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Is there any real
right and wrong?
What would you do
if, during World War II, you were hiding some Jewish people in your home
and a Nazi soldier came to your door and asked if there were any Jews
inside? Would you tell the truth and consign these innocent people to
death, or would you lie to protect them? Most people respond to this question
with the "logical conclusion," that they would lie and protect
the Jews.
For years now, many
people have used such moral dilemmas to disprove the existence of moral
absolutes. Lying may be wrong in most situations, they say, but not in
all situations. But what do moral dilemmas really prove? I argue that
they do not prove that there are no moral absolutes. That conclusion does
not follow from the above example. To the contrary, there would be no
dilemma if there were no moral absolutes. Moral dilemmas merely show that
in some circumstances one must choose the greater good when more than
one absolute impinges upon the situation.
Because of moral dilemmas
like this one, and other major disagreements over ethical questions like
abortion, euthanasia, pre-marital sex and capital punishment, many think
that ethics must be relative to individuals, culture or time. People do
not realize that an increasing number of philosophers these days think
that ethical relativism is naive and that morality is objectively true.
Surveys tell us that
most people in Western society claim to be moral relativists; that is,
they claim that what is right for one person is not necessarily right
for another. But it is very easy to say there are no objective or absolute
moral principles. It is much more difficult, however, to live as if there
are none.
The way we live, our
behaviour and the way we respond when people treat us, the judgements
we make when other people are mistreated-these things reveal what we really
believe about right and wrong. For example, we believe it was morally
wrong for the Nazis to torture and kill six million Jews during World
War II. But we not only think it is wrong, we think everyone should agree
that it is wrong. This is not to say that something is wrong just because
everyone agrees it is wrong. There is a logical possibility that we are
mistaken and it is just our cultural conditioning that tells us these
things are wrong. This may be a logical possibility, but is it very likely
that our deepest intuitions about this matter could be mistaken? That
would mean torturing people is not really wrong; we just think it is.
But if this basic intuition is wrong, that is, if it is merely the result
of cultural conditioning, could it be possible that our other basic beliefs
and intuitions, such as our belief in cultural conditioning, are also
the result of this same conditioning process? If so, it seems this line
of reasoning is self-refuting. It fails its own test.
Most people know that
such atrocities as what the Holocaust are genuinely, objectively wrong.
Christians believe that if objective principles of right and wrong exist,
there must be a foundation for them. And the foundation that makes the
most sense is the character of a perfect and holy God.
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