By Charles Obiajulu Ugwu- PhD
Most of what governs our moral lives were never argued into existence. They were rather inherited, absorbed before we had language for dissent, wrapped in reverence before we learned to reason, and enforced long after its original purpose had expired. We call these inheritances sacred, not because they are self-evidently true, but because questioning them feels dangerous. Monogamy, fidelity, obedience to doctrine, fixed notions of right and wrong and many others are treated as moral bedrock, yet they rest on foundations far more human than divine.
This essay begins where discomfort starts: at the uneasy recognition that some of our most cherished certainties may be less eternal truths than well-preserved habits, and that the cost of never asking why may be higher than we have dared to admit.
What societies call “moral foundations” are often little more than old agreements that survived long enough to masquerade as eternal truths. Time has a way of laundering human decisions into divine decrees. What began as improvisation under pressure responses to scarcity, fear, power, or uncertainty eventually hardens into doctrine. Once sanctified, these doctrines stop behaving like ideas and start acting like laws of nature. They are no longer debated; they are endured.
This is how human constructs quietly acquire the authority of the cosmos.
Consider how confidently we speak about monogamy, fidelity, obedience to doctrine, fixed notions of right and wrong, and the expectation that human behavior must bend itself around ordained principles. These are presented not as negotiated frameworks but as moral facts, immune to interrogation. To question them is to risk social exile, moral suspicion, or spiritual condemnation. Yet when examined without the fog of reverence, their origins reveal something far less mystical and far more human.
Monogamy, for instance, is treated as a moral north star, a sacred architecture of intimacy. But historically, it was less a revelation than a solution. It solved problems of inheritance, lineage, and property. It reduced rivalry in male-dominated hierarchies. It simplified governance. In early agrarian societies, where land and bloodlines mattered more than emotional fulfillment, monogamy stabilized systems. Religion arrived later, not to invent the practice, but to certify it to wrap social convenience in metaphysical authority.
This does not make monogamy wrong. It makes it contextual. The problem begins when context is erased and convenience is rebranded as virtue. When a historically contingent arrangement is elevated into a universal moral obligation, complexity is flattened. Human variation is treated as deviation. What was once a tool becomes a test of righteousness.
Fidelity follows a similar trajectory. It is spoken of as an absolute virtue, yet it has never been applied absolutely. Across cultures, fidelity has been elastic, selectively enforced, and often gendered. The same act that ruins one person’s moral standing barely dents another’s. Kings like Solomon were unfaithful without consequence; women were punished for suspicion. Clerics preached restraint while indulging exemption. Fidelity, in practice, has always been less about moral purity and more about power symmetry.
What survives history, however, is not this messy reality but a purified story: fidelity as sacred promise, betrayal as moral collapse. The story persists because it simplifies judgment. It offers clean lines in a world that resists them. But clean lines are not the same as truthful ones.
At the core of these constructs lies a deeper mechanism: the elevation of doctrine above inquiry. Once an idea is declared sacred, it no longer competes in the marketplace of reason. It exits the realm of evidence and enters the realm of obedience. To accept doctrine unquestioningly is framed as virtue; to interrogate it is framed as moral weakness or spiritual arrogance. The sequence is inverted. Belief precedes understanding. Allegiance comes before comprehension.
This is not how truth behaves. Truth invites scrutiny. It survives pressure. Doctrine, by contrast, requires insulation. It must be protected from doubt because its authority is borrowed, not earned. Once doubt becomes taboo, thinking shrinks. Curiosity is rebranded as rebellion. Questions become threats.
History offers uncomfortable reminders of where these leads. There was a time when slavery was defended with scripture, when patriarchy was described as divine order, when entire classes of people were declared morally inferior by birth. These were not moral accidents; they were moral systems, complete with rituals, texts, and justifications. They endured precisely because they were shielded from questioning. When morality is outsourced to doctrine, ethics fossilize. They stop evolving even as human understanding advances.
The determination of right and wrong under such systems becomes static, frozen at the moment of canonization. What was once adaptive becomes brittle. New knowledge, new contexts, new forms of harm struggle to find moral recognition because the framework is closed. It cannot absorb novelty without cracking.
Perhaps the most damaging consequence of this moral architecture is the force-fitting of human behavior around ordained principles. The assumption is subtle but profound: human nature is defective by default. Desire must be restrained, curiosity disciplined, difference corrected. Variance is treated as moral failure rather than biological or psychological diversity. The goal becomes compliance, not understanding.
This is how societies become experts at producing guilt while remaining amateurs at cultivating wisdom.
The human cost is enormous. People learn to distrust their own perceptions, to suppress parts of themselves that do not fit the approved template. They perform virtue rather than embody integrity. They obey rules they do not understand and defend beliefs they did not examine. Over time, this creates a population skilled in conformity but poor in conscience.
None of this is an argument for moral chaos. It is not a plea for the abandonment of values. It is a demand for their examination.
A morally mature society does not confuse age with wisdom or repetition with truth. It recognizes that some values endure because they work, not because they were declared. It distinguishes between insight and institution, between ethical reasoning and inherited obedience. It understands that reverence is not a substitute for coherence.
The irony is that many religious and moral traditions began as radical inquiries. They questioned prevailing norms, challenged entrenched power, and insisted on deeper forms of justice. Over time, those inquiries hardened into answers, and those answers into laws. What was once a living conversation became a closed script.
To reopen that conversation is not to destroy meaning but to rescue it.
Human dignity does not require doctrinal submission. It requires moral courage the courage to ask why we believe what we believe, whose interests those beliefs serve, and what evidence they produce in lived human outcomes. It requires the humility to admit that some of what we call sacred may simply be familiar, and some of what we call immoral may simply be misunderstood.
The true danger is not that people will question these axioms. The danger is that they will continue to live under them without ever asking whether they still make sense. A society that fears its own questions has already surrendered its future.
Moral adulthood begins when we stop outsourcing our conscience to ancient scripts and start taking responsibility for our ethical reasoning. It begins when we accept that meaning is not preserved by silence but refined by inquiry. The task is not to discard the past, but to interrogate it, to separate wisdom from convenience, insight from control, and truth from habit.
Only then can values earn their authority, not by decree, but by coherence with the human condition as it actually is, not as doctrine insists it should be.
About the Author
Dr. Charles Obiajulu Ugwu is a Nigerian contrarian thinker writing from Nairobi.
