The Moving Target of Right & Wrong

A moral question usually begins in the quiet, that tiny discomfort you feel before you take an action, not because you can justify but you can’t defend.

It’s the moment you ask yourself, “What’s the right thing here?”, even though you already have a dozen rational arguments to do the opposite.

That’s the real birthplace of morality: not in temples or textbooks, but in the friction between desire and conscience.

Everyone talks about ethics because everyone is trying to manage that friction. It’s not philosophy; it’s self-preservation.

The world is noisy, incentives get warped, and it’s very easy to drift into a version of yourself you didn’t intend to become.

Ethics is the language we use to reverse-engineer the drift.

But here’s the twist: everyone thinks they already know what “right” and “wrong” mean, until life pushes them into a corner.

That’s when the real question hits:

Who taught you your sense of right and wrong?
And why do you trust them more than your own eyes?

Some people outsource morality to religion.
Some to culture.
Some to the law.
Some to whatever is trending on their Twitter feed.

But the truth is far more chaotic: morality got crowdsourced by terrified humans trying to make sense of their time.

Every decade, every civilization, every “expert panel,” every dinner-table philosopher sits down with the same complaint:

“Ethics has collapsed. People have lost their way. The world is doomed.”

Plato said it in 4th Century BC.
Augustine said it.
The Victorians said it.
Your uncle forwarding WhatsApp messages says it.

And yet, nothing changed.
The world didn’t collapse into moral ash because of the sophists, or modernity, or the internet, or kids these days.

Because morality was never a stable, golden standard.
It was always a moving target shaped by power, scarcity, fear, and convenience.
That’s the uncomfortable part no one likes saying out loud:

Moral truth is cheap. Moral behavior is expensive.

And most people, across centuries, have preferred the cheaper version.
So the question, “Who decides what’s right or wrong?” is almost a trick.
The real question is:

Who benefits when something gets called right?

Who benefits when something gets called wrong?

Right and wrong are rarely philosophical debates.
They’re hidden negotiations between incentives and ideals.

Plato wasn’t mourning the fall of Athenian ethics; he was mourning the rise of people who didn’t share his worldview.

Every era repeats this script. Every generation believes the previous one had a cleaner moral compass. And every society assumes its ethical decline became unprecedented.

Our grandparents from 40’s/50’s always complained about our parents. Our parents from 60’s/70’s always complained about us. We from 80’s/90’s complain about the 20’s/21’st generation in one way or another.

But history moves on.
Not because we become more moral, but because we adapt.
We rewrite what’s right and what’s wrong to fit the world we inherit.

The world didn’t crumble because morality slipped.
It recalibrated.

And the real tension, the part worth exploring is not “How do we save morality?”
It’s:

How do we stay honest with ourselves when the world keeps shifting the goalposts?

That’s where the real moral question lives.
Not in principles carved in stone.
But in the quiet moments where you have to decide whether you want to become the kind of person whose choices you can live with.