So, what are those things that at least some human cultures view as INHERENTLY immoral, that is, acts they would still think of as immoral even if no other consequences of that behavior were to occur?

Here’s my attempt so far at making a comprehensive list of things that at least some cultures view as intrinsically wrong. Note that many of these items are related or overlapping. What am I missing from the list?

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1. UNFAIRNESS

• Injustice (e.g., helping a bad person avoid punishment, or undermining someone’s just reward)

• Inequality (e.g., causing society’s resources to be concentrated among just a few while everyone else is poor, or treating people differently based on gender or skin color)

• Abuse of authority (e.g., nepotism, or favoritism, or those in power giving rewards to those they like best instead of those who deserve it, or those who are given a certain position of authority not carrying out the duties of that position, or carrying out the duties poorly or in a self-interested manner)

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2. HARM

• Harm (e.g., causing others suffering or purposely reducing the happiness of others)

• Murder (e.g., ending the life of another person, including in some cultures, animals, or allowing others to die needlessly)

• Genocide (e.g., the harming or killing of a specific, targeted group)

• Stealing (e.g., taking something that belongs to someone else or that should be no one’s property)

• Destruction (e.g., damaging or annihilating things of value, like ruining the environment, destroying ancient or beautiful artifacts, instigating societal collapse, or hunting a species to extinction)

• Slander (e.g., speaking ill of others, or gossiping by spreading true but negative or harmful information about other people)

• Subjugation (e.g., controlling the body, mind, or choices of others, or restricting freedom)

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3. DISRESPECT

• Disrespect of authority (e.g., being rude to your parents or disobeying your leaders)

• Disrespect of the vulnerable (e.g., treating people badly or not showing respect for members of a subjugated or vulnerable or oppressed group, or not paying proper respect to those who are victims, or disrespecting people living under hard conditions)

• Disrespect of the dead (e.g., digging up a grave, selling a dead body, necrophilia, cannibalism, speaking badly of the dead)

• Disrespect of god or gods (e.g., blasphemy, taking God’s name in vain, desecrating a place of worship, violating a commandment such as doing work on a day when work is forbidden, worshiping a carved idol instead of worshiping God, not engaging in prayer or thanks, questioning God’s nature, or God’s choices, or God’s existence)

• Practicing other faiths (e.g., worshipping alternative gods, engaging in superstitions, engaging in practices or rituals of other religions)

• Rule-breaking (e.g., violating the laws of your country or the rules of your culture, even if those laws are arbitrary or pointless)

• Violating tradition (e.g., non-conformity, or refusing to engage in the traditions of your culture, or flouting traditional roles or norms)

• Disrespect of opinions (e.g., not taking into account the opinions or desires of other people, falsely believing you know more or are wiser than others)

• Defiling (e.g., causing others to be impure, or causing others to take immoral actions, or causing others to leave your religion)

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4. IMPURITY

• Food impurity (e.g., eating certain “forbidden”, “impure” or “disgusting” foods)

• Sexual impurity (e.g., sex before marriage, bestiality, incest, sex with forbidden people, or performing forbidden sexual acts)

• Bodily impurity (e.g., uncleanliness, or making certain disallowed alterations to the body, face, or hair, or taking drugs or intoxicants)

• Social impurity (e.g., spending time with others who are thought to be bad or impure, such as murderers or members of an outcast group)

• Unnaturalness (e.g., engaging in behaviors or social relationships that are viewed as unnatural or in violation of the natural order, or “playing god”, such as by trying to modify natural things)

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5. DISLOYALITY

• Betrayal (e.g., refusing to help someone who has often helped you or with whom you have a long history)

• Familial rejection (e.g., disowning a family member or refusing to help a family member in need or choosing to benefit a non-family member over a family member)

• Infidelity (e.g., to cheat on a romantic partner when in a monogamous relationship)

• Treason (e.g., rejecting your in-group, or bad mouthing your in-group, or harming your in-group, or leaving your in-group for another group, running away in battle)

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6. DISHONESTY

• Lying (e.g., being dishonest, or spreading false information, or allowing others to come to false conclusions)

• Perjury (e.g., claiming that someone did something they didn’t do in order to help yourself)

• Promise breaking (e.g., to violate a contract or go back on a promise)

