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    The Illusion Of Right And Wrong: The Truth About Morality
    The Illusion Of Right And Wrong: The Truth About Morality
    The Illusion Of Right And Wrong: The Truth About Morality
    Ebook82 pages55 minutes

    The Illusion Of Right And Wrong: The Truth About Morality

    By Alaric Moses Ong

    ()

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    About this ebook

    “Are right and wrong convertible items, dependent upon popular opinion?”
    -William Lloyd Garrison

    If everyone agreed that killing each other was right, would that make it right? Or is there inherent morality that would make killing wrong even if everyone thinks it was right?

    Can it be argued that Hitler did the right thing during the holocaust?

    What makes necrophilia wrong?

    Imagine a scenario where your beloved wife was diagnosed with an illness and there was a prescription that would completely cure her of any lingering discomfort and pain. However, the current state of poverty the both of you were living in impeded its purchase. The only method to obtain that medicine would be theft. Would you steal the medicine to save your wife?

    Imagine another scenario, for example in World War II. You were hiding Jews in your home to prevent their capture from the Nazis. Then, a knock was heard. A soldier interrogated you, demanding to know if there were any Jews inside. Would you tell the truth and consign those innocent people to death or would you lie to protect them?

    In the second situation, lying might be the better choice since it protects the Jews from being killed innocently. However, aren’t we told that lying is bad and we shouldn’t do it? So, why is there a contradiction? Could it be that lying is actually good? Then that would contradict logic, that something cannot be both opposites. Lying cannot be good and bad concurrently.

    This book delves into the concepts of how our right and wrong is defined and the author's understanding about right and wrong. It pieces the puzzle together as to what right and wrong actually is, thereby answering these age old questions.

    I hope you enjoy reading it
    -Alaric Ong

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAlaric Moses Ong
    Release dateAug 29, 2015
    ISBN9781311886941
    The Illusion Of Right And Wrong: The Truth About Morality
    Author

    Alaric Moses Ong

    Alaric Moses Ong is an entrepreneur, speaker and lifelong learner. He wrote his first book when he was 18 titled, "The Illusion of Right and Wrong". He is interested in philosophy, business and personal development.First business: Healthy food delivery business called BulletXpress. Sealed a deal with DBS bank where they sent emails to 10,300 of their staff to advertise for us.Second business: Entrepreneurship platform, built a team of 140 people in 10 months. Sold everything from tailor-made shirts, to cordyceps, personal development courses, health products, maids, and even electricity.Third business: Sales and marketing agency. Helping businesses to find ways to increase their sales. Clients are from a range of industries: Hotels, Wellness, Beauty, Financial products, Network marketing and othersSide hustle: [www.blushboss.com] A 6-figure e-commerce business selling cosmetics.

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      Book preview

      The Illusion Of Right And Wrong - Alaric Moses Ong

      There Is No Right Or Wrong

      The Truth About Morality

      By Alaric Ong

      Copyright 2015 Alaric Ong

      Smashwords Edition

      With deepest gratitude

      to my sister, father, friends and Hui Sze, whom I have gotten insights from conversing with. And to the universe, for the absolute truth always comes from the universe itself.

      ~~~~~~~~~~

      Table of contents

      Foreword

      Left and Right

      The Dog and Pen

      Religions/Philosophies

      Conscience

      Law

      Society

      The current state of humanity

      A society of repression

      Judgmentalism

      Getting out of that little box

      The solution

      A new way of decision making

      Seeing things from a macro perspective

      Fun thought experiments

      About the author

      References

      Foreword

      Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

      ― Henry Ford

      Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.

      ― Friedrich Nietzsche

      This book was written to describe my understanding of right and wrong. When someone first told me that There is no right or wrong, I was taken aback and I think you probably would be too. Surely, killing someone is wrong, isn’t it? There is no way for us to justify killing another human being, taking another human life! However, I’ve always kept an open mind and through constant questioning, I now have a slightly better understanding of the subject.

      Being receptive does not indicate believing everything that I hear. Similarly, I do not expect you to believe everything that is written in this book either. However, keeping an open mind implied that I constantly asked questions and was never 100% sure that the beliefs I had before were correct. For example, I believe in gravity and I am very confident in saying that when I drop something, it would fall to the ground because of gravity. However, should scientists discover that there is more to gravity or develop a new theory/hypothesis as to why things fall to the ground, would I be open to believing that there is no such thing as gravity? Absolutely. However, does it mean that I would believe it right after all the scientists in the world declare it to be a fact? No. I would still question all the findings before deciding to actually believe in it. Just because an authority figure (e.g. a scientist) discloses a fact does not suggest that we have to believe it instantly. True understanding is built on doubts and retrieving the answers from the doubts. My journey to understanding this concept of right and wrong was thus built based on constant probing and clarification.

      I highly discourage blind faith where an individual simply believes in something without evidence or questioning. I believe that blind faith actually brings us further away from the truth.

      There are people out there who are unwilling to change their belief systems even if it is obvious that they are wrong, simply because they want to continue believing in what they believe in. I would suggest that the reason we tend to fear changing our beliefs is because of cognitive dissonance. It’s the term coined by psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954 to describe the feeling of psychological discomfort produced by the combined presence of two thoughts that do not follow from one another. Festinger proposed that the greater the discomfort, the greater the desire to reduce the dissonance of the two cognitive elements (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 1999)

      An important factor here is the principle of cognitive consistency, the focus of Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory originated from the idea that we seek consistency in our beliefs and attitudes in any situation where two cognitions are inconsistent. Whenever a new idea is introduced that is inconsistent with our current thoughts and beliefs, we feel a huge sense of discomfort. As the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, and achieve consonance (i.e. agreement). When we experience cognitive dissonance, we can minimise it in five ways namely, minimisation or avoidance, rationalisation, acceptance, changing our beliefs or attitudes and finally, integration. (Will Meek PhD, 2015)

      The first three strategies are ways we operate that keep the inconsistencies in place.

      Minimisation or avoidance - The first and most primitive strategy that people often use is to either minimise the new cognition by making it seem less important or by avoiding the cognition completely. So if an external source i.e. a person or book wants to present new information to them, they would minimise their contact with this source so as to reduce the intake of new information. By avoiding and diverting their attention to something else, the cognitive dissonance is reduced.

      Rationalisation - The second strategy is to make excuses or justifications for the inconsistency. For example, most smokers know about the harmful effects about smoking. If so, why do they continue smoking? Therefore, they would have to come up with an explanation as to why they still carry on smoking because there is a dissonance in the two ideas as mentioned above. They could say things like oh, one stick won’t hurt or Only a certain percentage of smokers would get cancer, I would not be so unlucky as to be part of that percentage.

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