PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS
WAITING FOR SOCRATES ETHICS
DO RIGHT AND WRONG TRULY EXIST?
About 40 or 50 years ago, few people would have questioned whether or not right and wrong truly exist. Since that time, though, our culture has been flooded with the idea that right and wrong do not exist in an absolute sense but rather that everything is a matter of perspective, or even better, a matter of personal opinion. So before we go further, we need to examine the question: "Do right and wrong truly exist [at least in some areas] or is EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING, a matter of personal opinion?" The answer to this issue has huge implications for the ultimate meaning of life.
Before trying to answer that question, we first need to understand that sometimes we use right and wrong in a moral sense, and in a non-moral sense at other others. For example, am I using the word "bad" the same way whenever I claim that murder is bad and that a certain job is bad for me? No. In the first instance, I am using "bad" in a moral sense: there is something inherently evil in murder. On the other hand, if I take a job which is bad for me, my action is not inherently evil. It may end up being a disaster for me (I may lose my job); however, I haven't done anything inherently evil. I won't go to prison for taking that job. I could have just as easily said, "This job doesn't fit my personality," instead of saying, "This job is bad for me." Therefore, when we use the words "good" and "bad" or "right" and "wrong" in this section, we are using them strictly in a moral sense.
THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS
So do right and wrong truly exist, or is EVERYTHING a matter of personal opinion? To me this answer is quite simple: yes, they do exist; no, everything is not a matter of personal opinion. The supreme example of this would be the Holocaust.
A few years ago, a little movie hit the screens which barely caused a blip at the box office. It is called "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas." It is the fictionalized story of a relationship between an 8-year-old German boy, Bruno, and an 8-year-old Jewish boy, Shmuel. Bruno is the son of a German commandant, in charge of a concentration camp, whereas Shmuel is actually one of the boys living in the concentration camp. Bruno upon meeting Shmuel for the first time mistakes Shmuel's clothes for pajamas, hence the title The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
At the beginning of the movie Bruno, his sister, grandfather, and mother are so proud of the father who has just been promoted within the Germany army. Only the grandmother (Bruno's dad's mother) expresses disgust at her son's new post. The dad, Ralph, whisks the family away from a lovely home in Berlin to the country to be close to his new post. When Bruno looks out the window of his bedroom, he sees some children playing in the distance. They look strange to him because they are dressed in pajamas. When the parents realize that Bruno can see the concentration camp from his bedroom window, they have the window bored up. Under no circumstances is Bruno allowed to play with such children.
Bruno, though, is an explorer and is determined to investigate what lies beyond the woods close to his house. One day, escaping the gaze of his mother, he arrives at the concentration camp where he meets Shmuel. During the course of the film, the two boys develop a relationship. Bruno, who is being taught Nazi propaganda against the Jews by his tutor, is in a quandary because Shmuel seems to contradict everything negative he has been taught about the Jews. His sister, though, is quite content with the hate spewed against the Jews.
Not only is Bruno growing in his awareness of something being amiss. Bruno’s mother begins to understand the horror that is happening just outside the walls of her home. One day after shopping in town, she arrives back at the house and asks her Nazi chauffeur where that horrible stench comes from? She sees smoke arising from the area of the concentration camp. The soldier comments: "They smell even worse when they burn." This was not something she had planned on. She had assumed that the Jews were just being rounded up to work as indentured laborers. She had had no idea that they were being exterminated. From that point on, her disgust of her husband grows and grows.
Things deteriorate so badly between the mother and father that, upon the insistence of the mother, the father decides to send the family to Heidelberg because where they lived now was really no place for children. Bruno protests but is overruled by his dad. When Bruno shares the bad news with Shmuel, Shmuel not only despairs at the thought of losing his friend but also upon something else which has just happened. I want to stop at this point and urge you to watch the movie for yourself. It is a great movie with one of the saddest endings I have ever watched.
