Context: I'm to take a searching & fearless moral inventory, and I choose the format. I gave an example trait about myself, and my sponsor asked, "how is that moral?" I realized... I have no idea what it even means anymore. So my assignment is to ask people & look up definitions until something seems right. - Lo

It's a type of eel. - Scoble, Alex Scoble

Or a mushroom? - Brian Sullivan

What an interesting choice of words. I would say something is moral if it "seems right". I could elaborate, but I feel like I'd just be adding noise to a pretty succinct definition. - Brad Greer

Red, feel free to elaborate. What I'm confused on is if it's just my principle about what's right and wrong, how do I inventory myself? I hate everything about this. - Lo

Or if you wanted a serious answer...a set of rules that one lives by to fit in with a society. - Scoble, Alex Scoble

I actually got the mushroom answer at lunch/cribbage with a bunch of AA people. They went with "whenever you remember something and feel like crap, that's a moral." - Lo

To further explain why this is such a problem for me, I have a personality disorder in which I hold a very rigid set of rules about life & how to behave, and completely lose my shit when I or anyone breaks these rules. Ultimately I did not come up with any of these rules, they were instilled, or inflicted, on me - mostly as a child. I've gone to great lengths to discard these rules whenever possible. I don't feel like I have any ideas about what is right and wrong other than some outmoded garbage forced on me by sick and fucked-up people. So just the idea of doing this makes me want to vomit. But doing the steps (this is #4) is the price of admission for AA. - Lo

That's what I was wondering. Morals (in my experience) are intrinsically personal. That's not to say it's impossible to be immoral or amoral. Sometimes you learn your morals after the fact, and sometimes you knowingly do things that aren't right. I would say your inventory would end up being a catalog of regrets and [whatever the opposite of a regret is]. - Brad Greer

The funny thing is, I don't really have any regrets anymore. I worked really hard to get to that point. There are things I wouldn't do over again, but a lot of times doing something that seemed stupid worked out to be very important in the end. - Lo

I guess the real problem here is that my sponsor's notion of working the program runs counter to my other program of working out mental health stuff, and I'm thinking I'd have a hard time finding anyone in AA who wouldn't encourage me to do things that would be harmful to me on the perfectionism front. Even going to meetings presses my buttons & requires constant vigilance. *sigh* This Friday needs more Friday. - Lo

To me, morals are strictly what you consider right and wrong. Ethics are the actual rules. - Victor Ganata

What Victor said. A sense of right and wrong can be very personal, while I think of ethics as something we have as a societal standard of some kind. I'm also a firm believer in substituting the things you don't like about an inflicted moral, transforming it into something you do agree with. You don't have to ditch the rules, especially if that is really hard, you just agree to a different set. - Jennifer Dittrich

Yeah, morals are more of a concept without the details. Like it's morally wrong to hurt someone unnecessarily. - Heather

basically I agree with Red. Something is moral/immoral if it seems intrinsically right/wrong to you. the problem i mostly have with morals is that so many people i know (and seems like so much of our nation) think it's something that Church teaches you and cannot be disagreed with. and that things which are immoral (which is a subjective idea) should be illegal. - Sarah (or SCarla)

So in case anyone was wondering, and since this project is due tomorrow morning... most people said roughly the same thing, which is things you did were immoral if you feel bad/sick remembering them. When I first got sober, there were lots of examples, but I've worked really hard to make my peace with all of them. I have come to the conclusion that I grew up with a byzantine system of self-imposed rules largely based on what others expected of me (or thought I did). Since I have tried to completely reject the ideas of right & wrong and erase them from my thinking (for my own sanity & as suggested therapy), I was left wondering just how I decide what to do. Because I haven't just turned into a huge asshole. Apparently my current "moral" system is all about results, i.e. what is practical. If something is likely to lead to a result I don't want, I don't do it. If something I do has a result that makes me or someone else feel very bad needlessly, I don't do it again. For my moral inventory, I think I may end up both cataloging the morals forced on me as a child, and then looking forward, the things that are most harmful and most rewarding to me now - without being so rigid about them. Thanks for playing, and stay tuned for my 4th-step-induced craziness! - Lo