Am I Right?

When was the last time you pondered over this question? Five minutes back, an hour ago or yesterday? We are in ethical and moral quandaries many times through our waking hours.

Is what I am about to do right?

Is what she doing right?

Is the policy that the government just approved right?

Or, even worse, we jump to our own conclusions:

George Bush was wrong in attacking Iraq.

The nuclear deal is good for India.

Sometimes these predicaments are trifling, while at other times they are all consuming.

So, what I am going to try to do here is come up with a couple of premises, exemplify them and then share with you, a few guidelines, I follow when faced with similar situations.

Let us start off with setting a very basic premise. It may seem very obvious but I am still going to put it out here anyway. Whatever I am going to say now pertains to people with sane and criminally disinclined minds. We cannot apply these discussions to murder convicts.

The second premise revolves around the outcome of the thought process in deciding between right and wrong. Whenever a group of people are given a situation and asked to come up with conclusions, we usually have many and, more importantly, conflicting answers.

So what is the relevance of these conflicts as far as the original question is concerned?

Often times, conflicts fool us into believing that at least one of the conflicting viewpoints is RIGTH. Whenever you are in the presence of such discussions, you are inclined to take a stance. “This is right and that is wrong.”

However, conflicts do not, in any way, prevent the conflicting perspectives from all being wrong at the same time. It is pretty intuitive if you give it a thought. I personally believe that this is much more common than the previous case.
But, what is more interesting is that, conflicts do not prevent the perceptions from all being right at the same time. We will come back to this.

So if conflicting points of view can all be right or wrong at the same time, what causes the conflicts? The answer lies in the question itself. Perspectives.

Let us try and understand this with the help of a few examples. For the contradictory and wrong perspectives, all you need to do is spend a few minutes on a busy traffic junction and you will get many examples.

So let us move on to the other case, conflicting perspectives, all right and let us take few factual example this time.

All of us would have had a chapter called Light in our Physics textbook. On one hand, we are told that light is an infinitesimally small particle of energy called photon. On the other hand, we are taught that light is a wave spread across infinite space. Contradictory? Yes. I wonder how many of us raised this question to our teachers. But both these perspectives are right because scientists have been conducting experiments that validate both. How this is possible is the subject of many theses on metaphysics, so let us not delve in it. Let us take another example from current affairs. Global warming. For many coastal regions it is a prophecy of disaster. But for countries like Canada and Russia it opens up so many economic prospects.

So now we have premises and examples. But what is it that I am trying to tell you here. I am not offering you an anodyne. I am going share a few thoughts about how we should approach the questions that pertain to right and wrong.

First and foremost:

“Do onto others as you as you would have them do to you.”

Next time put yourself at the other end and see if you still reach to the same conclusion. However, it is easier said than done. Let me give share the thoughts of a few wise men on the following three points:

We need to learn to-

1. Overcome biases

“The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scale.”

2. Think objectively

“Patriotism is a conviction that your country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.”

3. Accept uncomfortable truths.

“You are not perfect and as prone to making mistakes as anybody else.”

And always remember:

“If you had been born where they were born, if you had been taught what they were taught and if you had been where they were, you would have believed what they believed.”