In 1946, the Nazi war criminals on trial at Nuremberg all offered the defence that they were merely obeying orders, given by a duly constituted and democratically elected government. Under the doctrine of national sovereignty every government has the right to issue its own laws and order its own affairs. It took a new legal concept, namely a ‘crime against humanity’, to establish the guilt of the architects and administrators of genocide.Well, this raises a perplexing question, I should think, for those who've adopted a secular outlook on things. How can there be "a crime against humanity" in a world which denies any higher moral authority than the state?
What reason, exactly, can someone who denies the existence of a transcendent moral law-giver provide us for saying that the holocaust was evil? Rabbi Sacks, of course, was a theist and had ample grounds for condemning it, but what of those non-theists who in the wake of WWII were morally outraged by the genocide of the Jews and the Japanese atrocities in Nanking and elsewhere?
Aside from a lot of emotive rhetoric, perhaps, what rational justification can they give for saying that these horrors were immoral or evil?
There is none. They were simply emoting, giving expressions to their feelings, but why were their feelings any more "right" than the feelings of the Nazis?
Objective moral right and wrong require a standard beyond our subjective individual intuitions of right and wrong, and in the absence of God there is no such standard. Those who condemned the Germans at Nuremberg were tacitly adverting to a higher law than the law of the state, even if some of them had no grounds for thinking that any such law existed.
The world did something similar in 1948 when the U.N. passed its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in which it pronounced that all humans on the planet were born free and equal and had a right to life, a right not to be enslaved or tortured, etc.
But where did the drafters of this Declaration think such rights come from? If we're all the result of eons of mindless evolution how do we come to have "rights" which everyone else is obligated to respect? And for that matter, where does the obligation to respect those rights come from?
These things are simply comforting, feel-good fictions unless they're mandated by a moral authority who has the right and the power to hold us accountable.
Men can pass laws which entail punishments if those laws are transgressed. They can, if they have the power, impose their will on other men and exact punishment if their will is violated.
But what men can't do, independently of God, is claim that any behavior is wrong in any moral sense. The Soviet communists could pass a law saying that it's illegal to speak out against the state and send transgressors to the Gulag or to the grave, but what they couldn't do, at least not logically, was declare that it was morally wrong to speak out against the state.
It may have been illegal in the antebellum South to harbor runaway slaves, but that certainly didn't make it morally wrong. Legality and morality are two different things. The men on trial at Nuremberg broke no laws of their state and no one who denies a law that supercedes the laws of men can say that they did anything morally wrong.
The non-theist who wants to condemn them has left himself with no grounds to do so, for if objective morality is not rooted in something higher than man, either individual man or collective man, then it does not exist. Morality is merely a matter of arbitrary personal feelings and the power to impose them on others.
A non-theist who believes in human rights and moral evil should either give up those beliefs and live as a moral nihilist or give up his atheism. Otherwise, his moral judgments are incoherent.