Pushing Boundaries: Absolute Truth, Cultural Morality, and Ethical Innovation

I have always believed in the existence of absolute truth. Many great thinkers have argued about ethics and what is morally correct. I grew up in a Christian household, and my name, Yechan, means worship and praise. My family would go to church every Sunday, and I would attend Awana on Fridays, which is a Bible-memorizing program for children and youth. I have always believed in the perfect truth. I was taught that God created the world and that this world operates through His order. God is perfect, so, growing up, I never questioned what was right and wrong. Since I was exposed to this morality from a young age, I developed the idea that whatever was in the Bible and what God says is the way the world works. I had a clear understanding of what was right and wrong. God was good, and Satan was bad. The reason Satan is bad is because of Sin. Sin is the act of trying to live without the presence of God. Living a sinful life leads to death, as it is what separates you from God. Being a Christian with good morality and proper ethics was very simple—I just had to live a sinless life. As a child, I grew up experiencing different cultures. Due to my Dad’s job, I had to move every three years. I was exposed to meeting many different people, languages, customs, and more. At a young age, I realized that what is normal in one society is considered strange in another. This was a striking concept for me. I had always believed there was an absolute way of living the best life, but these experiences provided me with different ways to live. The daily interactions people had with each other were completely different from country to country. The perception of what living is, and your personal model of how you view this world, was so different—it took me by surprise. Your view of this world is never entirely correct. We try to model this world, but we do not have enough experience to have a perfect model. Our morality is therefore skewed, in my opinion. I believe we develop morals through the environment in which we are nurtured. If we live in a culture and society where one particular thing is deemed correct, we will have morals that support our own view. Nevertheless, there might be a culture where that moral is frowned upon. We as humans are very complex. It may be true for a particular person that the truth they believe is the absolute truth. Yet this is a very risky mindset because you are trapped in your own perspective and refuse to grow and adjust to the real truth. People often say that what works for you and how you feel is all that matters. I would like to say that to be truly ethical, you cannot just rely on your feelings and your beliefs. There is an absolute truth and good. Now, this philosophy of ethics has developed as I studied business and Economics. Currently, at UVA, I am studying Computer Science and Economics. Taking economics classes helped advance my thinking in this area. Economics is the study of how people behave and how societies are built. Utility is a key concept in Economics to justify the creation of societies. Capitalism was created by Adam Smith to maximize utility in society. Communism was created in order to help equalize the utility of living among everyone. Learning many different economic topics, I developed the idea that economists strive to create the best model for a society, attempting to get close to the perfect world. Yet we know we cannot create a perfect world, but we try. Similarly, I believe that ethics and morality work the same way. We can never reach perfect ethics and morality; however, great thinkers try to develop ways for humans to get as close as possible to what is perfect. Through thousands of years, we have pushed our thinking beyond what once seemed normal. What we see as very normal now would not have been acceptable thinking even a few decades ago. Humans change, adapt, and push toward advancements in thinking, technology, and society. When philosophers developed new ideas, the public opposed them, deeming them immoral and against what is right. Still, by breaking and advancing the standard, humanity has developed. If we remain stuck in the norm—in our own mindset that we have created to model this world—we will not be able to take a step closer to what is better and eventually perfect. You have to actively challenge the world. Greatness is not sculpted by doing something exceptional within the existing frame. Greatness is creating a new way that no one has ever considered before. That is why I believe ethics should be challenged. Morality that you currently possess cannot stop you from achieving greatness for society. Since a young age, I have always wanted to develop technology that pioneers the world and changes the way we view it. I want to create an invention that impacts our daily lives and alters our world model. Cars and phones in our recent history have completely changed everything. They challenged what was ordinary and made our world different. When people talk about engineering ethics, they often refer to the safety of the public. I would like to question whether being safe and making sure the standard of engineering ethics is met is truly being ethical. Engineering has the ability to pioneer a field and develop new things. It can have an impact on millions, if not billions. An invention like the phone has impacted billions of people throughout history. If the development of the iPhone had strictly followed the ethical codes of that time and prioritized safety above all else, it might never have been developed successfully or impacted as many people. We talked about the Hindenburg crash in class. The Hindenburg pioneered the field of air travel and changed the way we viewed our world. It was the starting stone that helped people develop air travel, so we can now have airplanes that cross thousands of miles over oceans. The Hindenburg killed 35 people. It is true that engineers could have been safer and prevented this disaster. Despite the tragedy, the Hindenburg showed us what air travel could look like and demonstrated the kind of disasters that might occur in air travel. This helped us advance technology and society. The utility that the Hindenburg provided was more impactful than the disutility it caused through the disaster. If an engineering product or project can pioneer a field and create advancement, I think it is more ethical to take a risk and push the boundaries of what is possible for the sake of humanity than just to follow ethical rules created by engineers. If a business does not make any profit or push the industry forward because it is following engineering ethics, it does not provide much value to anyone. We cannot say it is truly ethical or putting humans first. Integrity is important when considering all of these points. If a business tries to cheat and save money and causes harm to the public, it is not being ethical. If a pioneer is genuinely trying to help humanity and create something new that could cause some safety issues, I believe that is still the right thing to do. I think we as humans, for millennia, have been trying to find and advance our morality. With my experience in Christianity, I do believe there is a perfect world and perfect morality. Nevertheless, we as humans are corrupt, so we can only try to push our society, thinking, and behavior to be more perfect. I believe that when creating new inventions, there is universal ethics one should follow, but there are also other ethics we have created that should be constantly challenged. I believe the best we can do is push ourselves and try to become closer to the perfect state every day as individuals and as a society.