Reports from a Resident Alien

If morality is not absolute, then it is irrelevant. Let me explain.

Back before European explorers first landed in South America, the Aztecs had a thriving civilization. They had their own culture; they had their own language; they had a style of art and a structured civilization. They had a complicated mythology. Archeologists are still finding out more and more about them. They also, of course, practiced human sacrifice, and apparently on a large scale.

Then there were the Spanish. Another thriving civilization. Of course we all know what happened; put them together, start the invasion, and only the Spanish came out on top. It didn't help that the Aztecs had never been exposed to smallpox and the like. Net loss: One Aztec empire.

Don't worry, I'm not really here to discuss history; in fact, I don't really know much more about the whole incident than what I got from casual reading. I'm actually more interested in the clash of morality here. On one side, we have a group of people who sincerely believes that if they don't participate in rituals that involve human sacrifice, the gods will withdraw their favor and everyone will die (or, less apocalyptically, their society will destabilize and chaos will descend). On the other side, we have a group of people with an equally sincere belief in their own superiority and their own right to take the land they wanted. Both sides essentially believed they were doing the right thing when they took human lives.

Looking back on it, I doubt that anyone would want to revive either human sacrifice or the kind of destructive conquest that leaves entire nations scattered or dead. But there are lots of people who would say, "Well, that was right for them, back then. They believed they were doing the right thing; and it's really the intent that counts. For them, it was the right thing to do."

So here we have the idea that society, and society alone, determines what is right and wrong.

But that's faulty reasoning. First of all, to give society the responsibility for determining morality, you have arbitrarily declared that societies are infallible, and that when a society and an individual within it differ, the individual must be in the wrong. Looking back into my own country's history--both my birth country and my adopted country (Germany and the USA, respectively), I can see an awful lot of evil that was socially accepted, and a lot of individuals who disagreed. One particularly striking example is the way the US justified slavery during the time when it was legal; they actually had people preaching sermons about how it was better for black people to be slaves because they would be happier, because they were incapable of making their own decisions or taking care of themselves. Slavery was evil then, and is evil now. That we didn't acknowledge it back then doesn't make it any less true now.

But you might still say that good and evil are defined by society; in 1800, America defined slavery as "right", and in 2010 we define it as "wrong". Fine. So which society is correct? 1800s America or 2010 America? If your answer is "both", that evil changes depending on your perspective, then there's no need for a concept of "evil" at all; the term "evil" can be completely replaced by the phrase "socially unacceptable", or anyway a special case of the term that involves just the society's mores (rather than simple customs which do not arouse moral judgment from most people--for example, it is not common to keep more than five cats in the same house, but most people in our society would not judge it as wrong to keep six).

But if "evil" is the same thing as "socially unacceptable", then you can't argue about morality; you can never say something is right or wrong categorically; you can only say, "I do not prefer this" or "My society does not prefer this."

The only way for good or evil to have meaning at all is for them to have a meaning that is not determined by society. For this independent meaning to exist, Good and Evil have to exist as separate entities, outside the minds of people. Their being immaterial concepts does not preclude their being real; numbers are concepts with independent reality, for example, and so are ideas like sequence, cause-and-effect, and logic in general. (If logic had no independent reality, we wouldn't be able to reliably apply it to science.)

Now, if you want to say that good and evil have no meaning independent of sentient minds, then you can say that; but you should step out of the moral debate entirely, because with that premise, morality has no meaning. The only thing left of it is, "What can I do that will benefit me most without causing society to retaliate against me?" And that's a pretty poor sort of moral code to live by.

By the way: Who would I side with in the case of the Aztecs? Neither. As is the case in much of history, both sides were terribly wrong, and both sides suffered for it.