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natsu's picture

How are our sense of Morality formed?

It was interesting to see just how much the concept of morality seemed to have relevance to some of our previous conversations.  I wish I could respond in some way to Ian's question about whether discussing and directly addressing the concept of morality has influenced my thinking about any of these topics, but to be honest, I am not sure at all.  Something about morality that is so strange, at least for me, is that no matter how much I learn about different moral perspectives (from reading, discussing traveling etc.) my sense of morality does not seem to change very much. 

As I mentioned briefly in one of my comments during class, I used to work at a Japanese elementary school.  About twice every week, the children had "moral class" and since the children I was responsible for (the children with "special needs") were not expected to do much during this time, I was often able to observe the classroom and listen to the teacher talk as if I were one of the students.  Since I had spent most of my elementary school years in Holland, I had never had the chance to be a student in a Japanese "moral class" as a real elementary school student, and I was surprised at how interesting the class actually was.  The students had a "moral text book" but instead of just lecturing from the book, the teacher often came to class with interesting stories to read or activates that made students think about moral issues and learn what was morally correct.  Or at least, what I thought of as moral.  That was what surprised me so much - I almost felt as if the teacher was teaching the students my sense of moral to the students!  It is true that I was raised by parents who are completely Japanese, so it is not entirely surprising that my sense of my morality is quite Japanese. However, for half of my life I lived outside of Japan, and I studied at an international school during most of elementary school.  Thus, I was surprised that what the students were learning in their "moral class" seemed to talk so strongly to my sense of morality.  I was also so intrigued by these classes, because while the students were learning about moral from the stories and activities, I felt as if I was learning something about myself from them.  It also made me wonder if the children in the class would really end up with a different sense of morality if they did not receive these moral classes at all. 

 In class we exchanged some ideas about genetic and social contributions to our sense of morality.  As mentioned already, morality is often considered to be a mainly influenced by the society, but I think there must be some genetic contribution too, which is why people feel the most comfortable in their own culture and feel drawn to their origins.  I also think that difference in moral perspectives is what makes it sometimes so hard to live in a foreign country, or for people to live in a multicultural country.  Differences in culture like food, music and fashion is fairly easy to embrace, but it is a lot harder to accept different perspectives on moral issues.  I would imagine that it would be really difficult, perhaps impossible, to hold "moral classes" in public American schools.  People would never be able to decide on the contents of the "moral text book".

 

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