What happened to 6 million Jews and another 12 million homosexuals, intellectuals, communists, Poles, handicapped, and other undesirables in the concentration camps is simply horrific beyond description. Children were among those who were starved, imprisoned, hanged, gassed, burned in ovens, etc. If you enter the children's museum at Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem), you will hear a tape playing the names of each child who was killed at one of the camps. The tape plays 24/7. It takes 18 months to go through the list of every Jewish child exterminated in one of the camps. And that is just the list of names of children whose deaths were documented. It is no telling how many truly died. Truly unbelievable. The medical experiments performed upon Jewish men would repulse even the most depraved.
Unfortunately, the Holocaust is just one example of the horrors which man has visited upon other men. Whereas we have an approximate figure of the number who died in the Nazi concentration camps, we really don't have such figures for the Stalinist purges which number in the tens of millions (30-50) nor such figures for the purges in Mao's China. Add to that the slaughter in the southern region of the Sudan, in Rwanda, the killing fields of Cambodia. The number is simply staggering.
When we look at the issue of right and wrong in light of the Holocaust and similar events, then the answer seems quite clear: the Holocaust absolutely, undeniably wrong. It can only be wrong, though, if an absolute standard of right and wrong truly exist. (It is impossible to claim something is wrong unless you know what is right.) "But," a person might object, "why are you always bringing in the Holocaust when you discuss right and wrong?" Simple. Because whatever view of life you adopt (God/no God; right and wrong/personal opinion, etc.), it needs to account for ALL of life and not just the parts which fit in well with the view I've adopted. All of life includes the Holocaust and similar events. In light of such events, it is natural to conclude that right and wrong truly exist in an absolute sense.
Do any other actions qualify as being absolutely wrong? Yes. Rape is never justified. One young man in one of my classes stood up and defended his viewpoint that there is no such thing as wrong or evil in the world. When a young lady challenged him regarding the issue of rape, he stuck to his guns and claimed that even rape was good. I stepped back from the young man because I knew exactly what was coming. For the next 15 mins. the young lady lit into him, giving him one of the worst verbal lashings I've ever witnessed. At least from my perspective he deserved it. A woman will never justify rape. The man would be wise not to either.
Other actions considered just wrong: cruelty to animals, cheating on one's spouse, betrayal of one's country, indiscriminate murdering of other human beings, child molestation, child and wife abuse . . . No way you spin it, the vast majority will admit such actions are absolutely, undeniably wrong.
OTHER ISSUES ADDRESSED BY THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS
Should I Obey Unjust Laws/Orders?
What makes The Boy in the Striped Pajamas so compelling is that it works on so many different levels. For example, what the father/commandant was doing was actually legal in Nazi Germany. Another fine movie which is based on the actual transcripts of the trials of the Nazi judges is Judgment at Nuremberg. It deals especially with the issue: if a law is immoral, should I obey it or enforce it? The answer given in that movie was a resounding "No." The West, in fact, felt so guilty about what had happened to the Jew that it led the way in establishing the nation of Israel three years after WW2 ended.
Whereas it is true that every law is moral or immoral in some sense, it is also true that the depth of morality/immorality is highly debatable. For example, when is the tax rate so high that it is immoral? What regulations imposed by the government are immoral. Some of these are up for debate, to be sure. But what about other laws which are undeniably immoral?
Some of my students have claimed that we should always obey the law, even some of my African-American students. When I ask them about Rosa Parks, though, their attitude changes. No, Rosa Parks should have never been told to sit in the back of a bus, and yes, she was absolutely right in refusing to sit in the back of that bus. No, Martin Luther King, Jr. should have never been told to eat in a "Colored Only" restaurant, and yes, he should have passively resisted the racist laws of the South. Some laws are meant to be broken, not violently but passively.
Other figures come to mind when talking about civil disobedience. The father of modern civil disobedience was Henry David Thoreau who ended up in jail because he refused to pay his taxes which helped fund the war against Mexico (July 23, 1846). Ralph Waldo Emerson, America's greatest philosopher, visited Thoreau in jail. Emerson asked, "Henry, why are you here?" Thoreau replied, "Why are you not here?" (from http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=318). Thoreau went on to inspire Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., to engage in peaceful civil disobedience.
