Right, Wrong and the Truth - Essay Example

It is easy to find a person who might even kill someone else just to be able to get his hands on some wealth. Bertrand Russell writes, “Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.” Ethics play a very important role in the life of any kind of a citizen; may he be a layman or a business man.

In every part of life, every man has the choice of being where he is, choosing the decisions that he must take in order to make his own life better, and having the choice of stepping on other people’s dreams to do the same or not. In business for example, ethics play an important role when people decide to cheat or not to cheat by selling bad quality products to consumers. Again, the question of what is right and what is wrong arises over here because morally speaking, it is wrong to cheat people and have them pay a higher price for something that is not worthy of the same.

According to historical norms, various customs that have been taking place since times immemorial still find their way within our modern lives. However, some of these customs are banned according to the legal system within countries because they are simply very immoral in nature. For example, in earlier times, discrimination and slavery played a very important role in the lives of the upper class; however today, it is against the law to be discriminating against any person on any basis including gender, caste, creed, race etc.

Thus, this is a question of both ethics and morality because it helps to understand what may be closer to being right and what may be morally accepted by society at large without harming the maximum number of people involved in the process. In many cases, the truth is far from what may be right or wrong and not many people can do something to change that. For example, it might be wrong to practice female infanticide in parts of the world, however, the truth is that many tribes and families have been practising it for a long time in remote areas and will not stop because it has almost become custom like.

In villages in India, it is tough for people to stop practising this heinous act because they are not aware of its implications and carry it out because it is a tradition for them to be able to give birth to a boy. Coming back to socio cultural dimensions around the world, again, the idea of understanding what may be right or wrong is almost funny. It is like explaining the theory of brightness and darkness to a blind person. For the blind man, the darkness in his world holds a different kind of colour altogether that a normal person will never be able to understand.

At the same time, someone who is colour-blind sees the world in a different manner than a person who is able to differentiate between colours easily. Thus, it all boils down to a matter of perspective; today what may seem right to one group of people may be extremely wrong in the eyes of the other. The world is made up of different kinds of people who hold different thoughts and notion within their minds. It is very difficult to be able to change people’s minds and get them to believe in what a single person might be thinking.