning member of society.

Enslaving dogs and forcing them to do things that are against their nature may benefit a few humans in the short run, but does it benefit human society? Aren't those dogs a part of our society too? Aren't they people who should be given reasonable rights and freedoms? Okay, so it may be beneficial to a dog in human society to be trained in a profession so that the dog can act as a functioning member of society, but that dog should be treated with respect and dignity in the process and should be treated afterward in accordance with its accomplishments. Humans would expect no less. Why should any other person in human society. A gerbil or hamster might not be able or willing to learn the skills needed to hold a job, nor are their bodies likely to be physically capable of handling most human jobs, but if they make a small child happy, isn't that contributing to society? Some people would say that a line has to be drawn somewhere, and I would argue that the line has already been drawn and it's time we learn to blur it a little, or perhaps even erase it entirely. Such lines tend to draw themselves rather well. If a dog acts in such a way that it is a threat to other people, it should be treated as a person with a behavioral problem, no spoken language, a dog-shaped body, and its own unique brain. That's not so hard to figure out.

If a plant grabs a fly and eats it, there's no moral problem and we should have no trouble establishing that no laws have been broken by the plant in the process of acquiring its meal. Does the fly being murdered by the plant constitute a broken law? I would say probably not, since the fly was likely not a functioning member of society, and both the plant and the fly were acting on instinct alone since they lack the ability to learn enough to overcome their instincts. If the plant were large enough to have eaten a functioning member of society, and managed to do so strictly by its own instincts and the actions of its potential meal, we should treat it roughly the same as we would any human with the same mental abilities. Confine it to a place it where it can do no further harm and provide for its needs, or perhaps transplant it to a location outside of human society where it can live in peace according to its natural instincts. Punishing the plant for its actions would probably be inappropriate and unnecessary, but should be carefully considered if the circumstances make it appear to be called for.

You might be wondering what a man eating plant is doing in a serious writing about human society, but I used such an outlandish example to illustrate the fact that we don't need to put prejudice into our laws in order for them to work, nor do we need to add a new law every time a new situation comes up. I don't have all of the answers, but I know that truth is still truth no matter what the context. If a change in context makes what you thought to be factual suddenly look false, then the validity of your assumption is in question. Likewise, if you have to check the race or gender of a person to know whether or not they've broken a specific law, there's either something wrong with that law, or something wrong with your understanding of it.

There is for example, no logical reason to have a minimum chronological age requirement for the consumption of certain hazardous or behavior altering substances. Now, before you go getting mad at me for even thinking such a thing, consider what those age restrictions were put in place to accomplish. The idea was to protect people who are too young to know any better, and to protect society from the effects that such substances may have on the reasoning abilities of such individuals. But really, is there a certain age at which all individuals suddenly know better than to get drunk and disorderly? Is there a certain age at which people suddenly know better than to light up a substance that releases a dangerous chemical laden smoke with high levels of known carcinogens, inhale its fumes deeply, and then exhale them into the air that other people have to breathe? Life isn't that simple. There is no such age. Someone had to make one up, because they didn't know any "better way" to deal with the situation. Well, I sure wouldn't recommend removing such age restrictions without putting something better in their place, but I would also go as far as to say that something better should be easy to come up with. How about something akin to the requirements for driving a motorized vehicle? Show that you understand what the risks are and how to minimize those risks for yourself and others, and you can get a license. Show that you are inconsiderate of the safety and wellbeing of others or that you are unwilling or unable to consistently act responsible while or after using such a substance, and you get that license removed.

Do we need a government to enforce such things? Probably so. Does that government need to be separate from the rest of society, above the rest of us, or ruled by an individual? Definitely and decisively not! The founders of the United States had the right idea when they decided that we should have a government composed of the people, and made by the people, that would work for the people. They simply had no model on which to build such a government, and no tools available to make it possible. So, we ended up with a government made from the people, and elected by the people, to rule in the name of the people. Not quite the same thing, but a good start.

In closing, I would like to say that the difference between good and evil is something that has to be decided on a case by case basis, and it's up to each of us to actively make such decisions to the best of our abilities. Whether you get your idea of right and wrong from a religious leader, a legal text-book, street-smarts, common sense, logical deduction, or anyplace else, the guideline to go by should be clear. If it really is good, it will promote peace and prosperity for all, and will help to build a future worth looking forward to, not for one class or one race, but for everyone. If it's good, people from the future or even from another world will be able to recognize it as good, even though their context may be far different than ours. If it's good, it will leave a lasting beauty in its wake, that only evil can mar.

We are all capable of being misinformed, and as such we are all capable of being very sure of what's right and what's wrong, even when we are mistaken. For this reason, we must learn to think beyond what we know and realize what effects our actions have on the larger picture. It is only then that should allow ourselves to feel confident that when we choose to do what we feel is right, our choice is unlikely to result in more harm than good. Everyone makes mistakes, but the important thing is to remember to do the best we can.

For those who are incapable of understanding the idea of unselfish motivation, I submit to you this line of thinking. You are a part of something grand, and without that which you are a part of, you would perish. Anything that you do to help the world you live in, also helps anyone living in that world. Anything you do to help society as a whole also helps its individual parts. Your efforts may do more good for someone else than they do for you, but if those efforts do you no harm then you are still better off because you have a better world to live in. If you find yourself surrounded by grumpy people, try cheering them up so that they don't have to feel so grumpy, but also realize that the joy you spread will linger long after, and in time you will have surrounded yourself will happy people. Or, at lease slightly less grumpy ones. Make the world a better place to live, for all of us. Set the example so that others will do likewise. If you act selfish, you hurt others, and if you hurt others, you make the world that you live in a worse place to be living. If you want to live in a better world, don't complain that it's not good enough, and don't try to make others as miserable as you are. Make it better. For everyone.

Learn to recognize what's right by the effect it has on the world around you. Not just locally or immediately, but the whole picture. Don't leave it up to other people to make the world better. Be a part of it. Regardless of whether that part is to do your job in obscurity and let other people benefit from it, to provide entertainment for others, to clean up someone else's mess, or to simply share a smile with others as you pass them on the street. Regardless of how you choose to do your part, remember that it is up to you to do what's right.

It is up to each of us to protect and nourish the beauty that is goodness, in ourselves, in others, and in the world around us. Not because it's what we were told to do, and not because it's what we are required to do, but because it's the right thing to do.

Donald A. Kronos, PhD.

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