"I" for "Is there such a thing"

Neo-moral issues, is there such a thing?

The question of how a person should act has been asked ever since man started using his reason and intellect. Moral issues, if scrutinized, have been the same for as long as man can remember.

Whatever moral issue I put in this homework won’t be new, it will be as old as time, for there are no neo-moral issues, each generation just recycles and digs what dirt his forefathers buried.

Let me elaborate.
Stem cell research, if scrutinized, is abortion.
The Human Genome Project is body modification and mutilation.

If we look at the basis why certain issues are considered immoral, we will find that all of our moral issues today are based on these foundations. Nothing is new, it’s just modified.

So the problem is not with having “new” issues, but with why we recycle, modify and complicate the past mistakes the generation before us did.

We can say that technology and pursuit of education may be the “neo” issue of our times (though this issue is still as old as time for education and technology has been around for quite some time). Definitions and meanings become blurred as our pursuit to become educated intensifies. Education in itself is not bad, but the definitions and the things that we learn in our formal and informal years of studying mold and modify the way we perceive moral issues. The word “success” is a good example. We learned formally and informally that to be successful is to be rich (rich is different from prosperity, rich means having lots of cash, prosperous or prosperity means being wealthy). That blurred definition alone makes us perceive that we must do ANYTHING in order to have money, whether what we do is moral or immoral.

Before, dirtying the name of an officemate was considered immoral, now it’s considered as being smart; chivalry is now dead because women won’t consider men who treat them with respect (respect nowadays is so blurred that I’m having a hard time explaining it); promiscuity was considered immoral before, but now it’s just having “FUN”. The list goes on when it comes to misconceptions to what words really mean. How we stop this, I don’t know, for language evolves as fast as the day turns into night.

So, Mr. Motol, I don’t think there are new moral issues to be considered. We just have to evolve with it in order for us to stay moral.