Friday I wrote about an exchange at Uncommon Descent between Barry Arrington, a lawyer, and a commenter who calls himself camanintx. In response to Arrington's question about the existence of absolute right and wrong camanintx replied that morality is determined by the society in which people live and is thus subjective to the individual or relative to the society:
Barry: Let's assume for the sake of argument that drugging, raping and sodomizing a young girl was considered moral behavior in Arabia between the years 501 and 600 AD [I by no means concede that, but will accept it arguendo]. On the basis of your response, camanintx, I assume you would say that the fact that it was considered moral behavior in the society in which it occurred, is in fact determinative of the morality of the behavior, and therefore if Polanski had done what he did in that place and time it would have been moral. Is that what you are saying?
camanintx: Since morality is a subjective term, yes, that is exactly what I am saying.
The notion that moral right and wrong are purely subjective is a very difficult view to live out consistently and is devastating to any society in which it's widespread. If one is one's own moral authority then nothing is really right or wrong. No matter what I do, if I think it's right then it is. Thus, if one thinks slavery is right, or human sacrifice, or torturing children or animals, or raping little girls, whatever it is, camanintx would not say that a person is morally wrong either to think this or to actually practice these things. In camanintx's universe moral worth is a matter of one's own choice and preference or that of the society in which one lives.
This view is fraught with problems. Here are a couple:
1) What exactly is the decisive unit of moral authority for camanintx? Is it a nation, a subculture, or the individual? Is it his intellectual or professional peers or is it people of the same gender, ethnicity, or political party? Moral relativists rarely answer this question with any lucidity.
2) But however those questions are answered, how many people in that unit have to hold something to be wrong before it is indeed wrong? A majority? If so, how do we ascertain what the majority thinks? Do we take a daily poll? If 51% of the people today think that infant sacrifice is acceptable it would be moral today to sacrifice infants, but if tomorrow 51% think it's unacceptable then tomorrow it would be wrong. It's a strange view of right and wrong that sees it as so fluid a concept.
3) Suppose someone lives in two different morally relevant societies. The consensus view of this person's ethnic group, say, is that cheating people is wrong, but the consensus of his professional peers is that cheating is the proper way to do business. On what basis does he decide which group is morally authoritative? Ultimately he has to decide for himself which means that the individual is the ultimate arbiter of moral right and wrong, and whatever he think is right is, in fact, right by definition.
4) Moreover, if the majority decides what's right then someone who holds a minority view is ipso facto wrong. It's logically impossible for them to be right since they hold a view contrary to that of the majority, and there's no reason why their society should tolerate their opinion. If this view of right and wrong were held consistently there could be no reform since a minority opinion could never be true and there'd be no reason to consider it.
5) Most ironic, if camanintx is correct that the truth about moral right and wrong is decided by the majority then one who believes as he does, if he lives in a society whose majority disagrees with him, would have to admit that his belief is wrong and he should change his view to conform to that of the majority.
Charles Darwin wrote in his Autobiography that "One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life ... only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best." Darwin was right about this. If there is no God then there is no real right or wrong. Our action has no real moral value. The problem is that not only is this socially catastrophic, it's personally impossible. No one can live this way unless one is an arrant nihilist. In other words, ironically, few people can live consistently with the entailments of atheism. What's worse for atheism, few people would want to.
RLC