Insecurity => creativity LO10970

Julie Beedon (julie@vistabee.win-uk.net)
Tue, 12 Nov 1996 16:30:41

Replying to LO10900 --

The messages about morals have interested me coming at a time when in the
UK there has been a recent public/media outburst about morality...

Ben asks..
>This and other messages have caused me to stop and ask some important
>questions. What are morals? What is moral? How do we decide? What is evil?
>Is evil the opposite of that which is moral? Or is it something more? Why
>are some things malum per se (an evil in itself) and others are malum
>prohibitium (wrong because prohibited by law)?

I looked moral up in the wonderful Bloomsbury Dictionary of word
origins... Latin mos 'custom' is the starting point of the English family
of 'morality' words. Its derived adjective moralis was coined, according
to some by Cicero, as a direct translation of Greek ethikos 'ethical' to
denote 'typical or proper behaviour of human beings in society' and was
borrowed directly into English in the 14th Century. Morale was borrowed
from French, where it is the feminine form of the adjective moral. At
first ot was used in English for 'morality, moral principles'; its modern
sense 'condition with regard to optimism, cheerfulness, etc. is not
recorded until the early 19th century..

The oxford dictionary goes further in saying it is ' concerned with
character or disposition, or with the distinction between right and wrong;
morally good, virtuous, righteous

So typical or custom becomes good??? - very interesting how this seems to
take us back to a discussion we had earlier in the year on SETs (self
evident truths...)

It seems to me that the notion of morals or morality relies on a construct
like SETs to be able to be used... one of the theories which I have seen
linked to the whole morality debate in the UK is the decline in religious
education??

>Which brings me back to me original question: What is moral? How do we
>know what is moral? These are important questions to answer before we say
>that we've experienced "moral decay."

Perhaps this is part of the design work we need to do in organisations -
define an organisational morality?? I recently read an article by Stephen
Carter on integrity - his theory was that integrity require first that we
have beliefs and secondly that we live by them ... both of which are
difficult but we cannot do the second until we have done the first...
likewise we cannot talk about moral decline in a society which has no
stated morals... can we??

Julie Beedon
VISTA Consulting - for a better future
julie@vistabee.win-uk.net

-- 

Julie Beedon <julie@vistabee.win-uk.net>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>