Ethics?

“Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.” 

― Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

Ethics: 

"the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles" 

"moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity"

(Oxford Dictionary of English)

"The basic concepts and fundamental principles of decent human conduct." (BusinessDictionary.com)

"a social, religious, or civil code of behaviour considered correct" (Collins English Dictionary)

These are some definitions of ethics, but I think they can be summarized as the study of what is right and what is wrong. Sometimes I wonder how can this be possibly studied, everyone thinks in a different way, we all have different cultural contexts, we all have been brought up differently and so, it would be natural to think we all have different ideas of right and wrong. I understand there are things that are definitely wrong as murdering a child for no reason. There are exceptions, there are people whose minds work in a radically different, even twisted, way and have no objection in killing a child. But is there really something that is definitely right, something that is always right no matter what? I guess what ethics studies are patterns in this right and wrong 'conflict', I guess it is the same with most areas of study as science and history, where there are many perspectives, but it still strikes me as strange to try to study such a subjective and unstable subject. 

We could talk about eating meat. Is it ethically correct to it meat? Is it correct to rise animals, feed them and take care of them only to kill them later and eat them? There are people who argue it is not wrong, they say we need to eat and that being superior in intelligence to them, we have the right to feed our selves. But then there is the fact that as superior in intelligence to them we have the capacity to survive by feeding on other things. In T.O.K. class, we watched a documentary in which people with different positions towards the idea of eating meat went to a place where cows are 'processed' to be transformed in edible meat. This group of people included vegans, vegetarians, obsessive meat lovers and people who eat meat. In the documentary we saw two cows being slaughtered. I was really shocked, because I do not like eating meat very much, I try not to think too much when I eat meat, because then I remember I am eating a corpse and I feel awful. The only reason I am not a vegetarian is, basically, because I would starve. My parents eat meat and they insist I need it too. What really shocked me after finishing the documentary, was that no one felt bad of eating meat after seeing it, the people I talked to insisted that there is nothing wrong in eating it. In my case, the documentary did shock me and I stopped eating meat for four days, it was not longer because of the reason I gave previously. After this experience I kept wondering if it is ethically correct to kill animals in order to eat them and I wondered about the diverse perspectives people have on the topic. It is really hard to talk about ethics, who are you to decide what is right and what is wrong?

And if you think with more detail, it is even harder t give an answer to this, as before deciding which actions are right or wrong you need to define what does 'right' mean and what does 'wrong' mean. Then there is the fact that ethics and moral ideas tend to contradict their selves. Talking again about the conflict between eating meat or not there is a quote by  Isaac Bashevis Singer that says: “People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.” The more you think about it the more complex and subjective you find it. 

History

"It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain"

-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

History has been defined as "the study of past events, particularly in human affairs" or "a continuous, typically chronological, record of important or public events or of a particular trend or institution" (Oxford Dictionary of English).

I believe history is really important, as it helps us learn about both mistakes and successes in our past and it helps us understand why we are now as we are. However, there is one really interesting and frustrating thing about history and it is that we can never really know the truth about what happened. In some cases we can hear or read testimonies of people who were present when the event we are studying happened, this makes it possible to reconstruct the events. The thing is we do not always have testimonies and so we have to speculate about what really happened. Also it would be absurd to think people would recall or remember things as they happened: humans are always biased. Our emotions and beliefs tend to get in the way even when we try to put them away; it is impossible for a human being to put their emotions and cultural context apart entirely.  Testimonies are never exact, in fact they can be completely different from the actual events.

What I am trying to say with this, it is that we cannot just believe everything written in a history book, because it could all be wrong or it could be telling the story only from only side. I am not saying there is absolutely no truth in what we know about our history, but we have to remember all of it has gone through a political and cultural filter, and not everything gets past it without being modified. Take this for example: When I was younger, I used to believe everything our teachers told us in school were absolute truths, that teachers really knew what they were talking about and were always right. But a couple of years ago, I had a history teacher who taught us about the Spanish Inquisition and told us how horrible and unfair it was. She talked to us about the massacres, about how people were judged just because they thought differently, how emotion and political affairs got in the way. She was an atheist. That same year, we learned about the same topic from our religion teacher, who was extremely Catholic, and his view of this historic event was completely different. He justified the Inquisition, minimized the amount of deaths it caused and never considered it was unfair to judge people in that way. 

Another example, can be seen in the Palestine-Israel conflict. I watched a documentary in which kids from various parts of the Israel territory and the Palestine one had had the opportunity of spending a day together. All these kids were interviewed about what they thought of the conflict. They had grown in such different environments, some of them having lost their fathers in hands of Israelites, some others extremely religious, that they had completely different perspectives of the conflict. The idea of putting them all together for a day, was to see if they kept their views after spending a day together. The funny thing was that those who met  each other began to understand better the other side of the story and understood there was a lot behind their 'enemies' actions, that maybe both parts were right in a way. They had never seen the other side of the story and their society and the things they had experienced had made them shape the truth of the war in different ways. However, the same children who had reached those conclusions were interviewed again some years later and their mind had changed completely. These children had gone back to their lives and societies, which, once again had influenced their views. The most understanding kids, claimed they had to protect their country, and all the progress made during the filming of the documentary was lost.

These examples show how information never gets to us without having been biased by the cultural contexts, beliefs, etc. of the person who is recounting the facts. We cannot possibly know the truth of what happened, there are so many perspectives and so much subjectivity. That is the reason we have to listen or read from different sources and perspectives in order to make our own judgements  and create our own theories of what really occurred.