There is a difference in our decision-making process between simple rule-following and the ongoing process of morality.
Morals and morality are words often thrown around by those who take their meaning to be related to a code of sexual conduct. But morals and morality are actually far more than that. They are our entire basis for decision-making.
Our daily activity requires us to make choices. We choose things all day long. Some choices are simple; others are complex. When we make our decisions, we base them upon two things: our experience (knowledge) and our feelings (emotions.) People sometimes say that when we make a decision based on our knowledge, we are making the decision “with our heads,” and when we make the decision based on our feelings, we are making the decision “with our hearts.” In the decision making process, we balance these two influences. We pull some quick data from both areas, compare it to our situation at hand, and then make a conscious decision to take a particular action. To the extent we are able to appropriately balance the “head data” with the “heart data” such that we make a choice most likely to produce our desired result, we can call the balance “wisdom”, and describe our decision making process as “wise”.
The library that exists in our heads contains our knowledge. It contains the history of our experiences, and how we filed those experiences. When we “use our heads” to make a decision, we do not actually examine every little bit of filed information. We quickly analyze the summaries or labels we used to store the information, and we only “go deep” if we have the time and desire to dig deeper. Much the same sort of library exists in our hearts, where our emotional experiences are filed. There also we find labels that summarize certain things. These labels and summaries are very important, because we rely upon them all day long. We constantly consult them as we go about our decision-making day.
Along with all the other data about the world that we have collected over our lives, we have filed within our minds and hearts certain facts about what behaviors we think are right and wrong. We sometimes change these labels when we receive new information, but the basic assignment of labels to certain behaviors was established inside us when we were children. We based much of what we decided to label as “right” on whether or not it caused pleasure to ourselves or to others. We labeled “wrong” those things that seemed to cause pain.
This is a highly simplistic representation of how most of us constructed our moral beliefs, but it is representative of most people. It’s very likely that certain things which we have filed as “right” and “wrong” are there because other people (parents, teachers, religious leaders) told us how to file them. However, a majority of what is there, we learned to file for ourselves. Their influence really helped set up the filing system, and helped us file the first few items; we took over the filing as we became older.
Using this library as a backdrop against which we compare the options of a situation at hand is a process that we had to master in order to mature and gain our independence – to “become our own person.” As long as our parents were there to make our decisions for us, we may have been storing information, but we weren’t called upon to perform the process of morality, i.e., making decisions based on the data in our libraries.
Now that we have “become our own person”, we do this all the time. We make a multitude of decisions every day. People who are very good at this process appear to excel in the world; those who seem to struggle with it don’t do as well. But regardless if we make a thousand choices a day or just one, the important thing is: did we make choices that were in harmony with what we have labeled “good” behavior? It’s a matter of quality, not quantity.
If we are acting in harmony with our moral construct, then we can say that we are being true to ourselves, that we are behaving with integrity insofar as our personal morals are concerned. If we are making decisions that go against our moral construct, then we are not behaving with integrity, and we are behaving immorally.
Whether we behave morally or not, our actions will always result in some type of consequence. These results may be positive or negative. We may have foreseen them, or we may have had no idea they would materialize. We may have intended to create them, or we may have not intended to create them. The results will be there, regardless. When we say, “we believe in living accountable lives”, we mean that we believe in accepting responsibility for the consequences of our actions, whatever they may be. Accepting responsibility means that we are willing to acknowledge our role in the actions and results, and our willingness to take corrective action if necessary.
As we gain further knowledge, we may alter some of the labels in our filing systems – we might learn that behaviors that we thought were OK have aspects that are not, and we may wish to divide them up. As we experience wisdom, we may find that certain combinations of “head” and “heart” data go together well, and we might repackage them in such a way that they form a new label, and therefore an expansion of our moral construct. This re-filing and re-labeling is a natural process that we will do our entire lives. Our hope is that, as we practice, we will become better at it.
The acquisition of knowledge also helps us make more harmonious decisions. We might learn that certain situations require a different balance between head and heart data than we thought in the past, or that the results of certain decisions are not predictable enough that their choice is wise. This knowledge about the decision-making process is also filed for future use; the extent to which we can file it correctly (analyze and understand it), and then apply it (make a better decision the next time as a result of having learned from the past), is influenced by how aware we are of this process and how skillful we have become at improving it.
This decision-making process is what morality is about. Decisions about sexual behavior are merely elements of the construct, only a few of the thousands of files and labels that make up our backdrop for decision making. All of our decisions have their basis in morals and ethics. They are all made against our personal moral construct or backdrop. Our integrity and morality rests upon how effectively we can make decisions based upon that backdrop.