In my mind, I ask—where does our morality come from? Growing up, I learnt what the good things and the bad things were. As a child, it seemed simple enough. Murder is bad, and stealing, and lying.... Honesty is good, and forgiveness, and contentment....

As I experienced more and my frontal lobe developed, that veil of simplicity wore off. Murder is bad, but sometimes it is good and necessary, at least some people think so. Lying is bad, but not white lies. Cheating is bad, but what if you did it to help your family or friend? Even the good things weren’t always good; it is a grave sin to be honest sometimes, and to forgive would depend on the situation.

Where does the fountain our morality emerge from?

Each of us have a sense of morality, an inner voice whispering to us what right or not—a conscience. We try to align our actions with our conscience, and we trust it so much that we expect other people to conform to the dictates of our own conscience. The problem is, though our consciences generally align in some matters, they do not in others. What is right to one person is not necessarily right to another. Some people think it is the good and right thing that the husband should have the final say in a marriage, others do not. In as much as there are whole organizations dedicated to animal cruelty, it is not a matter even worth considering to others.

Even within our own conscience, some issues of morality are just too blurry to decide. For me, Robin Hood is a classical case. Giving to the poor what was stolen from the rich—does the good outweigh the bad, or does the bad outweigh the good?

So, where does our morality come from? Is there an ultimate good? An ultimate evil? Who or what decides?