What, though, if I am a soldier in the German army and my commander has ordered me to exterminate Jews? Am I, therefore, supposed to exterminate the Jews, especially in light of the fact that I swore an oath to obey Der Fuehrer in all things? The answer is still, "No." Yes, I do swear allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America. Yes, people unwisely did swear blind allegiance to Hitler, but it is still wrong to exterminate the Jews even though I swore that oath to Hitler. Why would it be wrong? Because I am obligated to obey a higher standard, a higher authority if it exists: the absolute standard of right and wrong. That allegiance trumps all other allegiances (if right and wrong truly exist), and NO ONE has the right to demand a higher allegiance to them than to that standard of right and wrong.
But the Consequences Will Be Horrible if I Disobey
For a moment think about the consequences the father might have experienced if he had disobeyed the order to exterminate the Jews.
Two issues here. First, whenever I don't do the right thing because of the negative consequences that could result if I did, what kind of person does that make me? My classes would respond: "A coward." That's exactly right. When I don't do the right thing because it is "too" hard or the consequences could be bad, I have become a coward.
Courage is one of the cardinal virtues (along with prudence, justice, and temperance). At some point the truly ethical person will have to exercise courage in order to remain ethical. In fact, courage takes the virtue to its highest level. C.S. Lewis puts it this way: "Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality." When I have to exercise courage to do the right thing, I have become moral/good at the highest level.
Most of us get caught up in the moment, though, and refuse to do the right thing. We think that this will past and soon all will be forgotten. There is a problem with that. When I make a seriously bad choice, I change. Damage is done to me. And although I may change friends and family during the course of my life, there is 1 person I always have to live around...me.
This was brought out in the movie Titanic. Bruce Ismay, who dreamed up the idea of the Titanic, was on the ship when it hit the iceberg and was about to sink. In fact, according to the records, he was to a large degree responsible for it sinking because he had insisted that the captain run full steam ahead through the northern Atlantic, even in the area where large icebergs had been spotted. Since there was limited space on the lifeboats and since he was a man, he was supposed to go down with the ship. Instead, at least according to the movie, he grabbed a young girl and claimed that he needed to get a seat on one of the lifeboats because he was the only family she had. The sailor knew Ismay was lying but accorded him a place on the life boat.
At the end of the movie the Rose character spoke about the aftermath of the sinking and how it affected all who had been on the ship and had survived. Speaking about Ismay, she said that some sought for an absolution that would never come. For the rest of his life, he sought forgiveness for what he done...but he sought in vain because that forgiveness from within himself never came. That is the damage his cowardice had inflicted upon his life.
But the Consequences Might Be Wonderful if I Disobey
In the section above, it sounded as if the consequences were definitely going to be bad for the commander if he had disobeyed his commanding officers. I would say that it is very likely that those consequences would have been bad. HOWEVER, I am NOT saying that those consequences DEFINITELY would have been bad. In fact, the consequences might have actually been good. Suppose he had resisted his commanders and brought about the downfall of the concentration camps.
Sounds preposterous? Unlikely, maybe; preposterous, no. Why? Because there have actually been times in the past when people have said, "No," and they have brought about a great, positive change in the world. For example, was Rosa Parks for sure that she was going to be made a hero for refusing to sit on the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama? No. She probably thought she was going to be lynched for her refusal because other African Americans had been lynched for lesser "crimes." But she did it anyway because she was courageous and she was right.
Did Martin Luther King, Jr., realize that he and his actions would change the south forever? No. He wanted to change the south; however, he had no guarantee this would happen. Instead, his home, church, family, etc. stood a good chance of getting bombed. Yet he did it anyway because he was courageous and he was right.
