Might our sense of right and wrong be something created by society to check our biological urges?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
If we say that justice systems that are there, they are required because we are biochemically programmed to behave in particular ways. So, to moderate our bad behaviours and to say encourage good behaviours, we need legal systems. So, yes, that’s one way of looking at it.
And we do need that because we have a programming and not everybody can resist the programming. So, especially when something becomes an addiction, even an addict has free will. But a person is an addict, their free will will be, somebody is alcoholic, their free will will be not whether I will drink or not, whether I should drink five bottles of alcohol or six bottles of alcohol.
That is the extent of the free will that is left. Sometimes some people may become so conditioned that at that particular time they may need external control. But external control alone is never enough.
If we see, there is within us something called conscience. Now, the specific way in which the conscience works may be different for different people. So, somebody born and brought up in India may consider certain things to be wrong and certain things to be right.
Somebody born in the Arabic world may consider something else to be right, something wrong. Somebody else born in America may consider something to be right and something to be wrong. So, there may be relativity in the specific categorization of what is right and what is wrong.
But there is an innate universality in the understanding of right and wrong. That there are some right things and there are some wrong things. So, this understanding is universal.
And that is not based simply on survival instinct. If you look at the reductionistic view of the world, we would have all of us working under the principle of survival of the fittest. So, if somebody is drowning, then that person doesn’t know how to swim, that’s why they are drowning.
Somebody else just jumps in, swims, even if there is storm or waves over there, they jump in, they rescue that person. And they come, they come back. Now, why do they do that? Now, here we are saying, if we were working simply by the principle of survival of the fittest, then we would not, no one would jump in to say, that person is unfit, let that person die.
But we see not survival of the fittest alone in operation, we see something else in operation, that is, sacrifice by the fittest. Those who are fitter human beings, they sacrifice to help the unfit. And we don’t think of this as wrong.
Why did you look for your life? Why didn’t you save your own life? We consider it noble. We consider it as heroic. When the twin towers were collapsing, the natural human instinct was to rush out.
And everybody was rushing out. The firefighters went inside. And that was heroic.
So, the point is, that there is an aspect within us, which is programmed. And to regulate that, we do need law. But that is not all that there is to our being.
There is another aspect to us, which is our innate sense of right and wrong. And then that is, that may be less developed in some people, that may be more developed in some people. The specific understandings may vary.
But it’s a universal reality that is there in everyone. And this, this function of right and wrong often impels us to do things which are biochemically wrong. To go into a river or a sea to save someone is risking my life.
To go into a fire to save my life, to save someone else’s life is risking my life. But we do it because there is a side within us, which is noble, which is actually not programmed. So, basically, there is the law, which is definitely required to control those who are highly programmed.
But there is education, or we could say rectification, rectification which is required for those who are just giving into their programming indiscriminately. But there is also education and purification, which is for those who already are evolved and who can evolve more. So, both have to be required in any society.
A society that works only on education without rectification, those who are miscreants, they will have free reign over this. The society which focuses only on rectification, no education, it will just become like a tyrannical society, where there has to be perpetual power control with even a slight lapse leading to collapse. So, we need a balance of both.
So, basically, Darwin did get it right when he said survival of the fittest. It is a fact of nature. But it is not the only fact of nature.
There is another aspect to our being, which transcends our biological imperative. And that is our spiritual side. So, we human beings have, we could say, a divider or conflicted existence.
We have a spiritual side, which longs for deeper understanding of things, which longs for a bigger purpose for life. But we also have a biological side, which just looks for immediate gratification, immediate interest. So, our heart, our soul looks for meaning.
Our tongue settles for pudding. We try to understand deeper truths of life, but if some quick pleasure comes up, we forget that. So, this is a conflicted existence that we are living.
So, if the biological side becomes too strong, then law is required to control it. Because the more the biological side becomes stronger, human society degenerates to the level of jungle. And because we have some sense, by which we don’t want to have the law of the jungle simply by it is right.
That’s why we create systems of law by which even the we are protected. So, the animal side within, the biological side within us, to regulate that, again, if you consider, where does the sense of regulating that come from? If we were simply biological creatures, the animals, they simply have might is right. They don’t have any system of law over there.
They simply act according to nature. So, why do we even think of regulating our biological side? There is something within us, which recognizes that simply acting according to biological impurity is not right. When Hitler wanted to destroy all those who he thought were physically incapable, then he wanted to kill all handicapped people.
He wanted to kill all people who were infertile. And he started that. He had his own idea of eugenics.
We find that moral is evolving. Hitler was simply acting according to, we could say, biological imperative, expanded through state initiative. But we find that wrong.
So, our sense which tells us this is wrong, our sense which makes us want to have a system of justice, that points to something beyond our biology. That points to our spirituality. So, there is a tension between our biology and our spirituality.
And for those who are driven more by their biology than by their spirituality, for them we need systems of law. But we want all human beings to evolve to a more spiritual level of consciousness. And that’s why there is education, there is purification, there is elevation of consciousness that also has to be facilitated.
So, we need both systems for spiritual development and we also need systems for regulation of biological impulse. Does it answer your question?