morality – It's Dai Time

It was bound to happen. Today, I didn’t get to a computer before midnight. I thought about turning back the clock on my blog post, pretending that it had been posted before the clock struck 12, but that’d be deceptive and unnecessary. After all, this experiment, this writing project is really about writing one short entry each day. And a day starts when I get out of bed and ends when I get back into it.

Midnight is just a scientific construct to demarcate what society considers a day. So, it’s no big deal that I missed the midnight “deadline,” right? Besides, setting the clock to a time other than the actual time I wrote the post would be cheating. No one might ever know about it or find out, but it would reside in my heart as a shameful mark in this yearlong write-a-thon.

I don’t remember ever having cheated in school, although I don’t know if this is actually something extraordinary or not. I always thought that there must be schoolmates of mine that did cheat (in ways both large and small), but I would be hard-pressed to come up with any actual percentage.

And what constitutes cheating? Besides the obvious infractions of secretly getting test answers early or copying off of another student, where is the line drawn?

When I was younger, it wasn’t always be clear when working with other students was mere collaboration, and when it had turned into something more sinister. Likewise with that naughty p-word: plagiarism.

Sure, copying direct passages from a library book into your paper was obviously wrong. But what about rephrasing an idea that wasn’t originally yours? What about letting a book do the critical thinking on a situation for you?

Of course, you don’t really think about this when you’re a kid. Not that much, anyway. As an adult, you realize that cheating surrounds you. It’s not just restricted to those classroom questions of morality. It’s about whether or not you eat that extra donut, whether or not you go to sleep when you told yourself you would, what you write in your self evaluation.

So, I’m not perfect. I don’t always turn off my console after just one more level. I don’t always wake up in time to do the chores I said I’d do the night before. But you have to draw the line somewhere. And forging blog post times to make it look like you wrote something before midnight? That’s just fucked up.

Video games make morality so simple sometimes.

Choose to do one thing and your character becomes better. Choose another and your character becomes worse.

Life is full of these choices, of course. The simple fact of the matter is that most of us automatically choose one path or the other every time, without really thinking about it. Most small choices have an obviously morally correct choice, which is something we chose instinctively.

The big questions don’t really come up. Should I save the life of my enemy? Should I lie to someone rich for my slight monetary gain? These questions are certainly a bit more probing, but they’re not situations we often run into in real life.

Because most of us in the slightly positive area, there are few moral choices that actually come up in our lives that truly test our resolve and determine the life path we take. And, more often than not, those choices have no real effect on our lives past the event.

You get the bill at a restaurant and the waiter’s forgotten to put on a drink. It’s a tiny charge ($2, say), but the simple fact is that the bill is wrong and in your favor. Do you bring it up? Do you pretend to not notice? The morally correct thing to do is to bring the error to the attention of the restaurant, but in all practical terms, your choice won’t really matter.

Someone you’d rather not hang out with asks if you have plans. You’re fairly certain they’ll invite themselves along if you mention that you’re doing a group activity and you’d rather they didn’t. Do you lie? Is the better social choice different from the correct moral choice?

And in the end, does it matter? Of course it does. Society has laws and standards that punish those that make the wrong choices. But it also matters most of all to ourselves. We, more than any other person or establishment, face the consequences for any active choice we make. We’re forced to live with it the rest of our lives.

Like a simple video game system, our subconscious is keeping track, making marks every time we make a decision. None of us are perfect moral beings and none of us are totally corrupt moral demons, but we all have a pretty solid idea of where we think we stand on the spectrum.

Tag: morality

Day 243: cheating

Day 204: morality system

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