See how I did that? I downplayed the idea by associating them with moustache-twiddling. That's something you'll usually see as a response to this kind of question, by people who are abso-100%-lutely certain there is no such thing as pure evil.

And then there'll be the philosophical discussion: what is evil, anyway? Is there really such a thing? If there is, what does it consist of? Surely Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and Microsoft are evil... what's the common thread? Is there one, or is "evil" just an illusion - a classification we give to people and entities that simply do icky things for reasons we can't fathom or generally don't like to think about?

Regardless of all this projected discussion, I'm going to stick by one of my previous pronouncements on the subject: The modern reader doesn't want to cheer when your villain meets his sticky end, he'd rather weep like a milksop because your villain was only a victim of his mother's ghastly haircuts.

Now it is common for many of the Evil leaders in stories to be personally involved in the evil activities, leading a small band to harrass and enforce the collections of "taxes." Most stories is like the sharriff gone bad or the industry head in the small town. Of course, they are right there to be isolated and eventually killed by the hero. Of course, A general at the head of an army would fit this kind of leader.

The kind of Evil I personally like is where he appears to be so wonderful a person, a politician who appears to be for the poor and desolate. He has a wonderful smile friendly disposition, likely immaculately clean with every hair in place. In public, he is likeable.
In the background though, he is actually giving orders to his minions to cause the problems he appears to be trying to solve. His cruelty might show to close minions like punishing them for having a smudge on their pristine white suits.
Because he is using politics to do what others would do personally, he would be more difficult to pin down and defeat. Any of his enemies would appear to be horrible people.
Of course, I would have the good guy looking like a down-and-out punker who has no class.

Sorry for the rambling.

As for what evil is or isn't...right now in the world, there's a lot of talk about "moral relativism," the concept that what somebody does is "no better or worse" than what somebody else does or has done. That's why you see [insert your own group] claim that they do [this disgusting act] because of [somebody else's disgusting act somewhere in the past]. (Say, Islamic terrorists claim they're trying to destroy the United States because the Crusaders tried to throw them out of the Holy Land centuries before the United States was founded.)

Ironically, villains who espouse moral relativism generally seem more villanous to me.

Sorry 'bout the soapbox ranting...I don't know what came over me. Or perhaps I do, and I am just being coy about it. In any case, one of my favorite villains of the past twelve years or so was Darken Rahl, from Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. The anti-archetypal wardrobe (he always wore white) and physical appearance (supposedly, a 'beautiful' man) of that character alone tickled my literary fancy. Too bad [SPOILER WARNING]
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he's killed off in the first book, and...um...again in the second. Seriously, the guy gave me chills, yet I couldn't help but be drawn to the passages in which he was featured. Probably that 'rubber-necking' syndrome many people seem to subconsciously suffer from...humans are morbidly fascinated by the perverse, simply because most of us make the deliberate choice to avoid perversity (in the violent sense of the term) as a psychological impossibility. I dunno.

Inkwell
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"The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp."
-Anonymous

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Ironically, villains who espouse moral relativism generally seem more villanous to me.

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I don't think it's ironic at all. Once you espouse moral relativism, you can espouse literally any moral position at all, whether it's objectively evil or not. That makes it possible for a character (or a real-life person) to believe or do _anything_ and still feel justified.

Finding a way to make my villains "sympathetic" as is the "common wisdom" for writers these days is VERY hard, because I know from the research I've read that this type of person doesn't have many redeeming qualities, except for the ones who were handsome (Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahlmer). Even Lord Voldemort was a handsome young man, but became twisted and horrible because of the things he did to himself to ensure his power and dominion over life itself.

Are good looks enough to make someone a sympathetic character? Not to people with even half a brain, IMO, but then again, Dahlmer had a *fan club* while he was on trial for *eating* people. Go figure.

To answer the original question about whatever happened to "evil" villains, Voldemort's pretty darned evil -- SCARY evil, with no redeeming features (except when he was young and handsome, but good looks aren't enough of a redeeming feature IMO). I think those writers who aren't writing "evil" villains may be buying into the "political correctness" crap where you can't say bad things about anyone even if they're true. I'll stick with the psychology of bad people - that's reality. The more reality you can put in fantasy characters, the more the readers will believe them, IMO.

