Moral Relativism

We may spend our lives searching for the answer.  Searching for a purpose.  Our purpose.  A reason.  The meaning of it all.  What is the purpose of our existence?  What is the value of life?!

What if there isn't an answer?  What if our existence had no meaning.  What if life had no value at all.

Well, I guess that's not exactly what this topic is about.  But, what if there was no true definition of right or wrong?  Because, maybe there wasn't.  And the topics above weren't too far off of the topic of morality.


Once quite a while ago, I looked up moral relativism on the internet.  I looked at the comments to an article on the subject, and saw two people debating (maybe the only surprise is that it was a reasonably polite debate).  One person said there would always be things that were bad, like killing a baby, and the other said, well, what if there were situations in which killing a baby would save so many other lives?  But hypocrisy was always bad, right?

I didn't agree with either side.  I think the point is that there is no absolute definition of good or of right.  When animals killed each other in the wild, most people wouldn't see it as something right or wrong.  It was just something that happened.  The way an asteroid flies through space, or another star explodes.  People wouldn't consider those moral actions.  For those last two, that might be because there's no choice involved, which brings up the concept of free will, but that's another topic (one that won't show up for quite a while).  But even with actions that are "chosen," maybe someone chooses to kill another person, kill a group of people, destroy the entire world, nothing made this action absolutely morally wrong.  If there was another cognizant species out there that was made aware that some human ruined the lives of other humans for personal benefit, would they see morality/immorality in that act?  Maybe, maybe not.  If some comfortably living plant took more nutrients than it needed to live and caused another plant to die, is that an act that you would judge based on morality?  Was there really something that made humans just, well, special?

I don't think anything made morals absolute.  I don't think they had to be that way.  But we defined our own morals, by our own ideas, and by our own cultures.  Maybe nothing made it "absolute," but we could all agree that killing other people for no reason was morally wrong.  We see stealing, lying, and cheating as bad things.  Without any absolute answer, different people and different cultures would have different morals, maybe none of which "had to be that way."  But surely it was a "good" thing, for the sake of humanity as a whole, that we created our own morals.