How can we all become “moral agents” representing objective morality?

Zsolt Hermann
2 min readNov 20, 2022

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Question from the Internet:

“As a moral agent, how would you motivate people to make moral judgments without bias and prejudice?”

I do not think I can call myself a “moral agent”; I do not think anybody can. Our “morality”, our sense of “right vs wrong”, is based on our inherently self-serving, self-justifying, egocentric and subjective worldview.

It is not that we are “evil” or something similar.

We simply have no chance and ability to look at the world and others in a truly objective manner; we simply have no idea what actual “right vs wrong” is.

In order to have some “absolute standard”, a shining gold standard we can all measure ourselves against, we need to turn towards Nature apart from humanity. Our own arbitrary ideologies, philosophies and even our religions cannot help us since they are built on and developed by the same limited and distorted inherent human nature and worldview.

In Nature, “right vs wrong” is very simple: the whole system is based on creating and sustaining life. Thus any processes, actions and states that facilitate the creation and nurturing of life are right, while anything that is against it is wrong.

Now, this is not measured or justified on the individual level — where human beings try to assess and judge processes.

For example, a predator chasing, capturing and consuming prey is not wrong since in the global and integral scale of things, it contributes to the most optimal balance by taking out the weaker parts of the species of prey while feeding the predator. In our own biological body, also constant destructive and rebuilding processes are unfolding in order to prepare the body for the best possible state within changing conditions.

So when we want to learn what true “morality” — right vs wrong — is, we need to learn from Nature what the ideal conditions are for creating and sustaining life in relation to the whole system.

In humanity, we also have to build a society that is the most ideal for the life of the whole collective — on a global level — through positive and sustainable, mutually responsible and mutually complementing cooperation. This cannot be measured on the individual, local or even national level. Our measurements always have to encompass the whole human society and Nature we exist in. We need to come to a realistic and “visceral” feeling that the whole system belongs to us and we belong to the system.

We can achieve this through the right, purposeful and practical educational method.

Then we will all become “moral agents” representing the morality of Nature.

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Zsolt Hermann

I am a Hungarian-born Orthopedic surgeon presently living in New Zealand, with a profound interest in how mutually integrated living systems work.