Million Dollar Madness

In my last post, I explained that there is objective truth in the world. I have only talked about complete objective or complete subjective truth thus far, but there are "shades" in between those two ends. Some people believe there is some objective truth, and they could be wrong about some things, but certain areas of truth are dependent on an individual's views.

One of these areas is morality. Even if relative morality can be argued, there is still one main issue with it. A person holding this view cannot logically enforce their views of morality on others! Since the setandard of what is correct changes from person to person, someone is justified to do anything they want to if they believe it is justified. The act remains justified no matter what someone else's view about the morality of that act is, especially since there is no "outside" standard to determine whether the act is moral or immoral.

For example, Bob has a million dollar check that is his. He holds a relative moral view. Jake comes in, picks up the million dollar check, and walks away. Bob starts an uproar. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?! YOU CAN'T STEAL THAT FROM ME!", screams Bob.

Jake tries to calm Bob down. "Dude, it's all good", Jake says, "I'm gonna cash this check and give it all to that one foundation that builds a bunch of wells in Nigeria. You were just gonna use the money to expand your world-record Twinkie collection. Taking the check seems right in my eyes".

In this simple example, Bob holds a relative morality view, yet seems to enforce what he believes is wrong (stealing the check) to Jake, even though Jake believes that stealing the check is right/moral in this situation. So, Bob suddenly appears to hold much more of an objective view of morality (that there's some sort of moral standard that everyone should follow). In this case, the standard would be "stealing something from me is wrong".

This example shows how difficult holding a strict relative moral view would actually be. You cannot enforce what you believe is moral, even if someone performs an act that is clearly immoral. Besides, there is nothing that is "clearly immoral", because there is no absolute standard available to determine what is moral/immoral. Relative morality ends debate on what is good/moral, because a person's view on what is moral is automatically correct.

In summary, the relative moral view is almost impossible to hold practically, and leads to contradictory views about the same topic. This contradiction issue is the same one found in the relative truth view. There is some kind of objective standard of morality. A person can have a wrong view about what is moral. 

Although I have not backed this next statement up yet, I believe there is a standard that applies to all people. Once again, I am discussing "extreme" views - total relative/objective morals. There are other views, like societies determine morals, but I will hold off on them right now. I have also not discussed the foundation of objective truth.

Since I don't want to make these blog posts too long, I will split up this topic and relative religious views (my next post). I also plan to add website sources to reference once the topics start getting more complicated.