Wrestling with Wrongness: Can We Ever Really Know Evil?

In the spring and early summer of 1994, during the Rwandan genocide, it's estimated that a person was murdered every ten seconds for one hundred days. Yeah. And last week, we were wrestling with the very nature of knowing something for sure. And when you hear a fact like that… it feels like the wrongness of it is something we just… we just KNOW. It feels as real as the ground under our feet. Exactly. But here's the question that keeps me up at night. Is that wrongness a property of the universe itself, like gravity? Or is it a rule that we, as humans, wrote down and just happen to agree on with overwhelming force?

See, I lean toward it being a property of the universe. A moral fact. I think there are certain truths—like "inflicting suffering for your own amusement is wrong"—that aren't opinions. They're truths we discover, not things we invent. Like a mathematical proof. It's true whether you believe in it or not. But if these are objective, discoverable truths, why are we so bad at finding them? For centuries, entire civilizations thought slavery was morally acceptable. They were just… wrong? Objectively wrong, in the same way someone who says two plus two is five is wrong? I think so, yes.

It’s a difficult position, but I think they were. Our understanding evolves. We get better at seeing the truth. Just because humanity once believed the sun revolved around the earth didn't make it true. We were just collectively mistaken. Why can't the same be true for morality? Mm-hm. So you're saying there's a North Star for morality, and our compasses are just… faulty. We're slowly, clumsily, trying to point ourselves in the right direction. Right. The existence of the North Star isn't dependent on our ability to navigate by it perfectly. Okay, but let's flip it. What if there is no North Star?

What if morality is entirely a human invention? A set of agreements we make to live together. You know, a social contract. We agree not to steal from each other because we don't want to be stolen from. That's the subjective or relativist view, right? That morality is just a description of a culture's preferences. Yeah, and it explains a lot. It explains why different cultures have had wildly different moral codes. It's less about discovering a universal truth and more about, uh, building a system that works for a particular group at a particular time. But that is a terrifying idea to me.

Because if that's true… if morality is just a story we tell ourselves… then on what grounds do we condemn the Rwandan genocide? Oh, wow. Yeah. Seriously. If there's no objective truth, then all we can say is, "Our society's story says that was wrong." But the people who did it had a different story. And in a purely subjective universe, their story is just as valid as ours. It just becomes a clash of opinions. So you're saying we can't just say, "We don't like genocide." We have to be able to say, "Genocide is WRONG." Full stop. As a fact. Yes! Without that, the word "wrong" loses all its power.

It just means "something I disapprove of." And that feels like an unbelievably flimsy foundation to build a just world on. It feels like building a house on sand. So we're caught. Either we have to believe in these invisible, universal moral laws that we can't seem to consistently agree on… or we have to accept that our deepest convictions about good and evil are ultimately just… preferences. That's the bind. And I don't think there's an easy way out of it. The first option requires a kind of faith. The second one… the second one leads somewhere so dark I don't even want to contemplate it.

It makes justice an illusion. And maybe the struggle, the wrestling with it that we do every day, is the only real thing. The choice to act as if our compass is pointing toward a real north, even if we can't prove the star is there. Maybe. It’s a choice to believe that some things matter, objectively. Even if we're the only ones in the universe who think so. Which leaves me wondering… is choosing to believe in goodness the first and most important moral act of all?