These are important figures in U.S. history; however, let us not forget Gandhi. Few people appreciate what Gandhi did. Basically, he brought down the greatest empire the world has ever known: the British Empire. A friend of mine from England who has been listed as one of the top CEO's in the world was taken aback when I claimed that the B.E. had been the world's greatest empire. He had argued for the Roman Empire to occupy that position. No way. The best part of the R.E. was actually only Greece, Turkey, and Egypt. The western half was actually a drain on the eastern half of the empire.
The British Empire, on the other hand, extended its dominions so far and wide that the saying went: "The sun never sets on the British Empire." It extended from Great Britain to Canada, to islands in the Caribbean, British Honduras (modern-day Belize), New Zealand, Australia, India, much of the Middle East (e.g., Palestine), and much of Africa. The goal of the British was actually to be able to run a train from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa to Cairo, Egypt without once leaving British territory. Think of the gold and diamonds the British mined from S.A., of the timber and natural resources from Canada, and the wealth from India. It really boggles the mind. When you go to London today, you see some of the most splendidly built buildings in the world? Many of the buildings are built of marble and laced with gold. That's just in the city. In the countryside is country estate after country estate, palaces fit for kings. How could this tiny country of 55m. people sport such wealth? She had once been the capital of the world's greatest empire--ever. And Gandhi brought it down with his civil disobedience.
But how could one man, Gandhi, bring down an entire empire? How could the one man MLK, Jr. radically transform the South? Well, they didn't do it by themselves. They had a whole host of people who followed them...HOWEVER, none of this would have happened if they had not stepped up to the plate. They were the catalysts that brought about great change in their world.
Now what is a catalyst? In science you might have a test tube which contains different chemicals. Yet nothing is happening; there is no chemical reaction UNTIL you drop into the test tube a catalyst. The catalyst triggers the chemical reaction. Other chemicals are in the test tube; however, there is no chemical reaction until there is a catalyst.
In the same way, all the elements were there for the Indians to bring down the British government and for the South to rise from the Stone Age of racism. However, these were not going to happen until a catalyst was dropped into the situation. MLK, Jr. and Gandhi were those catalysts.
Well, how do you know if you are a catalyst or not? Did Gandhi know that he was going to be the catalyst to bring down the B.E.? Probably not. He wouldn't know though until he stood up against the wrong of the British people. The same holds true with MLK, Jr. However, they would have never been the catalysts they turned out to be if they had not stood up for the right.
THE EXISTENCE OF ABSOLUTE RIGHT AND WRONG POINTING TO THE THIRD MODEL OF ULTIMATE REALITY
The PreSocratics
Now that we have processed the evidence that right and wrong truly exist in an absolute sense, how does the existence of right and wrong point to the third model of ultimate reality, transcendence? At this point we will look at the first (M) and third models (T); later we will see the reason the existence of right and wrong undermine the second model (P).
The first officially recognized philosophers were the pre-Socratics, that is, those Greek philosophers who lived before the time of Socrates. The pre-Socratics focused on the nature of ultimate reality. Just exactly what is ultimate reality. For all practical purposes, they were materialists (although at times, especially with Heraclitus, their views on matter were more pan-en-theism than purely material). They searched for the one substance which made up all of reality.
The pre-Socratics claimed that nature was in constant flux or change. Just a casual view of nature confirms their claim. None of us look the same way we looked twenty years ago, ten years ago, or in my case, five years ago. We are constantly changing. The small Texas town I moved to 18 years ago looks radically different now than it did then. Our small town now has a better movie theater than Waco, a city of 100k, has (at the time of this writing)! In fact, the second law of thermodynamics claims that everything is moving towards entropy, that is, the universe is constantly winding down. The universe used to be a lot hotter than it is today; and it will be even much cooler in another 2-3 billion years.
As the pre-Socratics promoted certain elements as being the basis for all reality, they chose substances which reflected the changing nature of reality. The first pre-Socratic was Thales of Miletus (c. 624 BC – c. 546 BC). Thales chose water as being the essential substance to all of reality.
