The maximum "man is by nature a political animal”, withdrawal from Politics inAristotle, represents the way this ancient philosopher saw part of the essence of the human being: a being thinking, capable of improved communication (speech) and being dependent on community life in the greek polis.
For community life (word derived from the etym ordinary, which means a set of beings common to each other that live together) to be successful, some human creations are needed, such as the laws and the mores. Customs are, roughly speaking, morality itself. The human being is, then, an animal capable of creating a moral in order to make life possible in society.
Moral customs are evaluative, that is, they dictate norms based on moral values. There is, within each society, a set of values that specify and differentiate what is good and bad, what is good and what is bad, what is better from what is worse, what can and cannot be done, etc. This means to say that moral values are a kind of “code of conduct
” that dictates how each individual must act within that society to integrate and adapt to it.It is also necessary to emphasize that this code of conduct composed by the moral values, as it is built and consolidated within each society, it is variable, being impossible to find completely different societies with absolutely equal moral values.
For this reason, we distinguish customs according to communities, regions or countries. Therefore, in Brazil, we have a morality that is almost completely different from Japanese morality, or the cultivated customs by the South American natives were totally different from the customs brought by the Europeans who colonized our territory.
During the history of Philosophy, Socrates he was the first thinker to bring to philosophical work the reflection on strictly human subjects, therefore, he was the introducer of moral reflection in philosophy.Plato, his disciple, continued on the subject, but, so that his moral philosophy would not confront his theory of knowledge, he postulated that moral values are rational concepts eternal and immutable. This idea requires the notion that there is a concept of good, the good itself, a concept of evil, the evil itself, and rational ideas that immutably characterize any possible notion of moral value.
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Aristotle established a field of study within Philosophy called ethic, responsible for studying, qualifying and establishing the differences between morals, organizing them in a rational system that differentiates what should be done and what should not be done in a polis so that community life can proceed without disturbances.
During theMiddle Ages, the philosophers submitted completely to the christian morals as the only possible and true, and it is the prevailing way of thinking in the Christian West to this day. In modernity, with the development of the Enlightenment and the outbreak of great revolutions, European thought established great differences in the way of valuing that affected social life.
Already in the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche strongly criticized Western morality, still strongly determined by Christian values, accusing it of being a morality that subjugates the human being as a natural being, castrates his strength and capacity for creation and denies his own life.
Therefore, what we can signal as a consensus among philosophers who theorized morals and moral values is the the fact that without some form of valuation and customs there would be no society or civilization such as the We know. Any kind of community life needs a minimum rule setting.
So, without customs and morality, we would fall into barbarism. It is, however, up to each individual and each community to judge whether the customs and moral values in force in their environment and in their time are the best and most adequate for social functioning, while respecting the individuality and rights of beings who share the joint life in that place.
by Francisco Porfirio
Graduated in Philosophy
