MORAL RELATIVISM AND ITS COSTS

The educated and the university community are largely committed to moral relativism. As such, morality is something we just make up according to the way we were socialized and the way we feel. From this point of view, there are no moral laws apart from our own thinking. Therefore, morality is not absolute, objective, universal, and unchanging. Consequently, the “evil” of torturing babies is no more than a temporary human convention.

What are the implications of moral relativism? Do we realize the great price we are paying by making evil into a merely subjective feeling or decision? Here are some of the costs:

1. We cannot coherently criticize any evil or unjust act if there is no actual, objective right and wrong.
2. There is nothing objectively wrong with genocide, rape, torture or any form of criminality or injustice.
3. Life becomes meaningless apart from lower animalistic pleasures.
4. Human life and all of our commitments are minimalized.
5. The common moral language that binds us together is dissolved. Saying you are sorry then becomes meaningless and a mere tool to manipulate others.
6. Such a belief system is utterly unlivable. 

Socially, we should expect moral and legal chaos and collapse. Even the secular humanist and atheist Max Hocutt warned:

• “To me [the non-existence of God] means that there is no absolute morality, that moralities are sets of social conventions devised by humans to satisfy their needs…If there were a morality written up in the sky somewhere but no God to enforce it, I see no good reason why anyone should pay it any heed.” (Understanding the Times) 

Serial killer Ted Bundy understood this reasoning and took it to heart:

• “Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective [it just depends on how you think about them], and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.” (Christian Research Journal, Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32) 

Bundy’s conclusion was honest. If there is no God in whose image we are created, then there is no objective difference between us and hogs. We are all animals and can be treated as such!

There is only one possible basis for an unchanging, objective, and universal moral order – an unchanging, universal, and transcendent God!