• Cheating (e.g., getting an unfair advantage, violating rules that everyone else has to follow, or giving what one person has earned to a different person instead)

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7. BAD CHARACTER

• Irresponsibility (e.g., failing to take care of your children, or do your job, or keep your promises)

• Inaction (e.g., not intervening when something bad is happening and you have the power to stop it)

• Wastefulness (e.g., letting food or resources go to waste, using more than is needed, or not making use of your talent or potential)

• Faithlessness (e.g., not believing in God or gods, not believing in the existence of good and evil, not believing that there is such a thing as moral being morality)

• Ignorance (e.g., stupidity, irrationality, lack of knowledge, narrow-mindedness, intolerance of other opinions)

• Selfishness (e.g., not caring about other people, or choosing the benefit of oneself over the benefit of one’s community, or refusing to help others who are in need when you have a lot of resources, or rejecting being part of any community, excessively promoting oneself, or bragging)

• Recklessness (e.g., allowing things of value to come into danger due to lack of forethought or caring, taking excessive risks)

• Sinful emotion (e.g., excessive anger, lust, greed, jealousy, pride, laziness, arrogance, materialistic desire)

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EXAMPLES OF MORAL SYSTEMS

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The Ten Commandments forbid items from 8 of these sub-categories:

• Practicing other faiths (“thou shalt have no other gods before me”)

• Disrespect of God (“thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images…not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain…remember the sabbath day”)

• Disrespect of authority (“honor thy father and thy mother”)

• Murder (“thou shalt not kill”)

• Infidelity (“thou shalt not commit adultery”)

• Stealing (“thou shalt not steal”)

• Perjury (“thou shalt not bear false witness”)

• Sinful emotion (“thou shalt not covet”)

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The golden rule (“Do to others what you want them to do to you”) doesn’t directly forbid any of these items, but making reasonable guesses for what most people would want done to them, it likely ends up forbidding at least some items from every one of the high-level categories above.

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The “Five Precepts” for lay followers of some traditions of Buddhism ask you to refrain from these sub-categories:

• Murder (“I undertake the training rule to abstain from killing.”)

• Stealing (“I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking what is not given.”)

• Sexual impurity (“I undertake the training rule to avoid sexual misconduct.”)

• Lying and Perjury (“I undertake the training rule to abstain from false speech.”)

• Bodily impurity (“I undertake the precept to refrain from intoxicating drinks and drugs which lead to carelessness.”)

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As I understand it, for some (but not all) Sikhs, the main sub-categories of religious prohibitions are:

• Bodily impurity (cutting hair, taking intoxicants)

• Practicing other faiths (e.g., eating meat of animals killed in a ritualistic manner, engaging in superstitious rituals, and animal sacrifice)

• Sinful emotion (obsessive greed/materialistic desire)

• Selfishness (living a life disconnected from society as a recluse or non-family oriented living, bragging)

• Slander

• Lying

• Infidelity

This piece was first written on April 18, 2018, and first appeared on my website on September 15, 2025.

After a little reflection, it is clear that the morality of a person who carries out an action doesn’t just depend on the action itself but rather depends on the state of mind of the person who performs it. This holds for pretty much every commonly used definition of morality. Suppose, for example, that I was tricked into believing that giving money to a certain charity would help the poor when, in fact, the donation was being funneled to gangsters. Generally, Christians, Buddhists, Utilitarians, Kantians, and almost everyone else are in agreement that, although the consequences of my action were bad, I am not bad for carrying out the action because I misunderstood the action’s nature. On the other hand, if I willingly chose to fund gangsters, almost everyone would be in agreement that the action would reflect poorly on my character, even if the net result of such funding was essentially the same as in the case where I thought I was donating to charity. To give another example, there are very few who would say that a person is good for giving money to the poor merely to impress a good-looking date, whereas many would call the person good if they donated out of genuine concern for the welfare of others. Hence, pretty much however one defines ethics, there is widespread agreement that it is not our actions themselves that define how good we are, but rather the intentions underlying our actions. An action (e.g., giving money to charity) is compatible with us being a good person if the thoughts that motivate us to carry it out are considered good (e.g., a desire to help others) but may have no effect on our goodness or even make us a worse person if the motivating thoughts are considered bad (e.g., a desire to help only me at great expense to others).

