Morality, that is our a view over what is right or wrong, is determined by what we feel we have learned about ethics from our life experience. Now, everyone's view on right and wrong should then vary; however, nowadays, people are too concerned with what other people think of them, but such an approach is an incorrect, because by following the crowd, we risk believing in a set of principles that is fallacious. In the 20th Century, in many parts of the world, racism was thought of as incontrovertibly right by many people, especially in places like South Africa, but, nowadays, racism is widely condemned. Why is that? This is because in the 20th Century many people believed in a flawed herd mentality about race.
One particular country where racism was accepted (but it is not anymore, fortunately) was South Africa. For most of the 20th Century, South Africa was ruled by the white community while the black community suffered because it was denuded of the opportunity to gain financial prosperity and was disenfranchised. Any opposition by a black person too these immoral oppression was met with fierce punishment and even violence (that often led to death) - for example, an activist leader, Nelson Mandela, was indicted and imprisoned for three decades.
Unfortunately, members of the white community were passive to these atrocities that their government was committing until the 1970's, when an editor of an already controversial newspaper let an article that was censorious of the government's unfair treatment towards black people to be published. Then, he met up with a black activist leader who was under a quarantine that only allowed him to be with one person at a time. This journalist's action was met with a severe punishment by the government, and soon the journalist had to flee his country to England. There, he campaigned against the apartheid (the racism in South Africa) and due to his work and work of many other, apartheid was removed from South Africa. This white journalist's action to be a heretic and go against the morality that other people of his skin colour tried to instill in him led to the demise of the terrible racism in South Africa.
Moreover, we can really see that people sometimes can be blinded if they follow the crowd. Pip, the protagonist of Charles Dickens' novel 'The Great Expectation', tries to shed his humble past in his quest to become a gentleman. However, he was wrong to do so, but even though he realised his mistake at the end of the book, he was going in the wrong direction and losing his morality by trying to emulate his gentlemen friends. Thus we can see that other people could be mistaken about difficult topics such as morality, so we should follow our mind than those of other people, to find the ultimate truth.
One particular country where racism was accepted (but it is not anymore, fortunately) was South Africa. For most of the 20th Century, South Africa was ruled by the white community while the black community suffered because it was denuded of the opportunity to gain financial prosperity and was disenfranchised. Any opposition by a black person too these immoral oppression was met with fierce punishment and even violence (that often led to death) - for example, an activist leader, Nelson Mandela, was indicted and imprisoned for three decades.
Unfortunately, members of the white community were passive to these atrocities that their government was committing until the 1970's, when an editor of an already controversial newspaper let an article that was censorious of the government's unfair treatment towards black people to be published. Then, he met up with a black activist leader who was under a quarantine that only allowed him to be with one person at a time. This journalist's action was met with a severe punishment by the government, and soon the journalist had to flee his country to England. There, he campaigned against the apartheid (the racism in South Africa) and due to his work and work of many other, apartheid was removed from South Africa. This white journalist's action to be a heretic and go against the morality that other people of his skin colour tried to instill in him led to the demise of the terrible racism in South Africa.
Moreover, we can really see that people sometimes can be blinded if they follow the crowd. Pip, the protagonist of Charles Dickens' novel 'The Great Expectation', tries to shed his humble past in his quest to become a gentleman. However, he was wrong to do so, but even though he realised his mistake at the end of the book, he was going in the wrong direction and losing his morality by trying to emulate his gentlemen friends. Thus we can see that other people could be mistaken about difficult topics such as morality, so we should follow our mind than those of other people, to find the ultimate truth.
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