Do what is right, not what is easy. This was posted on LinkedIn, the Instagram of business networking, and these vapid concepts are as ubiquitous as the believers. I don’t know if there is an overlap between these people and the religious, but I have my suspicions.

‘Right‘ is another weasel word. As I like to separate ‘Truth‘ from ‘fact‘, I prefer to distinguish ‘right‘ from ‘correct‘. It seems that one could simply predicate ‘truth‘ and ‘fact‘ with ‘moral’ to yield ‘moral truth‘ and ‘moral right‘ in a similar manner to the way we prefix science as pseudoscience when we want to call out its bullshit nature.

On one level, I understand directionally what these terms mean, but it still irks me. Do what is right translates most directly to ‘Do what I think you should do‘, once removed from ‘Do what I believe my preferred peer group or authority group believes you should do‘. This is what moral right distils down to.

But people who employ these terms and, more importantly, buy into them, feel very strongly that it means more than that. Generally speaking, they believe they have tapped into some universally applicable vein.

Disclaimer: I’ve been reading more of Johnathan Haidt’s Righteous Mind, so it might have tipped my sensitivity meter to 11.