To Be Moral is to Act Moral
Notes
Can we say that we are moral if we don't act according to our beliefs Integrity? I seems difficult to say "yes". After all, having values without expressing them in any shape or form is meaningless, no? Is there truly a difference between a person who thinks that helping the poor is important compared to an person who's indifferent about them if they both do nothing to support them?
In some sense, morality is a fake it till you make it kind of thing. It is only by acting that we gain the title of a moral person, and not the other way around. Reverse Thinking. Therefore we can't just sit on the sidelines and wait for the right opportunity to act, we have to be proactive and take action, to be the moral person we can become.
I'm not saying that morality is only about the results of your actions without considering other factors such as your intentions. It's like the example of the thief that breaks into a house by opening the window, which by chance saves the elderly lady that lives there from suffocating from a gas leak. We can't praise the thief even if the result of his action is good. We need both reasons and actions for morality. Therefore, to be truly a moral person, its not enough to believe in the right things, you also have to act accordingly. Personally, I believe that the combination of right reasons with right actions means that you have to cultivate the right virtues within you, but that is a different topic.
Similarly, it is not enough to fill ourselves with knowledge and pretend it makes us better people. If we only focus on reading books, on learning about philosophy and not practicing it, we are no better than those who fail to do both Intelligence is not morality.
The desire for knowledge before action can cripple us if we focus only on the intellectual side of morality, because what drives us to action is often not the logical deduction that something should be done and we just need to understand how, but rather the internal passion, the emotional urge to express your beliefs morality is both rational and emotional.
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Overview
🔼Topic:: Ethics (MOC) ◀Origin:: Aristotle (philosopher) 🔗Link::