Moral Codes: Good or Bad?

Clashes of cultures happen all around the world, at nearly any given time in history. Moral codes have violated each other since the crusades and earlier, and over recent events like the verdict in Ferguson. People will always have differing opinions. Sometimes these opinions can be right or wrong, but are often very subjective still. Subjective clashes of cultures were very apparent in Things Fall Apart. One example of these was Okonkwo's hanging at the end. The foreign soldiers didn't understand why they had to be the ones to take down the body; to them, it didn't matter who did it. They didn't understand the tribe's different moral code. To the tribe, it would violate their moral code for anyone in the town to touch the body. Would it actually matter who took it down in the end? As an outsider, its easy to say no, but we have no proof of this. Cultural Relativism is a theory that says since the tribe believes it does matter and outsides believe it doesn't, we can conclude that neither group is 'right'; it is simply a subjective matter and there are multiple answers.

In one chapter of our U.S. history textbook, The Pageant, the possibility that slavery was good for the slaves and was not a bad practice was mentioned in an excerpt. Many cultures' moral codes conflicted over the topic of slavery. Even within the United States, the North mostly believed slavery was bad, and the South mostly believed it was good. Who are we to say which one was right? This is a case where Cultural Relativism seems to fall apart. Cultural Relativism would suggest that both opinions must be considered, and therefore that neither are right, slavery is neither good nor bad. However, two groups thinking differently about it does not mean there is no true answer. Logically, since slavery violates basic human rights, it can be considered bad.

This means we can say that the South's moral code was not perfect. However, this was one flaw in it; every moral code that exists today will have flaws throughout it. This does not mean that moral codes in general are bad though. They are a collection of opinions, so they can have parts that are right or wrong. I think that if someone went through every part of every cultures moral code, they could combine the good parts to form a correct moral code. But I don't think that the other flawed moral codes are bad, since they do still contain many valuable correct parts most of the time.

The theory of Cultural Relativism does focus on this open-mindedness, which is beneficial to any culture. Rigidly staying with one moral code is bad; it will have flaws, and none of them will be fixed. By opening the moral code to suggestions from other cultures, a society allows these flaws to be fixed as times goes on. I think this is the most important thing to keep in mind when following a moral code. You may strongly believe one moral code over others, but you must also concede that it is not flawless, and therefore that it must be changed if some aspects of other moral codes are more accurate.

Guiding hand or choices... or fate?

When we talk about fate, our first thought is of some type of God or other superior power. The opposite of this is then to not have someone controlling it, to be able to make your own decisions and affect the outcome of things. I don't think these are the only two choices though. When I think of fate, I think it just means that everything will happen a certain way because of the way each molecule is positioned. I believe in this type of fate, not the type where someone else is controlling my actions. After all, who would control their actions then? Do they have a fate too? If not, why them? I think the scientific explanations with evidence make much more sense.

The French mathematician who publicized this idea, Laplace, used an hypothetical situation known as Laplace's demon, where a demon can process every atom in the universe and predict the future. An interesting twist on this that I thought about is if he can read every atom, and understand what all of his movements would cause, could he change the outcome of the future? If someone really could affect their destiny, it seems like this demon would be the one to do it. Yet even if he does seem to have the ability to affect the future and maybe decides to make himself rich, his decision to make himself rich was preset by all of the atoms in him. If we could go back to the big bang, and turn everything back into a few original atoms, and then run simulations from these, we would see a long string of events that leads exactly to where we are; no individual choices were made.

This is the opposite of the ideas seen in Oedipus. In Oedipus, the gods are able to control Oedipus's fate. No matter what he does to try to escape it, the gods can still ensure his fate happens how they want. Theoretically, if the gods knew ahead of time (through something like Laplace's demon) that Oedipus was going to kill his dad and sleep with his mom, it could be possible. Their telling Oedipus (through prophets) that it was his destiny to do so could have been part of what the Laplace's demon predicted and accounted for, so he would have known Oedipus would return to his birthplace. Although this is a viable possibility, the poem acts like the gods actually controlled the outcome instead of predicting it, so I still don't think the plot is completely viable.

These topics remind of three movies I've seen before: Final Destination, Run Lola Run, and The Butterfly Effect. Final Destination takes the stance of an invisible guiding hand. In it, fate is something that ensures everyone who is supposed to die does die, in the order they should. In Run Lola Run, the main character is able to control her own fate, by going through every possibility and changing her decisions to affect her fate until she reaches an ideal state. The Butterfly Effect has a similar idea where the main character can control his life by going back in time, but he has much less control. The time travel is simply used as a device to show how little he really can control. No matter how many times he goes back, he just continues to mess things up even more. He does not end up in an ideal state, but does settle on one where everyone is okay at least (sad ending still though). The Butterfly Effect and Run Lola Run mirrors my beliefs best because it shows how everything is just a long chain of events that cause each other.

Brutality in United States Prisons

Roman poet Juvenal once asked, "Who will guard the guards themselves?" A variation on this might ask "Who will enforce the enforcers themselves?" In a prison, the inmates cannot be trusted since they are in the prison for committing a crime. The prison guards give the only trusted testimonies regarding what happens there. So what if they decide to break the law and lie about it? Well that is exactly what many prisoners claim is happening.

Jelpi Picou, an Orleans Parish Prisoner, said that there was a drug circle in the prison he served at. He claimed the guards sold drugs to the inmates. The problem with this is that nobody can report it; the people who are supposed to report it are the ones who are breaking the law. Another way the guards supposedly break the law is by beating the inmates. Estimates are that 85% of prison action is unsupervised. To me, this is insane because the prison is filled with people who need 24/7 supervision.

A very similar scenario unfolded in Bryce Courtenay's The Power Of One. Klipkop brutally beats up one of the black servants in the prison for a theft that he did not commit. You also see that Lieutenant Borman feels the same hatred towards prisoners, like when he boxes with Geel Piet, and kills him. As seen in real-life situations like this, you have to wonder whose job it is to report things like this. You would hope other guards would, but the corrupt ones typically seem to hold a lot of power, and can blackmail the innocent ones into keeping quiet. Prison guards obviously develop a lot of stress due to the nature of their job, but they're currently venting this stress by abusing their inmates. This is horrible because they might feel better after beating the inmate, but the stress will build back up shortly after, and they'll want to beat up another prisoner.

This is analogous to what happened in Ferguson recently. A criminal was shot and killed by a police officer, so the initial assumption is that the respected officer had a good reason to shoot. However, witnesses disagree about what actually happened. This is a tough situation because people expect that the officer is a good man, which, although true most of the time, can never be known for sure. Often it is the officer's word against that of either a criminal or a dead man. This current setup is not fair to the public citizens.

I think that these issues need to be resolved soon or riots like those seen in Ferguson will become more prevalent. The installment of cameras on police officers' bodies and cars could solve that issue, but the prison is a much larger area. They already have cameras, but the guards know how to not be seen on them. A possible solution to this could be having cameras directly on the guards. This way, whatever they looked at or heard, a judge can also look at or hear. I really feel like this would be the least possible necessary change to be made to the prison system.