One of the reasons I’m interested in ethics is because relativism, though currently very popular, has devastating consequences, and I want to help students learn how to critically examine the views that they are force-fed from birth. Few can thoroughly live out the belief that the heart of morality boils down to personal preference. Ted Bundy saw clearly on this point. Here’s what he had to say:

Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved either right or wrong. I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured it out for myself – what apparently the chief justice couldn’t figure out for himself – that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any “reason” to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring – the strength of character – to throw off shackles….I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment” that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these “others”? Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig, or a sheep, or a steer? Is your life more to you that a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as “moral” or “good” and others as “immoral” or “bad”? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham, and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.

Terrifying. This is the teaching under which our students sit today.

Written at 5:47 pm         ||         Filed under: General
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