Who is right who is wrong

And when I was a child, I thought that God was the God who only saw black and white. Now that I am no longer a child, I can see, that God is the God who can see the black and the white and the grey, too, and He dances on the grey!

Grey is okay. JoyBell C. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly,. Right Is not measured by its men, but men are measured by their right. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading.

In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. Right makes might. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea. And once you learn the difference, you must always choose the right. What color would you say the house was? Who would paint a house two colors? Who's right? The house isn't brown or white.

It's both. We remain frustrated if someone else repairs the harm we accidentally caused. Guilt is an important emotion, she notes. And it starts playing a role early in life. As kids get older, their sense of guilt may become more complex, she says. Or they might feel guilty when they just think about doing something bad.

What happens inside someone when she feels pangs of conscience? Scientists have done dozens of studies to figure this out. Many of them focus on morality, the code of conduct that we learn — the one which helps us judge right from wrong.

Scientists have focused on finding the brain areas involved with moral thinking. To do this, they scanned the brains of people while those people were looking at scenes showing different situations. For instance, one might show someone hurting another. Or a viewer might have to decide whether to save five fictional people by letting someone else die. But there turned out not to be one. In fact, there are several areas throughout the brain that turn on during these experiments.

By working together, these brain areas probably become our conscience. This network is actually made up of three smaller networks, says Fiery Cushman of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. This psychologist specializes in morality. One brain network helps us understand other people. Another allows us to care about them. The last helps us make decisions based on our understanding and caring, Cushman explains.

The first of these three networks is made up of a group of brain areas that together are called the default mode network. It helps us get inside the heads of other people, so we can better understand who they are and what motivates them.

This network involves parts of the brain that become active when we daydream. Most daydreams involve other people, Cushman says. The second network is a group of brain areas often called the pain matrix. In most people, a certain part of this network turns on when someone feels pain. A neighboring region lights up when someone sees another in pain. The more empathetic someone is, the more those first two brain networks overlap.

In very empathetic people, they may almost completely overlap. That shows that the pain matrix is important for empathy, Cushman says. It lets us care about other people by tying what they are feeling to what we ourselves experience. Understanding and caring are important.

But having a conscience means that people must then act on their feelings, he notes. This one is a decision-making network. When people find themselves in moral situations, all three networks go to work.

Rather, we have a network of areas that originally evolved to do other things. Over evolutionary time, they began to work together to create a feeling of conscience. For example, some people are very empathetic. That drives them to cooperate with others. And still others simply happen to be in the right place at the right time to make a difference to someone else, Cushman says.

The feelings behind conscience help people maintain their social ties, says Vaish. There is nothing immutable about any standard. This is the key to dealing with different standards, we can change ours and others can change theirs.

We do not have to, but the possibility is always there. This stance gives meaning to the value of the following questions. We could look at the standard here as purely related to cleanliness, but it is important to recognise that the standard is being applied in the context of a relationship.

Hence, we can ask ourselves, "Why is this standard important in the context of this relationship? Once we have established the importance of the standard we are applying, we can then ask ourselves, "Where did this standard come from and is it still relevant to me?

For example, being fit enough to run a marathon might be an acceptable standard to live up to in our twenties, but not so in our seventies. It may well be that the standard we are so vigorously applying has outworn its usefulness. Ultimately, we must ask ourselves, "What would happen if I changed my standard? What would I lose? What would happen if I do not change my standard? What might I lose then? People are often so fixed in their ideas of how something could be that their stance becomes out of proportion to what they risk if they change their stance.

Alternatively, they may not see what they stand to lose by holding onto their standard. Is the relationship more important than a clean kitchen? If we ask ourselves these questions, we can then consider a conversation to develop a shared standard. Something that is acceptable to those involved. By doing so, we develop clarity about what is expected in our relationships and set a context for how the relationship in the future.

In the work place, standards clash constantly. If people were only able to consider the value of their standards and value of the differences of others' standards rather than always vigorously defending them, there would be far more learning and growth in the work place and far less conflict.