Relatively Wrong

In life, and in my writing, I strive to elevate perspective.  Beginning from the premise that every individual is the protagonist of their own story means attempting to understand why people make certain decisions and behave in certain ways.  It fosters understanding and sympathy even for actions and opinions with which I might personally disagree.  To do this effectively requires applying moral relativism.

We wrote about moral relativism before; it is the concept that there is no absolute morality, that right and wrong are merely a product of culture and context.  To Aristotle’s question of “is conduct right because the gods demand it, or do the gods demand it because it is right,” moral relativism firmly answers the former, and that those gods in question are the prevailing cultural mores and norms.  Morals by the behavior of the majority.

Under the framework of moral relativism, good and evil become meaningless in any absolute sense.  If a culture finds it normal to execute every third child born, that is not merely not evil, but morally justified.  If a culture regards war as its highest ideal, and recognizes none of our modern notions of “laws of war,” their warmongering and violent atrocities are not just justified, but morally upright, even required.  You can see wherein the danger of this kind of morality lies.

Applying moral relativism as a tool for understanding others, for approaching history, and for writing more complex stories is well and good, and especially a fine antidote to the tendency to impose the lens of modern causes upon the past, and the trend in fantasy for stock showdowns between good and evil.  It is when it is applied to the real, current world that moral relativism becomes dangerous.  Surely there are some actions which we can define absolutely as evil.  Otherwise, a serial killer is only “evil” because he does not live in a society of serial killers, and doesn’t that strike you as wrong, or at least make you uncomfortable?

The opposite extreme to moral relativism is the deontological approach, perhaps most famously espoused in Kant’s maxim that “something is right only insofar as you should desire that it become universal law.”  This is like a fundamental physics of morality, suggesting that it ought to be possible to derive from first principles a universally applicable morality.  Such an idea appeals to me, but it has its own flaws, not least of which being that practicable derivations of moral “laws” are nigh impossible, at least with our current understanding of the relevant fields.  Far simpler to adopt an approach like Aristotle’s “virtue is the mean between two vices,” but even Aristotle admitted that some things are categorically evil.

Maybe it is my own flaw that I want there to be evil.  Not that I want evil to exist and to happen, but that I want a morality that allows us to say with certainty, and with no caveats, “that is evil.”  That is, and should be, a difficult threshold to establish, but it is a powerful one, and one worth making.  Someone who delves too deeply into moral relativism risks becoming unmoored from virtue of any sort, able to justify anything at all, no matter how abhorrent or atrocious.  The old axiom, “stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything,” is an apt warning that is only fully understood in contemplating the dangers of extreme moral relativism.

That warning against extremes may be the best guide we have to an independent morality, a conduct that the gods might demand because it is right.  Any philosophy ever proposed, any moral code, fails when it is taken to an extreme.  Aristotle may have gotten closest with his virtue as the mean between two vices, as vague and simplistic as that might seem (and, of course, it does not define what is a virtue and what a vice).  The truest evil I know is the evil of extremes in their many forms.  There is evil in the world, and we must be able to recognize it, to name it.  If we fail to name evil, not only will evil be free to run amok amongst us; we risk falling for evil ourselves.