There are some things that everyone generally agrees are unacceptable _ things that are inherently "wrong."
For example, murder is deemed wrong, as is any public acknowledgement of the fact that Dane Cook IS sometimes funny. Both raising taxes and cutting funding for public programs are universally wrong _ the possible wrongness of hypocrisy is still stuck in Senate sub-committee. It is wrong to have sexual desires featuring relatives, babies, animals, baby animals or any silverware I may use in the future.
What makes these things wrong? In this sense, what is "wrong"? After all, "wrong" originated as an indicator of incorrectness; if one responds to a question with an answer that was not the one desired, one is "wrong."
During elementary school, all of us underwent a kind of operant conditioning in which we were rewarded or punished for adopting various behaviors that were mysteriously classified as "right" or "wrong." If a challenge such as "What is the square root of nine?" was posed to us, "3" was the answer with which we could obtain a gold star and the relief of the teacher calling on someone else to answer the next question. Answers such as "4" and "green" and "Miss Jeffries, Pat can't answer because he climbed out the window and is suffocating a deer with his pencil case" were "wrong," in the sense that wrong things caused us to get lower grades and to be educated at too early an age about how bipolar disorder is just another one of those special quirks that makes all of us unique.
As children, we were introduced to the binary system of morality: every action was either "good" or "bad," every answer "right" or "wrong."
Anything that we did as children was a response to the question of what was acceptable to the towering giants who fed and clothed us; as such, we learned that it was best not to do things like sending our unwashed index fingers on a magical adventure into the deep catacombs of our nasal passages.
To the question of living as a human being, nose picking was incorrect _ "wrong."
We learned that the binary morality system cast almost all behaviors in a Dalmatian-spotted tapestry of black and white. The rules of the society that we would one day pass into were drilled into our malleable little minds, leaving each of us with an understanding of the figurative wall that cleaved down between the chambers of "good" and "bad."
During the Revolutionary War, the Americans were good and the British were bad. Helping an old woman across the street is a correct answer to the question of living as a human being; kicking her and running away is an incorrect answer.
When we entered the world of adulthood, we were introduced to the word "unless" _ and then everything about morality that we'd been taught was punted out of our lives along with our training wheels and our Lunchables.
The black-and-white nature of morality was suddenly bathed in an ashen wash that threatened to swirl "good" and "bad" together into an indistinguishable moral mud. The phrase "mitigating circumstances" rudely imposed itself onto every situation that before would have been dripping black ink from sheer evilness; the muddying generosity of circumstance could transform a loathable murderess into a suffering victim of domestic abuse, an obese man with a lack of self control into a long-term food addict, an alcoholic prostitute into a Catholic. Furthermore, circumstance could be as damning as it could be forgiving; any Good Samaritan of the 21st century has to be well-versed in exactly how he is legally allowed to help someone, lest he be sued for all he's worth by someone who WANTED to lie on the street with a broken leg instead of being pulled off and getting her knee scraped on the pavement.
Once we hit puberty, every possible action became "right" in one circumstance and "wrong" in another.
When committed by an individual with a drug problem and a lack of parental affection as a child, murder is a horrible atrocity.
When committed by a politician sending the order to drop a rain of cleansing napalm onto an Islamic city, murder is liberty and the spread of democracy.
Giving money to charity is right _ unless it's the Charity for the Enlargement of Executive Pay Raises.
Stealing is absolutely wrong _ unless it's stealing from a major corporation such as Wal-Mart, or unless you really, really want to.
This onslaught of moral ambiguity directly contrasts with the black-and-white mentality we learn as children. Fortunately, the human is an adaptive animal, fully capable of accepting contrary ideas as true.
In regard to morality, every adult holds two opposite realities in his or her brain: the binary system of morality he or she learned early on, and the circumstantial system that he or she was later asked to adopt. Society's needs have forced us to be flexible about the "goodness" or "badness" of certain actions _ after all, how are we supposed to have wars if killing people is consistently "wrong"? And yet we still feel a need to establish some "universal truths" in morality, some things that are unabashedly "right" or "wrong."
To keep some semblance of the black-and-white morality system in place, society has agreed to establish absolute moral status for some things that most people would say are good (giving to charity, helping your fellow man, and puppies) or bad (incest, child abuse and Republicans).
It is remarkable that man can hold these two contrary systems of morality in his head and believe them both to be absolutely valid.
I suppose that until one theory of morality is discovered that allows a country to be horrified at a serial killer's rampage while simultaneously training its young men to murder civilians of other countries in the goal of freeing them, man's ability to hold contrary truths will continue to be put to the test _ but whether his answers are "right" or "wrong" will depend on the person writing the questions.
Jessie Matus is a senior at Oneonta High School.
