DOUBLE MORALITY STANDARDS (SECOND DRAFT----- TEAM: Addy, Elia and Jared)

DOUBLE MORALITY STANDARDS
(SECOND DRAFT----- TEAM: Addy, Elia and Jared)

We would find hundreds and hundreds of examples that prove the existence of the double morality phenomenon. It’s possible and very probable that you (the reader!) are not only thinking about some imaginary instances but thinking about your own real-life examples, and it is even more probable that you (depending on your gender, religion, sexual preference, economic position, etc.) have been in the active side of your anecdote.

Try to ask to yourself HOW MANY TIMES did you act (or judge or even just say) in a way that you might condemn from an objective point of view (obviously, related to morality principles).
Try to ask to yourself WHY did you act the way you did?

In most of the cases... you wouldn’t know. The issue here is not only that you may be in denial and show no regrets, the issue here is that you can not remember how many times you have done that because it is so normal to you, it fits so well with your day-by-day routine, that you don’t even perceive this behaviour anymore.
About the WHY’S, well, you are a college student (at least this text is aimed at college students) so it means that you have a certain educational level, talking about Mexico this implies that you are more educated than the majority of Mexican people (actually, than the majority of Latin American people), it also means that your power of discernment is more developed and you can make, supposedly, more complex and accurate judgments. Now that you have beheld the greatness of your condition, the magnificence of your being, we can assume that your skills to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil and whatever are prepared to be used... and you are aware of that... the thing here is that even with this awareness you might not be able to answer the “WHY question” in a case in which you are the “attacker” and it’s quite probable that if someone points at your misbehavior you will justify yourself using arguments that you, in other situation, would consider encaging dead-end arguments. What I want to remark here is that you might learn some intellectual postures, that you might even support them, get excited when you talk about them and think “Yeah, the progress in action” but the reality is that you are not adopting those principles, you only support them in paper and worse when someone questions you about your “convictions”, the first answer you come up with is “Hey!, we live in a less developed country... those courses of action couldn’t be applied in Mexico”. Or, in other words, you like to talk, yes, but you don’t like to act... actually you like other people to act the way you want, driving yourself away from your own rules and playing the role of the Tyrant of Morality.

“What, Tyrant of Morality? Of course I don’t... I mean... I don’t even care about the others... they can do whatever they want... well, I do care about other people but... who am I to judge them? Maybe I would do the same they did if I were on their situation!” ... Which one is the optimal choice for you?

If you choose option 1... you will, probably, become an intolerant person and if you Choose option 2... you will become a grey-morality worshiper.

The problem with grey-morality (and some people think that being this kind of person is the most tolerant kind that exists) is that to qualify something of being grey, you have to understand first what is “black” and what is “white”... and once you’ve identified this, it would be irrational to choose grey if you already identified the white part, there is no way to justify your choice.

We have been talking a lot about you, now, we have to talk about double morality itself.

There is an essential difference between Double Morality and Hypocrisy. For example: a man who believes it is his right to have extramarital affairs, but that his wife does not have the same right holds a double morality standard. A man who publicly condemns extramarital affairs while maintaining his mistress is a hypocrite.

The double morality is not limited to power and dominance struggle between men and women (even those relations are the classical example of double morality standards in real life) it spreads to almost every aspect in our lives and it does not only have effects on one-on-one social relations but reaches institutional levels acting in, for example, the University, the Administration (actually, affirmative actions would be some kind of double standard... of course, you can justify them through a history of oppression and slavery) the Catholic Church (female priests?).

Just to clarify terms: We will understand for “Double Morality Standards” the different kind of treatments that some people have to other people basing on certain characteristics that should not have effects on treatment. It means that you apply moral criterions to a group in a stronger way than the way you apply them to others.

You are probably able to see it in your own houses. If you have a sister or brother and their opportunities and treatment with your parents are different, so you are probably suffering or enjoying double morality depending on the place you have. This is another problem with double morality: it’s unfair for some people but you can take advantages of it or don’t you like to be treated better than others? Even if you are a “good” person with some values you may be treated better than others, if you are a man you have more opportunities of work than women in this society, if you have friends you probably apply different criterions to talk, to think and even to judge them. Do you see the real problem? We make judgments without analyzing or thinking why we are doing them, may be shaped by mass media or may be, looking for a psychological reason, you have inferiority feelings, as Adler would say, and you want to hide them by criticizing others or it’s just a projection, which according to Freud is a mechanism used when you can’t accept a characteristic you have and you see it in others, does it sounds like you? And we have many other psychological explanations but let’s stop here with reasons.

Now, we have to make a difference in order to understand double morality, because morality is different to Ethics. Since a philosophical point of view Ethics belongs to Philosophy because it’s an universal concept while morality is more particular; besides, Ethics is based on a concept of freedom and morality on good customs. So, should we be talking about double morality or about Ethics? May be it will be clarified if we think that we are talking about our own lives in a society which is governed by certain moral rules and political correctness. So isn’t this writing double moralistic? We hope not because we are not applying judgments in different ways, we are just trying to reflex in a society where reflection is the last thing we do because urgent things monopolize our time giving us no chance for importan things.