Wrestling with Morality: Are Our Ethics Solid or Shifting Sands?

In 1945, the Nuremberg trials prosecuted Nazi officials for “crimes against humanity.” A concept that had to be invented for the occasion. It rested on the idea that there's a moral law that transcends any nation's laws. Exactly. And that whole trial brings up the question we're diving into today. It feels connected to what we talked about last week—wrestling with whether you're the same person after seven years. Are our morals just as fluid? Or is there something solid underneath it all? That’s the tension, isn't it? On one hand, you have this powerful intuition that some things are just plain wrong. Torturing a child for fun.

It’s not wrong because of a local custom, it’s just… wrong. Full stop. Right. It feels like a law of physics. Like gravity. You don't need a holy book or a philosophy degree to feel that. Many thinkers, from ancient theologians to philosophers like Immanuel Kant, would agree. They'd argue that morality is objective. It's either commanded by a divine being, or it's discoverable through pure reason—a universal rulebook for humanity. Okay, but then the problems start. Whose divine being? Whose version of reason? Because people have used both of those to justify some pretty terrible things throughout history. They have. And that's the door swinging open for the other side of the argument: that morality is a human invention.

A construct. So, you mean it's all relative? What’s right for you isn't right for me? Not necessarily so individual, but maybe more cultural or biological. The argument from evolutionary psychology, for example, is that our moral feelings—empathy, fairness, loyalty—are just survival strategies that got hardwired into us. Wait, so compassion is just… a useful genetic illusion? A trick our DNA played on us to get us to cooperate and not kill each other in our sleep? In that view, yes. It's a pragmatic tool for social cohesion, not a window into some cosmic truth. It’s what allowed us to build tribes, and then cities.

We call it "good" because it's good for the group. I have to admit, that feels… bleak. It drains the meaning out of it. If my impulse to help someone is just a leftover program from my caveman ancestors, it feels less profound. It can feel that way. But the relativist would ask, does it matter where the impulse comes from, as long as it leads to a better, more compassionate world? Hold on—but that’s the problem right there. What does "better" even mean in that framework? If morality is just a set of local customs, who are we to judge the customs of another culture? And now you've landed on the single hardest question for this view.

If there's no objective right and wrong, just different cultural programming, then what grounds do we have to condemn something like the Rwandan genocide, or the actions at Nuremberg? If we say "that's wrong," are we just imposing our own cultural preferences? That's a terrifying thought. It is. It’s the point where the elegant theory of relativism crashes into an unbearable reality. It forces a choice. Either you accept that you have no right to condemn those actions, or you have to find a source of morality that exists above and beyond culture. So we’re stuck. Either we believe in a universal truth that no one can seem to agree on… or we accept that our deepest convictions about good and evil are just elaborate, localized fictions.

That seems to be the bind. And both positions demand something of us. The belief in objective truth demands that we seek it, that we align ourselves with it. It asks for a kind of faith, either in reason or revelation. And the other side? The other side, the idea that it's all a construct, places an enormous weight of responsibility on our shoulders. It means we are the authors. We are the ones who have to decide what justice and compassion will mean. We can't look them up in a universal dictionary. We have to write the definitions ourselves, together. And then live with the consequences of the world we choose to build with those definitions.

So maybe the point isn't figuring out if good and evil are "real" in some cosmic sense. Maybe the more urgent question is, what happens if we decide to act as if they are? What kind of world does that create?