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but the argument insisting that there absolutely are no absolutes

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Well, I generally write to the notion that no one, even the ostensible villain, thinks they're evil in their own minds.

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"Only the Sith deal in absolutes!"

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Are good looks enough to make someone a sympathetic character? Not to people with even half a brain, IMO, but then again, Dahlmer had a *fan club* while he was on trial for *eating* people. Go figure.

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I don't think they were his fans because he was good-looking. I think they were his fans because they thought murdering people was cool. Or because they wanted to piss their parents off. Whatever the reason, it was his actual evilness (or would you just say "his evil?") that made them join/start the fan club.

Why anybody would be a fan of that kind of evil is another interesting question. I can't figure it out, except it's probably similar to the way I usually think the bad guy is the cool one in books and movies. Evil IS certainly interesting, but I can't figure out why there would be an attraction to it. It's...well, EVIL. Why are the Sith cooler than the Jedi? I don't know. Most people are able to keep their interest in evil limited to fiction, though (I think). It's just a little disturbing to me when people take that same interest in evil and apply it to real life. Serial killers in movies: kind of interesting in a sick way. Serial killers in real life: it's pretty sick (if you ask me) to join their fan clubs.

Anyone have any thoughts on why evil is attractive (in fiction to most of us and in real life to some)?

As a side note, if you haven't seen it, "Natural Born Killers" is an interesting (albeit VERY VIOLENT--be warned) movie on the topic.

I don't think that those we regard as truly evil inhabit the same moral universe we inhabit, that's all. In ancient literature, you often find certain animals characterized as being virtual embodiments of evil because they'll kill and eat human babies given the opportunity. As our understanding of the natural world and our philosophy evolved, I think that most people began to understand that those animals simply didn't understand that there was anything wrong with eating babies, anymore than most of us think it abhorrent to eat eggs. Of course, many of those animals understand that it is dangerous to try and steal human babies, just as you might understand (if you ever worked on a farm) that collecting eggs often involves getting pecked by angry chickens (which is more serious than you'd think if you haven't experienced it), just as gathering blackberries involves the rise of thorns and prickles. But we don't feel that it is wrong to take the blackberries just because we get occasional scratches doing so. To a child, who has a primative and rather ego-centric view of the world, it is the blackberry bush which is being bad because it scratches.

The problem is that most of us can't get over this same kind of naivete when it comes to villians who are outwardly human. We tend to assume that they think about morality the same way we do, that they are seeing things from our point of view and hurting us deliberately. Whereas it is far more usual for the person who injures us to be acting without any consideration of our feelings at all. It's even a common accusation, "you didn't think about what you were doing to me!" The interesting thing is that it is based firmly on the idea that other people should judge their own actions primarily in terms of how they will affect us, rather than them.

The thing that makes most villians "evil" is that they don't think about us, whoever "we" happen to be. It might very well be because they are thinking of someone else, like their own families or friends. Ted Bundy didn't think about the suffering of his victims, he thought only of the feelings of power and fulfilment that he got from killing and getting away with it. He knew that what he was doing was viewed as evil by society, but he rejected that definition of "evil". He didn't see any reason that he should let the desires of other people stand in the way of what he wanted.

The same thing was true of the Nazies when they were exterminating various people. They knew perfectly well that those people didn't want to be exterminated, that's why there was so much elaborate deception and all the camps were guarded by guys with machine guns and stuff. But they weren't doing it because of what the Jews and gypsies and handicapped wanted or didn't want. They were doing it because they wanted a pure society with no Jews, gypsies, or handicapped.

Did it become a struggle for many Nazies to suppress their natural feeling of empathy for the people they murdered? Of course. A lot of them went more than a little batty, quite a few ended up letting people slip through the cracks whenever they could. Most of them weren't heroes by any stretch of the imaginiation, they just had moments of weakness and failed in their duty to Hitler. Many of them died firmly believing that killing Jews was right and letting Jews escape was wrong.

