Morality

Morality is a hard term to define and decipher because there are so many things that have to be taken into account. If you line up a group of ten people and bring up a morality issue, you will mostly likely get different answers. People all over the world have many different beliefs and are raised to stand by those beliefs. Abortion is one of the hot topics in our country and a big moral issue. There are people who believe abortion is murder and completely, morally wrong. Then there are other people who believe that it isn’t wrong and it isn’t murder. Which one of these groups of people is right? Neither. The definition of morality is descriptively to refer to a code of conduct put forward by a society, or some other group, such as a religion or accepted by an individual for their own behavior. Neither of the beliefs about abortion are right or wrong because morality is a code of conduct and no one person can be told to believe in that conduct. Religion also plays a big role in morals and by living in the United States; everyone has the right to freedom of religion. But then there are also people who do not believe in religion. We, as citizens of the United States have the right to believe what we want, have our own morals and defend those morals and beliefs.

Abortion, stem cell research and cloning are examples of moral issues that are scientific and human beings control them. Whatever your belief on any of those afore mentioned topics, they could be stopped any day and you could also choose not to participate in or in some cases vote for or against the topic. When looking at Stephen Gould and Charles Darwin’s articles, you cannot compare them as moral issues.

Gould’s article is about the ichneumon wasp and how it gets inside another organism and eats away at the inside until it is able to go out into the world and then it kills the organism. Some might argue that this is a moral issue because it deals with life and death. But in all actualities, the ichneumon wasp and the way it develops are nothing but acts of nature. People cannot control the wasp and what it does, it just does it in order to survive and reproduce. This would be an example of Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection. If the wasp was not supposed to be here and it was not supposed to develop by killing another organism, then it simply would die out and become extinct.