There’s a moral to this story
As part of the ‘Lab UK’ section on its website, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) has conducted a survey called ‘Test Your Morality’.
Details of what the survey revealed are yet to appear, but Robert Aunger, Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Public Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said he hoped to unlock explanations for moral choices.
He pointed to the daily moral choices everyone made and said while people found some types of crimes abhorrent, they could not necessarily explain why. He called that phenomenon ‘moral dumbfounding’.
Aunger proposes a Human Superorganism Theory, which says moral actions are based on the “need to ‘police’ society in order to keep the ‘superorganism’ functioning properly, and that everyone in human social groups inadvertently plays the role of ‘unofficial policeman’ by making judgements about how others behave.”
However, the Bible says that humans are born in the image of the Creator—our Moral Law-giver—and it is He Who has wired our conscience to know the difference between right and wrong (Romans 2).
So perhaps ‘moral dumbfounding’ would be better defined as an inability to acknowledge the Author of morality in oneself and the world around.
- About the ‘Test Your Morality’ experiment, bbc.co.uk, 2013.
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