Now look at water and its tendency to be in a state of change. At room temperature water exists as a liquid; however, if the temperature reaches 100 degrees Celsius, then it vaporizes into steam. If the temperature drops to degrees Celsius, then it becomes a solid, ice. The state in which it exists is simply determining by the changing temperature.
Another pre-Socratic, Heraclitus (c. 535 – c. 475 BC), recognized the changing nature of reality. For example, he claimed that you can never step into the same stream twice because of the flow of water. Now he chose fire to be the one element which underlies all reality.
Like water, fire too is in constant flux. Sit in front of a camp fire and try to catch a flame. You can't...not only because it is not substantial enough to hold onto but also because of the fact that fire is constantly leaping about. It is difficult to control fire because of this characteristic.
(Although Buddha was not trying to come up with a scientific explanation of ultimate reality, he too recognized that nature/reality was in flux. In fact, one of the goals of Buddhism is to escape this flux and enter into Nirvana.)
Well, if matter is all that exists and it is in constant flux, then moral are in constant flux. Why? Because if matter is all that exists, then morals come only from matter. Well, if morals come only from matter and matter is constantly changing, then morals too would be constantly changing. They too would be relative, that is, in constant flux.
The Modern Theory of Relativity
We come to the modern era and find the same attitude both towards matter and ethics. The Second Law of Thermodynamics claims that "In any cyclic process the entropy will either increase or remain the same" (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/seclaw.html). Basically, the universe is running out of steam. It is running and changing, but it is moving towards entropy.
The relative nature of the universe is also a modern theory. According to Time Magazine, their "Person of the Last 1000 Years" was none other than Albert Einstein. (Readers of the magazine actually voted Jesus as the number 1 person of the last 1,000 years but the editors disqualified Jesus because He lived on earth 2,000 years ago.) What really put Einstein on the map was his theory of relativity.
According to Einstein time is a reality (as logically proved by Immanuel Kant). According to Einstein, the universe is like a huge piece of fabric with space and time interwoven in this fabric. Gravity acts upon this huge fabric of space and time. Just like a large ball, when placed upon a piece of fabric held up by people at the four corners, "bends" the fabric, so large masses in the universe exercise gravity to "bend" this fabric of space/time.
Now although Einstein postulated the Theory of Relativity, it was left up to Arthur Eddington to demonstrate that Einstein's theory was indeed correct. (He especially wanted to show that science could unite the world--an important idea especially after the divisiveness of WW1.) He demonstrated it by photographing a solar eclipse in South Africa.
Naturally we understand that there are stars in the sky, even during the day. We cannot see them, though, because of the brightness of the sun. A solar eclipse, though, would reduce the sun's brightness to such an extent that you could see and photograph the stars beyond the sun. What Eddington discovered demonstrated Einstein's theory. Instead of the light from the stars coming directly from the stars to the earth, the lights which came close to the sun were actually bent or curved by the sun before they hit earth. This was caused by the gravitational pull of the large mass of the sun. It demonstrated that Einstein's Theory of Relativity was in fact true.
Such a find has great implications for ethics, especially if the first model of ultimate reality is true, Materialism. Matter by its very nature has been shown to bend. Since the first model claims that everything is matter, everything by its nature bends, including ethics. No longer can we speak about absolute right and wrong. Instead, all ethics is relative...to this situation, to that context, etc.
All that sounds good. The only problem is that ethics is not the only part of life which comes from matter then, if the first model of ultimate reality is true. Knowledge likewise comes from bendable, flexible, changeable matter. All knowledge, therefore, like ethics, is relative. There is no absolute. Even the claim that ethics is relative is relative. This model for all practical purposes undermines all claims. Period. Richard Rorty, a thorough-going materialist, has recognized this problem and has come up with a unique solution to it: ignore it. Or in his own words: "I don't solve this;;;I DISSOLVE it." This challenge to materialism therefore just doesn't exist; just ignore it.
Maybe some feel comfortable with Rorty's dissolution; many though would see this as having your cake and eating it too. Way too convenient and way too dismissive of a serious challenge to materialism.
