Absolute Moral Truth

“Is there any such thing as objective moral truth?” This question has been asked since man’s beginning and promises a different response depending on who is asked and when. However it seems more and more the resounding answer we hear from our “modern” culture is;

NO! Moral Truth is whatever I want it to be.

This ideology has been furthered by the works of philosophers Friederich Nietzsche and Edward Westermarck who were most famous for their advancements of moral relativism. From a purely rudimentary standpoint it is easy for the mind to comprehend their viewpoints of morality which is why their notions have stood the test of time; they require no effort or intellectual insight. As with any hypothesis or theory it is critical that it be tested to show the produced result. Let’s analyze how moral relativism works in the world of ideas.

A little boy is brought into the world in the late 1800’s in Austria Hungary. From an early age this boy is forced to watch his mother beaten ruthlessly by his own biological father. His mother stays quiet as his father beats him violently into submission for small acts of disobedience. His entire adolescent life is ridden with bruises, scars, and brutality. On more than one occasion this boy is punished so severely he is bedridden from the trauma of his father’s beatings. This innocent child is often abused mercilessly without cause.

Fast forward and this boy enters adulthood and becomes a young man. In Vienna his mind begins to become self aware and is slowly shaped by his surroundings. Now after only 24 years of life he has come to a sharp realization. This young man, Adolf Hitler, came to truly believe that the Jews were the enemy and they needed to be eradicated from the planet. After years of enduring his own nightmare, he turns his example of retribution and justice on to millions of Jews.

Now under the pretense that there is no such thing as a moral absolute, how can anyone say that he is wrong? If there is no such thing as moral truth who are you to say what is good or bad? As you can plainly see no reasonable human can see the Holocaust and the carnage of World War II as anything other than a deep and ugly scar on all of humanity.

The very fabric of moral relativism falls to pieces when applied to such a horrific atrocity, so how is it still so widely accepted? In order to answer that I believe you start by asking another more abstract question. How does one eat an elephant?

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A young girl is raised in a deeply religious Catholic home. She is taught from an early age that God is watching her and that He does not approve of sin. She loves her parents and wants to make them proud, but she doesn’t see things the same way they do. They are a part of a different generation and don’t understand how “things are” today. She is deeply in love with her boyfriend and plans to marry him after high school. So because she is in love she goes against God’s law and her parents demands and one day she gets the call from the doctor’s office.

She’s pregnant.

Out of fear she hides it from her parents knowing the shame and hurt it would cause them. She manages to hide her pregnancy from her teachers and family and carries the baby to term. She wakes up one morning; she is giving birth and she is terrified. She is so scared of her parents that she refuses to tell them in spite of the fact that she is about to have a baby. She can’t trust her friends and her boyfriend broke up with her 2 months before refusing to father the child. She’s completely alone and doesn’t know what to do.

She gives birth. She prays for forgiveness. She throws her baby in a dumpster.

The acceptance of Moral relativism is a lot like eating an elephant. It is swallowed one willful bite at a time. Slowly we begin to chip away at our foundation in the name of “convenience” and “tolerance” refusing to call things what they are because we are afraid to judge. There is a difference between passing judgment and standing for what is right.

The philosophy of convenience creates a new concept and brands it good simply because it is freely chosen. This is not morality; this is merely exercising every human’s ability to choose.

Returning to the issue at hand, does freely choosing to do something make it good or right? The answer must be no in order for there to be any order in this world. There must be a higher order of objective right and wrong or everything we do in the world of laws, rules and government is only a matter of taste and therefore of no meaningful value. If the world of right and wrong is controlled by popular opinion than what precludes us from an eventual state of anarchy?

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A Tutsi man in southern Rwanda is watching his family while they prepare to flee the country as the Hutu militia approaches their village. He knows they don’t have much time and helps his wife dress their 5 year old son and pack some food for their journey. It’s too late, the Hutu’s have reached the village and opened fire on a neighboring house. The Rwandan genocide has begun.

The Tutsi man makes the decision.

He pushes his family out the back and grabs a machete. He fights off the Hutus long enough for his family to reach safety, but at the cost of his life. I met his son years later in South Africa; he retold this story with tears in his eyes and great pride as he shared this epic tale of his father’s great sacrifice. Is what that father did anything less than heroic? How can we say that without the existence of an objective moral order?

The path of discovering what is morally right and good is journey and I do not pretend to be the author but merely a harbinger. It is critical however the groundwork be laid in order to establish the reality that there must be objective moral truth or everything we believe is a matter of personal opinion. We as a people simply must depart from the cancerous ideology that truth is a matter of taste. When we chose to remove our own hands from our eyes then and only then will we begin to truly see.

This one’s for you Bob