Right and Wrong - and the responsibility to make a choice

There's a widespread tendency toward being subjectivist and/or relativist when folks think about morality.

Even otherwise reasonable people, trying to defend the freedom to decide moral questions for themselves, often mis-state that position so that it sounds subjectivist.

They say something like:
Right and wrong are only a matter of how every individual person sees it.

Let's look at this a bit closer with an eye to saying it more clearly.

Right and Wrong are indeed absolutes, but it's necessarily up to every individual to decide what to do about that. Each of us must choose what things are moral, since individuals must act, and human action requires, first, thought.

So the rightness/wrongness of a thing can be derived by looking at reality correctly -- but such looking must be done by each individual. It's not an easy process, especially on complex high-abstraction topics, but it's a requirement of living, foisted upon us by the nature of things.

Many people strain to avoid the necessity of moral choice — preferring instead to follow, in various degrees of blindness, the choices made by others before them, or by others around them. So we see folks following ideas from "moral leaders," or surrendering to the cultural mainstream — osmotically soaking up "what everybody knows" and letting thereby the mob's "judgment" replace their own. This is a dangerous method of living. Properly, no idea should exist in your mind without you having examined it before you put it there.

And it's not just a matter of whether we're "close-minded" or "open-minded." We should strive to be neither of those, but ... Active Minded. The active mind shines its spotlight on every question, taking the responsibility of making the moral choice, accepting the results of that choice, and learning constantly from the process.

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