About doing the right thing

I am alone. But I cannot move because I am stuck in a tight crowd of people. I am spending the New Years Eve on my own in Bangkok; I observe how neatly thousands of people queue to go see the fireworks, what they do through their smart phone cameras. I have not got any new years resolutions in my mind. Except for maybe one thing that I have been thinking about lately: Doing the right thing. Universally.

New Year's dinner

 I never break the law, but sometimes I knowingly make ethically wrong choices. For example, I may kiss a guy who has got a girlfriend. I have never met the girl, so she is just a stranger over whose happiness I have no responsibility. You may ask why I do so if I know it is not good. Well, simply because it gives me immediate wellness. Besides it is him cheating, not me.

After a while I am not very satisfied, though. I can tell myself that everyone does the same and it is not impacting anyone in my circles. However, if you scale up you can see that universally I am doing the wrong thing. What I am doing is hurting someone: the girlfriend who I do not know and who does not know me. If you think about the big picture, there would be no such wrongfulness – either towards others or yourself – if everyone considered everyone regardless of knowing them. If I thought about the girlfriend's feelings, there would be one less unhappy person around.

Additionally, when you do wrong together with someone else you learn to know that s/he is not ethically strong, either. In other circumstances s/he could do the same to you if s/he got immediate benefit of it. This thinking applies to other minor wrongfulness, too, like speaking negatives behind one's back, taking credit for someone else's work or blaming another one for your own mistakes.

In the long run I want to feel dignity over my actions, no matter if anyone I know gets angry at me. I want to be proudly above unethical people – to do the right thing for the universal sake of it, not for the fear of punishment. Still, to be an honest person, I do not make a new years resolution about this. I know I will occasionally keep doing the wrong thing, but I promise to at least consider its universal impacts.

A wrong thing to do