Good and Evil: Whence?

So familiar, so commonly used, yet so misused and so misunderstood. These words, together with other words that have moral meanings, really need to be looked at more closely to try to find out what they actually do mean. We need to know whether they have a relativistic meaning or whether they are absolutes.

Words like these, or right and wrong, nice and nasty, come in pairs. If we have one then the opposite, far removed in meaning, is not far away from our thoughts or our memory. On the other hand there is the tendency, so patronizing from post modernism as it exists in popular culture, to say. “Oh well, that is right (or wrong, or good or evil, or nice or nasty) for you.

Implicit in these words, until modern ideas such as existentialism came along, is the despair of ever finding absolute meanings. Post modernism, of course is only existentialism with arrogance and overweening self confidence, as if all the problems raised by existentialists were solved. I has given up the idea that there are any absolutes at all and insists that everything is relative. In this they implicitly deny any possibility of communication and they pull out the moral rug from under their own feet.

The people who make these meaningless assertions fail to see that when there are clear opposites then the things in opposition are absolutes. There may be degrees of evil. And everyone thinks their particular sins are less evil than those of other people, but in fact this is not true. Hatred, harboured against someone is the same as murder. Lingering lustful glances are as bad as unfaithful, illicit sex. But then there are people now who want to argue that no sex is illicit and that some forms of murder are alright because convenient.

Foolishly the folk who use these words as if they were merely relative fail to understand that they have actually changed the goal posts by implying that the words do not mean what they have always meant. When you say, “that is right (or wrong) for you,” they imply that right and wrong no longer mean “right” or “wrong”.

They are saying that the words actually express a preference or that the person using them means what is expedient for him. When I say “right” I do not mean “what I like” nor “what is expedient at this present moment for me”. When I say “right” I mean what is right at all times and in all places, and not just for me but for the whole population of the universe.