What is curious is that while there is little dispute that it is legitimate to evaluate the goodness of people based on the goodness of their intentions rather than on the goodness of the consequences of their actions, many people are not willing to carry this logic out to its ultimate, somewhat startling conclusion, namely that a number of people that are generally thought of as “evil” may not really be, and in some cases, may even be “good.”

To illustrate this point, consider the hypothetical case of a person who is schizophrenic and whose delusional thinking has led him to believe that the only way to save the world from unprecedented disaster is to blow up a certain office building while it’s full of workers. If this man were to carry out this terrible act, our instincts would inevitably be to label him as evil, whereas his intentions could demonstrate that he is quite the opposite. If he not only did not want to blow up the building but was, in fact, repulsed by the idea of hurting other people and only carried out the bombing due to his mistaken belief about the action saving the world, then it seems as though he was, in fact, being genuinely good rather than evil since his intentions were very good, and he likely underwent enormous stress and effort (including overcoming his psychological revulsion to murder) only for the purpose of doing what he felt was right.

At this point, some people may object that such a person with schizophrenia should still be blamed for his bad action since he has a responsibility to act in “accord with the truth” and to verify the reality of his beliefs prior to acting. But this argument fails to take into account the experience of people suffering from schizophrenia: in some cases, they have no inkling whatsoever that they are delusional. If a person’s delusion does not seem delusional to them in the least, how can they be blamed for failing to see or question if they’re delusional?

Another objection that may arise relates to the belief some people have that “good cannot come from evil” (or, similarly, that “evil cannot come from good”), which in this context may imply that even though the mentally ill person believes that they are doing a good thing by blowing up a building, the potential goodness of their intention is tainted by the evilness of the consequences. An example can help illustrate the problem with this way of thinking.

Consider a hypothetical situation where we are forced to make the choice of pulling either one of two levers. Suppose that the first lever will lead, with a 90% probability, to the horrifying torture and death of one thousand people and with a 10% probability of us receiving one million dollars in cash. The second lever will lead, with a 90% probability, to us receiving moderate injuries and with a 10% probability of one person being subjected to horrifying torture and death. Pretty much everyone who believes in morality, I think, would agree that pulling the second lever is the moral thing to do (since it makes the torture and death of others much less likely), whereas (psychological consequences aside) it is selfishly better for the individual to pull the first lever (since, that way injuries to our own body are avoided and there is a chance at nabbing the million dollars of cash). On the other hand, if a person were to really pull the second lever, despite that being the obvious ethical choice, there is still a 10% chance that a stranger would be subjected to horrifying torture and death because of that decision. To argue that “good cannot come from evil” (in the way discussed above) is to imply that the morality of my choice depends on whether (due to random chance alone) pulling the second lever led to bad consequences. When attempting to act ethically, however, all I can do is act in a way that (probabilistically) maximizes the amount of good that I believe my action tends to do. To hold me accountable for the actual realized consequences of my action, even though those consequences could never be known to me in advance, is to effectively determine how good I am based on the random roll of a die. The implication would be that ten people could carry out the same action for precisely the same reason, and yet nine of them would be labeled good, and the tenth labeled bad, simply because the tenth was unlucky. This is a conclusion that I think few people are willing to live with.

But what are the practical, real-world consequences of goodness being based on intentions rather than actions? We have seen already that it may alter our assessment of the insane. More bizarrely, though, it may influence our opinion of the deeply religious as well. People who commit acts that (they genuinely believe) are inspired by God’s will but (according to those who do not believe in the same religion) are of a heinous and destructive nature and are very often labeled as “evil.” But in many cases, religious fanatics are absolutely convinced that their actions are “right” and even good for humankind. In such circumstances, it seems that “delusional” would be a fairer label to apply than “bad.” Going a step further, it seems likely that many extraordinarily good people who devoted their lives to doing what they knew was right were, in fact, doing great harm because of false religious or spiritual beliefs. Take, for example, the case of Christian witch burners, some of whom must have genuinely believed that by murdering (what we know to be) innocent people, they were removing a great evil from the earth.

This piece was first written on July 29, 2009, and first appeared on my website on July 3, 2025.