Are you a good person?

We as a species struggle with morality. We often reach strong moral conclusions that we cannot logically defend. Ironically, our morality is driven primarily by an instinctive emotional response rather than an expansive logical investigation. Our choices are usually influenced by internal biases or outside pressures, such as the self-serving bias or the desire to conform. So, while we likely believe we approach ethical dilemmas logically and rationally, the truth is our moral reasoning is usually influenced by intuitive, emotional reactions.

Given today’s climate of cultural diversity, however, we should be working very actively to tame this emotional process into a rational format so as to avoid any unnecessary grievances and misgivings. Morality is not just something that people learn; we are born with it. However, as interact more and more with the world we need to imbibe processes to structure our instinct.

We spend a lot of our lives grappling with our inherent goodness. It gets expressed in guilt, avoidance, denial, and a labyrinth of other coping mechanisms. To my mind, this is an inescapable problem because, despite the best efforts of philosophers, we have not been able to identify a universal definition of “good”. So, the only way to know your inherent goodness is by creating or subscribing to a set of principles that determine your course of action at any given time.

There are many criteria that can be applied to assess the validity of moral reasoning, but there are two formal principles of moral reasoning that are particularly important and fundamental. These principles are "formal" in the sense that they concern the form or structure of moral reasoning rather than its content.

The first of these principles suggests that all moral arguments must include both a statement of a general moral principle (a normative claim) and a statement of relevant facts (descriptive claims) if they are to be valid.?Put in another way, no derivative moral judgment follows from simply a description of facts.?

This principle of moral reasoning was first clearly stated by an eighteenth-century British philosopher by the name of David Hume.?Hume noted that there is a logical barrier to deriving claims concerning how we ought to act from descriptive claims concerning the way things are.?This barrier has come to be known as the "is/ought gap" in ethical thought.?One cannot validly claim that one, for example, ought to respect others merely on the basis of the factual claim that respecting others assures that they will treat us well.?We must add some normative standard to the effect that being well-treated by others is a good that we ought to seek.?

A second basic principle of moral reasoning is that such reasoning must be consistent: we cannot hold inconsistent moral positions in different situations.?This principle of moral reasoning is typically called "the principle of universalizability."?This principle can be stated as follows:

If one judges that an action is right (or wrong), one is committed to judging that any other action that is like the first action in all morally relevant respects is also right (or also wrong).

This principle simply states that rational moral judgment must be consistent overall cases of actions that are similar to one another in respects that are relevant to moral judgment.?If, for example, one judges that it is wrong to cause other human beings’ great physical pain because pain is inherently bad, then one is committed to saying that it would be equally wrong to cause nonhuman animals great pain for the same reason.?If one judges that this is wrong in the case of human beings but permissible in the case of animals, and one cannot spell out how human pain is in a relevant way different from animal pain, then one's moral position is inconsistent and thus fundamentally irrational.

The principle of universalizability is the basis of all moral reasoning. If this principle were not accepted, then moral reasoning would be impossible.?Could we reject this principle??To do so would be to, in effect, deny that any moral judgment is more correct or true than any other, that there are no moral truths that can be accepted on rational grounds, and it seems quite impossible for us in a practical sense to believe this. When other people do harm to us or treat us in ways that accord us little respect as human beings, it seems quite impossible for us to simply shrug our shoulders and say, "I have no reason to complain about this."?Even if we might question the principle of universalizability in theory, we all accept it in practice.

With these principles guiding my actions, I find decision making to have become a significantly easier process both in terms of the emotional toll and the efficiency quotient. The world might never come to a consensus about the content of discussions like whether abortions are ethical or if we should give money to beggars but just by being on the same page regarding the methodology of coming to a moral argument, we might eliminate a lot of conflicts.

Your answers might be different from mine, but the place for both of us to start has to be self-reflection with the goal of self-awareness. Once we know ourselves, we can start evaluating others. If we make this form of introspection a lifelong exercise, we will surely be good people.?