Wednesday, January 13, 2016

The Morality Game

Morality arises from an individual based on a game they play in their head where they try to keep score, balance their books and the books of everyone around them much the same way a person makes a budget to spend their money.
The driving imperative of both of these activities is to ensure their own well being first, the well being of the people they love second, the well being of the people in the group they love the most third, etc, etc,
As a result of limited resources and limited knowledge, these two games can never be played to a satisfactory "end" they can only be "managed". As such a person who spends all of their money and ends up broke is not evidence that they don't care about their own well being or the well being of others. It could indicate many things.
Being careless with money might indicate the person is more driven by their emotions than the cold reality of a budget. It might indicate they can't do the math required to understand the implications of a budget. It might indicate they are overly optimistic about their own prospects. It might indicate they are pessimistic about their need to plan for the future.
So there is no clear method to understand why an individual may have troubles budgeting their money. The best we can do is a statistical analysis of humans and then show the trend for a deficiency in each important area required for managing a budget.
No individual case can be use to show that people generally would not want to balance their own budget if they could. In the same regard, morality is even more abstract as it lacks a tangible currency, but the game is identical to balancing a budget. The objective of balancing the morality budget is to promote ones own individual well being and the well being of others using the currency of the golden rule.