But is the standard which judges evil subjective or not? Thus far, we have only demonstrated that
God’s existence cannot be disproved on the basis of subjective evil. We have not yet discussed whether or not evil
is actually subjective. We now return to
the original question posed several paragraphs up: is the standard by which
evil is judged objective or subjective?
I begin by asking my readers a question: are any of you
perfectly good? That is, have any of you
succeeded in never telling even a single lie, or stealing a single thing which
belonged to someone else, or losing your temper even once? No?
Very well. You have just conceded
yourself as an unworthy judge of evil.
We note that the standard, whatever it is, which judges evil must itself
contain no trace of evil. For if it did,
then what standard should we say had judged that
standard to have evil in it? If the standard
has evil in it, then that means it has been compared to another standard and found wanting.
So it is with you. When you say
that you are imperfectly good, you imply an objective standard of goodness
outside of yourself against to which you have been compared and found wanting.
“When I say that I am imperfectly good, I mean that I
have fallen short of my own personal, subjective standards of goodness.” Why not, dare I ask, simply lower your
subjective standard so that your actions can meet it? If moral goodness is truly subjective in that
every decision on the matter is a legitimate one, then why deal with the guilt
of doing something “wrong”? Why not
simply lower your standards and wipe away the guilt? “I do not want my standards of goodness to be
too low.” But you must realize that this
contention implies an objective standard of “high-ness” and “low-ness” which is
pressing itself upon your own personal moral standards. Your personal moral standards can only be
“low” if there is some moral standard apart from it which is “high”. Objectivity, it would seem, cannot be evaded
when it comes to the standard which measures “goodness”.
If something is perfectly relative to everything around
it, then it does not exist. Translated
into goodness, what I mean to say is that if everyone’s say on the matter was a
legitimate – that is, if goodness was perfectly relative to whoever decided it
– then there would not be such a thing as goodness in the first place. I conduct the following thought experiment to
help demonstrate the point: consider a mirror.
What color is it? Now, some of
you may be aware, from the brilliant YouTube channel Vsauce, that mirrors
technically have a slight green tint in them.
However brilliant such an insight is, and however credible the
information, I would like to waive this fact about mirrors for the sake of
argument. This slight green tint aside,
what color is a mirror? The obvious
answer is that its color is relative to whatever colors surround it – that is,
its color is perfectly subjective. Now
imagine a world consisting entirely of mirrors.
What color is such a world?
Boggling as it is, we are forced to conclude that such a world has
absolutely no color. The color of a mirror
is relative to the colors around it; if there are all mirrors and no colors,
then there are still no colors. In order
for there to be color in this world, there must be some objective color introduced.
It’s the same way with goodness. If goodness is perfectly relative to whatever
we decide it to be, then there is no goodness.
There has to be at least some
objectivity to goodness for there to be a conception of goodness in the first
place, just like there has to be at least a fleck of objective color in a world
of mirrors for there to be any color. Clearly, the standard which judges evil to be
evil is objective and not subjective.
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