This isn't an issue of moral relativism. Just because someone, somewhere, happens to believe something very firmly, that doesn't mean that the converse cannot be the objective truth. A lot of people used to believe the Earth was flat. Most people today essentially believe that space-time is "flat" simply because they can't understand how it is possible for it to be curved. That doesn't mean that the Earth was ever flat, or that it wasn't always pretty much spherical. It doesn't mean that gravity and electro-magnetism are illusions. It simply means that it is possible for a lot of people to be totally mistaken about the true nature of the world in which they live.

Being a villian isn't about lacking empathy, because most villians in the history of the world have had normal empathy, just mostly for themselves and their own family and friends. Being a villian is about having a different moral vision of the world, whether or not that vision is objectively wrong. Take a moment to consider that you, each of you and all of you collectively, are the villian of someone else's story. Not just someone but many other people. You are really the villian of those stories, you are doing things for reasons that do not matter to the heroes of those stories, and you are injuring the causes about which they care deeply, by your actions or perhaps by your mere existence.

In the end, the question of moral relativism is utterly irrelevant. Even if there is an objective right and wrong, it is possible for people to disagree about what is objectively right and wrong. Even if there isn't, that doesn't change the fact that someone who wants something that directly infringes on your own ideas of what is right is a villian from your perspective, and if you try to stop them you become a villian from theirs. The existence of moral absolutes cannot produce total agreement about morality. The abscense of moral absolutes cannot remove conflict arising from different ideas about morality.

Having said that, I think moral relativism is a useful type of false moral system for a character because so many real people are influenced by it. That's not to say that most people would _claim_ to be moral relativists. Most probably haven't thought it through. That doesn't change the influence, though: most people haven't thought through the self-contradictions of Logical Positivism (a philosophy of science popular in the early 20th century), but they're heavily influenced by its remnants in the modern mindset. Same with moral relativism in moral theory and "indifferentism" in religion (i.e., the notion that all religions have an equal intellectual standing, once accidentally but concisely put to me as the notion that "religion is a journey, and the only way you can go wrong is by telling someone that they're going wrong").

In simpler terms, a moral relativist, eschewing any transcendent basis for "good" and "evil" has only succeeded in reducing the concepts to meaning "things I happen to like" and "things I happen to dislike". This generally means that a moral relativists practical morality will seem a bit more overtly selfish, which is good for making a villian because it narrows the range of people who will agree with the morality of the moral relativist.

Now, most moral relativists (true moral relativists, that is) will simply adopt whatever moral stance is most convenient for them at any given point in time. If a person truly has no convictions, there is no bar to pretending agreement with whatever morality will exact the greatest penalty on dissent or provide the greatest rewards for acquiescence. Generally this means adopting the local moral majority position, though often it means being a quisling to an oppressed/threatened majority.

The key thing is that, when a moral relativist villian is confronted, that villian has a plausible argument as to why the clearly evil things he is doing are not evil from his perspective. The argument is based on a false premise, but it's a premise, granted as part of the act of arguing the issue at all. Since the disagreement about morality cannot be settled by argument, then it comes down to force (or at least the plausible threat of force). Which is the basis of most stories where you have a villian. It's fine to have the hero win by moral suasion every now and then, but if you do it all or even most of the time, the audience starts getting bored.

Anyway, you don't have to believe that moral relativism is false to have a moral relativist as your villian. If two moral relativists have a conflict of personal interests, then that conflict assumes the character of a fight over good and evil for both of them. After all, each only means "what I happen to like/dislike" by "good/evil", and there are two distinct "I"s in play here. Of course the rest of us will regard both of them as villians, but an audience of moral relativists can line up behind one or the other of the contestents based on their personal sympathies.

I think we agree on this: From the perspective of a writer creating characters, all that matters is that the characters hold conflicting moral beliefs -- either conflicting with each other, or conflicting with the (likely) reader. Moral relativism is one convenient moral system to use to create a fairly realistic conflict of that sort.

There are other things I might find interesting to explore, discuss, and argue, but they'd quickly go off-topic and I probably couldn't devote the necessary time to them.

Thanks for the thoughtfulness you applied to your posts.

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Where did this politics stuff come from all-of-the-sudden-like?

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One fun exercize is to create your most evil antagonist. Then write something from their point of view so that, while the reader might not agree with what they are doing, or accept what they are doing, at least they can understand why they are doing it and possibly understand that it has to be done that way.

