Thanks A Lot, Brain

Many, many, many years ago I was told that I had “too many morals.” This was during a period just after high school when some of my closest friend began taking advantage of as many girls as they could because… well… we were all young guys thinking about sex all of the time. At the time I was one of only two people in my group who wasn’t trying to sweet-talk girls into bed. And on one evening my friend, JW hit me with the “You know what your problem is,” line to bash me for my morality.

This code I dated by was much more complicated than JW gave me credit for, I thought. It wasn’t that I that sex was wrong to me by any stretch of the imagination. I still look back on some opportunities that I passed on and wish that I had enjoyed myself more, as long as I didn’t lead anyone on. The problem was that several of the girls my friends fooled around with thought that the guys had more than just one night in mind. Unfortunately when the them would pour on the sweetness, they had no intention of more than that moment. I knew some of these girls and many of them expected that they were getting boyfriends out of the deal. In Central Pennsylvania in the late 80’s and early 90’s, almost every girl out of high school thought they had to be married before they reached twenty-one. I felt bad for them.

I was never personally faced with the really big moral issues, so in these simple conflicts I thought my morality was based on the fact that I didn’t want to be a liar, but I also didn’t realize that some girls were interested in just fooling around as well. Or maybe it was from a Catholic upbringing which made me feel like God has His hidden cameras focused on me. One way or another, apparently I had “too many morals,” and not much fun.

A few years later I got involved in an argument over the basis of morality with some person I worked with at a summer job. This guy was pretty religious, didn’t drink, and was engaged to be married even though he was not yet out of college. By this time I was becoming agnostic, but I straddled the line between atheism and some unnamed spiritual feelings. Despite a belief that there might be some kind of place for the soul, I started questioning everything I was every taught. The coworker was certain that the only reason for morality was because of God. I thought that this was such a simplification, but I had a hard time arguing with him because I could only talk about how laws, punishment and empathy enforced morality, but nothing I said really explained my own morality remaining as it had been for so long when everything that I based it on was changing so drastically.

My favorite movie lines at the time were from Woody Allen’s Love & Death in a scene with banter between Woody & Diane Keaton -

-Morality is Subjective…
-Subjectivity is Objective…
-Morality implies immanence…
-Judgment of any system, or a priori relationship or phenomenon exists in an irrational, or metaphysical, or at least epistemological contradiction to an abstract empirical concept such as being, or to be, or to occur in the thing itself, or of the thing itself.
-Yes, I've said that many times.

Now there’s new research that there is a section of the brain which acts as our moral compass:

Scientists and philosophers long have debated how people make judgments relating to morality. Are these decisions governed strictly by a calculus of cold, hard facts and logic? Do emotions carry the day?
"This shows a much more subtle, a much more nuanced view, which of course makes the whole problem -- the science of morality -- infinitely more interesting," said Harvard University's Marc Hauser, one of the study's authors.

Of course what all of this means is that I can no longer blame my parents or my Catholic education for my annoying morality. It’s my own brain that stopped me from having all of that fun. Stupid brain!