Please do not misunderstand me here, there is absolutely no question in my mind that in matters of right and wrong, not everything is either black or white. For the recovering alcoholic just one drink is wrong. However (in spite of the stand of some Christians) neither I nor the Bible condemn the drinking of alcoholic beverages period. The Biblical admonition is not to be drunk with wine, it is not to abstain absolutely. Some Christians in trying to say that it does mean that, have translated “wine” as “grape juice,” but why we would need to be warned not to get drunk on grape juice escapes me! No, not everything is black and white, but on the other hand back and white do exist, murder, rape, child abuse and widow burning are all not only wrong, they are evil!
The existence of evil seems to me to be self evident, but it goes completely against the grain of our modern thinking where moral relativism rules. This philosophy can, I think, be summed up in the phrase “It's all relative,” or to put this another way there are no absolutes, or there is no such thing as right and wrong. It is the “all” part of 'it's all relative,' that that sticks in my craw. In fact the statement “All truth is relative” is self contradictory, since it is itself an absolute statement. This can be seen by asking “Is absolutely all truth relative?” No doubt some will answer “But we mustn’t judge right? We need to be fair and neutral right?” I will deal with “we must” not judge later. But concerning being fair, how fair is it to victims of rape or child abuse, to say that these things are not wrong?
In a 2002 column Fox News analyst Bill O'Reilly asked "Why is it wrong to be right?" In talking about American college professors who currently teach that there is no such thing as right and wrong he says “they treat the questions of good and evil as relative to 'individual values and cultural diversity'." The problem with this, according to O'Reilly, is that "they see the world not as it is, but as they want it to be. And annoying questions about moral absolutes and unacceptable behaviour are usually left unanswered." I too could wish that there was no such thing as evil in the World, but it seems to me to be wrong to close our eyes to the suffering that flows out of the reality of man's inhumanity to man.
So pervasive and successful is the doctrine of moral relativity that one Canadian professor tells of his inability to get his class to say that female genital mutilation of non-consenting girls is wrong. According to Wikipedia “Female genital mutilation (FGM), also known as female genital cutting and female circumcision, is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as 'all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.' FGM is typically carried out on girls from a few days old to puberty. It may take place in a hospital, but is usually performed, without anesthesia, by a traditional circumciser using a knife, razor, or scissors. According to the WHO, it is practiced in 28 countries in western, eastern, and north-eastern Africa, in parts of the Middle East, and within some immigrant communities in Europe, North America, and Australasia."
Or what about the picture that still haunts me, of the 18 year old Afghan woman Aisha, whose mutilated face appeared on the front cover of a 2010 issue of Time magazine. It is reported that “With her clear skin and dark, flowing hair, 18-year-old Aisha would ordinarily have stood out from a crowd because of her beauty. But now, tragically, the young woman is eye-catching for a horrifically different reason. Aisha is a victim of Taliban brutality, her nose and ears barbarically hacked off by her own husband in a warped punishment for attempting to flee her cruel in-laws.” (Google "Taliban nose cut off").
Are we not willing to condemn such action? If we are not, I want to suggest that it is only because we are so far removed from such situations that it really does not affect us emotionally. This is rather like modern warfare, where we press buttons distantly removed from the front, and in so doing fail to see up close and personal, the carnage caused by our antiseptic button pushing. I want to suggest that those who refuse to condemn such actions as that cited above by the Taliban, because their philosophy teaches that “there is no such thing as right and wrong,” would jolly well change their minds if these things were happening to their daughter, or to their sister!
If what I have just said does not move you, I doubt that anything I say will make any sense to you. But though we will need to ask where it comes from, we humans do seem to have this built in “yuck factor,” which tells us clearly that these things are wrong. And we should not ignore such basic moral intuitions, even if we may need to debate and adjust or refine them. They are, as atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen calls them, “bedrock”: He says “It is more reasonable to believe such elemental things [as wife-beating and child abuse] to be evil than to believe any skeptical theory that tells us we cannot know or reasonably believe any of these things to be evil. …” (Kai Nielsen, Ethics Without God, rev. ed. (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1990), 10,11).
Certainly we will not be able to right every wrong. For the man and woman of compassion there are, and perhaps always will be, a myriad of causes deserving of our attention, energy and action, and we are all, all too finite. We do need a lot of wisdom to know when, where and how to use our limited resources. We also do not want to be starting wars left, right and centre. But to have followed moral relativity to its logical conclusion during the second World war, would have been to advocate, on principle, a “who are we to intervene” attitude in the face of the murder of six million Jews. To me this would not have been a virtuous neutrality, it would be a compassionless apathy displaying false humility! Unfortunately, as I will show in a later post, I am not just talking here about hypothetical possibilities.
To be sure cultural anthropology (which by and large has swallowed whole the philosophy of moral relativity) has a point about the need to exhibit a certain humility and sensitivity towards the culture and values of others. However I am much more inclined, with the Bible, to condemn as evil, what at times amounts to compassionless apathy. The Bible puts it this way “He who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin!” Is it not true that “all that need to happen for evil to flourish, is for good men (and women) to do nothing”? Do we really want to remain “neutral” in the face of man's inhumanity to man? Let's make no mistake about it, this is not only the logical, in some cases it is the actual, stance of those who hold to moral relativity!
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