Is it better to be a moral or immoral person?

We are all though that we should be highly moral, that we should respect the law and behave in a socially acceptable manner. This attitude comes so naturally to us that we rarely even stop and think about it for a moment.

For example, take a look at this example. 😊 You’re alone in a middle of a desert, your vehicle broke (or your poor camel died, whatever) and you don’t have enough water to reach the nearest settlement or oasis on foot. Luckily, you meet a man that has more than enough water for both of you and you kindly ask him to give or sell you some of his water. Alas, he laughs at you, decisively refuses to help you (even for money) and completely ignores you and your pleas afterward, going his way. Knowing that virtually no one ever passes through that deserts, you basically have to choose between physically attacking that man and stealing his property or dying from thirst while sunbathing on a hot sand. What would you do?

Sure, we can justify our wrongdoing from the situation above by telling ourselves that the man we attacked and robbed was utterly selfish, inhuman, horrible etc. But what about this: you have an opportunity to kill a complete stranger and steal his $1,000,000 in a way so discreet that you will never get caught. What would you do? Objectively, one unknown man less on this planet won’t have any impact on your life while $1,000,000 in your pocket surely will. Still, you wouldn’t kill him because you have no way of justifying it? Why do you need a justification?

Your need to justify your wrongdoings is a naturally inherited because if our conscience wouldn’t prevent us from doing unjustified wrongful actions, our society would rather quickly go to hell as we would all selfishly destroy each other in a thousand ways.

Thus, being a person with a high conscience is definitely good for our society, since conscience is a natural force helping our society to advance together without excessively destructive internal rivalry. On the other hand, high conscience is sometimes not too beneficial for ourselves as individuals. For ourselves as individuals, theoretically it would be much more useful to always follow the simple cost/benefit logic without thinking about moral issues. Luckily for our modern society, we (or at least most of us) can't do that.

That said, it seems to me that we should note that, in many ancient cultures, it was not considered immoral to kill people who did no one any harm. For example, early slaves were not considered human beings at all and it was considered OK for their master to kill them, even for no reason. Romans treated conquered nations as lower humans and killing/enslaving conquered population brought them fame and respect, not moral condemnation and shame. As awful as this sounds, at that time, such moral codes did enable some civilizations to prosper, at least during their expansion times (I’ll refrain from expanding this paragraph to the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, the USA, and similar, in order to avoid offending anyone).

I hope that a time will come when the world will be regarded as one single country and one single nation with many beautiful differences within it; a time when we will be sharing more and competing less.