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Moral relativists do not understand right from wrong.

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Most of the issues that crop up between the two (i.e. gun control, abortion, free market, etc.) are more modern issues that really revolve around how much control they want the government to have.

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For me, bad guys fall into two rough camps. There are stupid people who are my enemies mainly because they haven't thought carefully about how to achieve their underlying goals. With such a "villian" it is plausible that I could pursuade them to become my ally. Then there are people who really want something fundamentally incompatable with my own fundamental desires (meaning those goals that I am not willing to compromise for any reason). I might trick such a person into a sort of friendship, but ultimately this must end in betrayal because that person is genuinely evil from my own point of view and I am genuinely evil from that person's point of view.

Now the villians who have mistaken beliefs about reality tend to belong to the first catagory, but many actually belong to the second. I find that a good few people who have a mistaken belief about reality hold such beliefs not because they lack access to evidence that proves those beliefs false but because those beliefs justify the actions they sincerely desire to pursue. However, it is not normally possible to distinguish between these two sorts of villians because most people believe things that are "plausible". Thus, your failure to pursuade such a person might be because of a lack of forensic skill or available evidence, not because that person is determined to resist pursuasion. It usually isn't possible to back your enemies into a position where they cannot continue to argue their own position (at least, it isn't normally possible for humans). And even if you can, it may simply be that your opponents have adapted to their poor argumentative skills by relying on methods other than argument as a means of determining truth (for instance: reliance on an authority figures).

Let's deescalate the tension by choosing an amusing real-life example. Most people refuse to believe that the idea of space aliens visiting Earth can be taken seriously. It doesn't matter how much evidence is presented to make the case, because they rely on authoritative statements by the Air-Force, NASA, and other government sources to tell them whether that evidence is "credible". This is despite the fact that all the "authoritative" sources involved have admitted lying about real events in the past when they believed those events to be evidence of extraterrestrial activity. Of course, most of the "authorities" are themselves relying on the unquestioned assumption that there isn't any credible evidence for extraterrestrial activity. Even if you are an authority, if you say that something is credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity, then you'll cease to be an authority on the basis of that alone.

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So why do the same people who favor control of guns tend not to favor control of abortion, and vice versa?

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Don't worry, I won't write about the actual politics related to this question; but the question itself perfectly exemplifies the things we should ask in character development.

A glib answer might be "because they're stupid" or "because they have a knee-jerk belief in some authority". But glib answers don't make for interesting characters. If you can discover why an intelligent person can hold a position that seems contradictory to you, and _at least_ make it plausible on the surface, you've got the viewpoint of a character who could be a "villain" in your story, but not a villain in his own perspective. Suddenly she's plausible, tangible, _real_. Fiction can show us things that we might never learn in a lecture or a newspaper clipping, in part because we can see believable characters who believe things we would normally find unbelievable.

And who knows? You might just learn enough to change your mind, too.

By the point is not that nothing is actually evil, it is that acts appear differently depending on your relationship to the act. There is a semantic theory called Theta grid that works well with certain words (my notation is rusty but I hope it's clear):

die : [[object][death]]
kill : [[agent] [death] [object]]
murder: [[agent] [death] [object] [motive]]
assasinate:[[agent] [death] [object] [[motive] [cause]]]

It is very exciting with respect to that one series of words. But if you look at a language like Arabic, it kind of breaks down because they do that with every verb. So the grammatical pattern does not link to the meaning nearly so well.

At the first level, "die" is intransitive (requiring only the "object", grammatically the subject in this case) and "kill" is transitive (implying both an "agent"/subject and an "object"/object). The Theta grid extends this fairly basic division by allowing any verb to be given a boolean value for a larger set of relational semantic components.

Thus "murder" is not merely transitive, but also has the property of assigning intention (motive) to the verb. "Assasinate" assigns intention and something we might call "motive", "intent" or reason (cause). That last sentance highlights one of the great imponderables of Linguistics generally...at what point does the study of language become impossible for those who actually use language?

Anyway, the point about Arabic is that it has a regular format for giving the basic noun many of these properties. To illustrate, imagine that we changed an intransitive verb into a transitive verb by adding "nock" to the end of the verb. Thus "lie down" would become "lienock (someone) down" rather than "lay (someone) down". And "die" would become "dienock" rather than "kill".