Absolutes Pointing to the Third Model
Now if absolutes do exist, such as absolute right and wrong, they definitely don't point to the first model. Rather they point to the third model (we will see later why absolute right and wrong undermine the second model). But we can't say that they point to the third model simply because they don't point to the first. We don't want any model to win by default. Rather it is important to see how the existence of absolute right and wrong would point to the third model.
What we are searching for is an absolute standard or a perfect standard of right and wrong. The concepts of "standard" and "perfect" are critically important for this discussion.
First, how does the idea of standard play into this? Let's suppose that a student comes to me and claims that the following is one inch in length: ______. I reject his claim and say, "No, now this (________________) is one inch in length. Now we can argue all day long about who is right and who is wrong (normally I would get to win because I am the teacher). Another student, though, is tired of the haggling and decides to show once and for all his fellow student is right. How does he prove that I am wrong and the other student is right? By producing a ruler, a standard. The standard, ruler, settles the debate once and for all. It takes a standard to do this.
Well, let’s look at a certain standard. Suppose I was to present to you the following individuals: yourself, Gandhi, Stalin, Hitler, a member of Al Qaeda, and Mother Teresa. Now suppose I were to ask you to rank them in order from best to worst morally. Your list would probably resemble this:
Two things about this. First, not once in my years of teaching have I had somebody object to ranking these people. Why? Life teaches us to think in terms of some people are better than others. We have to be trained NOT to think this way; in other words, we have to be trained to deny reality in order not to rank people this way. Second, if you take this list and extrapolate it logically you will get something like this:
Now remember that we are trying to account for life, all of life. The only model which can support this standard of perfection is the third model, that of Transcendence. There is no perfection in the strictly materialistic view of ultimate reality; the claim that EVERYTHING is perfect will fall to pieces when we later study the second model, Pantheism (Pan-en-theism).
Now NOTHING can be proved conclusively; however, if you claim that there is at least some absolute right and wrong’s in the world, then you have established the basis for the third model, the model which claims that there is a transcendent sphere outside our material universe.
An Objection: But People have Different Morals?
One objection I continually hear is this: there is no absolute standard of right and wrong because people have different views on what is right and wrong. I am not sure how that is a legitimate challenge; however, people do use it. It would definitely be a problem if morals come only from people; however, if there is an absolute standard, then morals do not come from people but rather from a perfect Being in the third model.
But if the third model does exist, then why doesn't everybody have the same morals? There are several possible explanations for this:
The list can go on and on. In the meantime the extermination of the Jews would have continued. Nothing good would have come from his disobedience; instead he/his family would have been devastated.
1. Gandhi: EVEN BETTER
I am not saying I agree with that list entirely; for example, Hitler normally has a worse reputation than Stalin because few in the U.S. understand the atrocities Stalin perpetrated against his own people. Hitler may have killed his 18m, but Stalin his 30-50m. Also, some would place Mother Teresa at the top with Gandhi a close second. However, this is normally the list the students give me in class when I ask them to rank these people/groups morally.
2. Mother Teresa: BETTER
3. Yourself: GOOD
4. Stalin: BAD
5. Hitler: WORSE
6. Al Qaeda: WORST
1. BEST/PERFECT
You cannot logically keep saying worse, good, better, etc. if you don’t end up with “perfect.” You can keep saying better and better; however, it must end in perfect for this ranking to make any sense logically. In fact, what makes Gandhi better than you is the fact that Gandhi is closer to the standard of perfection than you are. Mother Teresa is better than Al Qaeda only because the standard of perfection exists—she is closer to that standard than Al Qaeda. Without that standard, we can say, “We prefer this person or that person,” but we can’t say, “This person is better.” That last statement…which life forces upon us…can only be made if that perfect standard exists.
2. Gandhi: EVEN BETTER
3. Mother Teresa: BETTER
4. Yourself: GOOD
5. Stalin: BAD
6. Hitler: WORSE
7. Al Qaeda: WORST