The Beatles Believed. Do You?

 A friend wrote to ask me, “What is the origin of ethical conduct? Is it (a) cultural, and therefore malleable as culture changes, or (b) natural, and therefore genetically hardwired into our being? If (b), does it evolve as we evolve?”There several fields of study we must consider to answer the above questions.  The first is cultural anthropology.  What people consider to be right and wrong has changed and almost certainly will continue to change.  Slavery is the classic example of a practice that was once not merely accepted but considered by many to be acceptable.  Even today, there are defenders of slavery's close cousin, indentured servitude.  In Raymond De Felitta's must-see documentary, Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story, my jaw dropped when the owner of a sharecropping business talked about how "happy" folks are to work for him.  The film's protagonist reveals just the opposite and pays for that confession with his life.The second discipline the above questions touch upon is biology, and Laurence Tancredi’s recent book, Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality, speaks to the biological foundations of what we do and why we do it.But my friend’s query also has philosophical or theological implications that have nothing to do with how people actually behave.  Even though slavery was widely viewed as an acceptable practice in America, it was still wrong.  It just took the law, public policy, and a lot of folks who otherwise considered themselves men and women of conscience to see why slavery was evil.  And even if biological research reveals that some of us have a proclivity to harm others, do we really want “the devil made me do it?" to constitute ethical justification?  (Yes, that’s right: I’m quoting the late, great Flip Wilson in a blog about ethics.)It makes sense to speak of moral progress, which presumes that at least some moral values are objectively right and transcend culture, biology, and time itself.Consider an ethical dilemma you’re facing now that involves someone close to you.  You’re not sure of what to do, and given what’s at stake in the problem, it’s hard to get the critical distance you need to make the right decision.  But the difficulty you face is not merely a function of being emotionally caught up in the matter.  At the root of the problem is the sense that there is a right way to rise to the challenge, or at least that some ways are better than others.  The solution lies in ethical principles that have stood the test of time and that are the bedrock of just about every spiritual tradition in the world, as Jeffrey Moses illustrates in Oneness: Great Principles Shared by All Religions. Moral progress?  Aren't there plenty of injustices we still need to work on?  Of course there are.  But there is also plenty of evidence to believe that, as the Beatles claimed, it’s getting better all the time.