The idea I once had about what morality means now seems laughable. Really what was laughable was how narrow it was, which only makes sense since I was a child. Any perception of right and wrong would be incredibly simplistic. Once as a kid,I was caught in a decently sized lie, and it led to me being grounded for a week. That event actually led me to a long streak of years where I didn't tell any lies at all. Honestly. The first lie to break that streak was when I told a telemarketer that my mother wasn't home while she stood beside me.
There are, at times, an impracticality to being moral and upstanding. Anyone who has ever had to drive in New York City at a busy time (which is basically any time) will have to admit that being nice under that setting won't do you much good. While that might be a mild example to some, on the opposite end there are the hypothetical paradoxes centered around morality, like the scenario where 7 people are stuck in an elevator that only has enough oxygen for 8. In dangerous parts of the world, people are put in perilous situations that ask them to make difficult choices every day.
While it was intended as a segue, just thinking about what life is like in a place where gunfire and general violence are a daily occurrence, the"moral dilemmas" that I was thinking about seem more like moans of discomfort now. A life with troubles is promised to us all, but the severity of those troubles are not pre-set, as each of us have our own personally tailored problems to deal with. This is a part of what makes acting morally even harder, since you need to somewhat calibrate how "morally" you respond to something. As a person who hasn't experienced bullying, how do you respond to seeing another person going through that? The question changes drastically when, in that scenario, you were bullied at some point.
It's in the instances where a person walks through the doors of the hotel and have all of these circumstances that they tell me they have and want something from me that I have to wonder what it is in those instances that is the right thing to do. I somehow become and authority in those situations and it's my call whether or not this person can have what they want. My word, in those instances where I'm the only employee in the hotel on the audit shift, is "law" in the sense that there is no one else on the premises to overturn my decision.
Mostly I have people who are coming inside to avoid the cold, and I have to decide whether or not this person is alright staying inside for any amount of time, since I don't outright want to turn them away. It can sometimes call for prejudice on my part, deciding whether or not I'm threatened by this person, to decide if they can stay. On some levels, it feels as if I'm judging people and that I'm being pompous. This, however, was just a part of the job, albeit an unforeseen one. And judgment was something ingrained in us to decipher danger from safety, as far as an evolutionist might have to say.
Morality is something that will never be static, since there are so many variations of it. Mainly depending on where you are and what you believe, you will respond to situations in life very differently than your neighbor would. I can understand how people are sometimes unnerved by people of different faiths, since their moral compass might be aligned differently,though reason at this point in our existence should be enough to overcome that fear.
