Everyone gets their morals from whomever they are around. Everything we see, do and experience early on in our lives affects our behavior, morals, beliefs and the list goes on. What you really have to look at is how we process that information. Let us use an example for one case of processing morality.

An example of a situation I love to give is two kids with one parent. The single parent cons their way through life and manipulates others. The single parent has bad morals and encourages that behavior. Kid one absorbs this information and becomes the same type of person. Kid two takes in this information and essentially becomes the opposite. Now why is this?

Kid one takes the morally wrong information and decides to make a life plan with it, becoming the spitting image of the parent. They maintain a self interested and bad moral code.

Kid two has been given the same morally wrong information, but has not put it to use. Kid two has processed the information and decided the morally wrong life style is ineffective. Kid two develops a moral code that isn’t exactly good in nature, but logical.

The kids can never have a blank slate with morality. They have processed it their entire life. This means they can never have a perfectly good moral code that doesn’t benefit them. Kid two will be in it for themselves their whole life, but most would think this is better than do wrong their whole life.

You just don’t process bad morals and decide to have good morals. Morals and personal interest have been hand in hand all throughout human history. It’s possible to have good morals with no personal interest, but you have to start that way (and it’s never the case).

You get your morals from whatever or whoever raises you, plain and simple. Your moral code on the other hand is a completely different story. You know the saying, “Nothing is new.” It implies to everything we do. Nothing is original and everything we think is only processed information we received from our surroundings.

Now, what makes a kid go one way or the other. You could argue that it has to everything with exposure to both morally good and bad information, but it’s not that easy. Humans process information their whole life. They learn and experience memories that they store and process for later use in order to make decisions . Two people process bad morals and one reads a book with a thought provoking story suddenly takes a completely different path.

It all comes down to choices and the information we get from it. When you decide exactly when to drive to the store, when you choose that certain brand of soda, what movie you see and it goes on. You’re not going to get a full understanding of why humans are the way they are from one article on the internet. You won’t get it anywhere because, when you think about it, were all just filling meters and scales that keep getting filled with information.