Now imagine that we had several other modifiers to add to indicate whether the laying was done on purpose, or in a particular manner (politely, with consent, violently, etc.), or for social, political, or personal reasons (this is the situation that actually pertains with several languages, Arabic is one of them).

If you have regular ways of modifying verbs in this manner, you can use the word meaning "assasinate" even if nobody has ever imagined the concept before, because the constructed word can easily be decoded as "intentionally cause to die for political reasons". You can say that in any language, whether or not the culture is aware of the finished concept.

The point that you can still believe someone is evil despite understanding their motives because "evil" is a matter of perspective is pretty similar to the point I was making. My point is a little different because I don't buy the idea that "evil" is entirely a matter of perspective. After all, I do evil things all the time, and it isn't like the fact that I'm the one doing them keeps me from being able to see that they're evil. If we could use a less charged term like "disgusting", then I could illustrate without...well, I'll let you judge.

Last night I was watching a show and there was a scene where a bloodthirsty, crazed, totally evil character was licking his razor sharp knife that he always carries around with him. As it just so happens, at that very moment I happened to be licking tasty blood off of my razor-sharp knife that I always carry around with me.

Now, I'm aware that licking tasty blood off my pet knife is disgusting (not evil...I don't think). Nothing about my mental makeup prevents me from thinking it disgusting even while doing it. I was watching a show where a very similar behavior was presented as archtypically disturbing, and the significance wasn't lost on me. It didn't keep me from licking my knife when I got tasty blood on it.

So for me its less a matter of perspective and more a matter of knowledge. I think it's generally impossible to take an action and definitively say "this is good" because you never know what unexpected stuff could occur. So IMO since you can't really know what's good and what's evil then the difinitive truth (if one exists) doesn't really matter, as your action is necessarily independant of the truth.

The question of guns and abortions, one might say that the elite do not want as many lower creatures so they come up with a way to reduce their population growth, and they definately don't want them to resist their treatment so they disarm them.. If you look through history and around the world, this is always true. Disarm the population and one can do anything one wants with them. Governments fear a population that can resist. The first thing a government does is disarm the population.

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So for me its less a matter of perspective and more a matter of knowledge. I think it's generally impossible to take an action and definitively say "this is good" because you never know what unexpected stuff could occur.

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You must have a tough time getting up in the morning.

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If everyone, except one person, in the world had been turned into a vampire, and the last natural human was a vampire-hunter, would he be just considered evil or would he really be so?

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On the other hand, an estimate of the actual size of the object, while it can be impacted by the position from which the estimate is attempted, is not a matter of perspective. If the estimate is wildly different from the actual size, then the estimate is incorrect.

Note that both these properties are actual properties, even though one is a matter of perspective. If I could move this a little towards the subject of good and evil, "friend" and "enemy" are both actual properties of other people that are matters of individual perspective. You might be mistaken about which persons are your real enemies and which are your real friends, but that doesn't change the fact that some people are really your friends and other people are really your enemies. Which people are "friends" and which "enemies" is inherently a matter of perspective, though (the only exception would be a person who is an enemy to everyone, which may not even be possible for a human).

Considering our vampire hunting friend, we can assume that he is a friend to himself, even if he is an enemy to everyone else. For the vampires, the situation is more difficult. If the supply of vampires exceeds the supply of humans by that degree, than almost all of them have to be enemies to each other as well as to the remaining human. Not only that, but each individual is faced with a "save it for later or eat it now" dilemma even if all the other competitors are vanquished. Of course a human can land in such a situation too, it just isn't survivable

The concept that the ends will necessarilly end up outweighing the means is inherently flawed. When you consider the long term implications of any act, the most important long term implication of that act will always be the fact of having performed it. Arguments about acts not being inherently right or wrong generally place artificial constraints on what may be considered an act, such as excluding mental and perceptual acts like "paying attention" "listening" "planning" and so forth. But when you exclude such actions from being considered, you destroy the entire basis of argument itself, since your argument depends on other people listening, contemplating, and accepting your argument. If you exclude those actions from being considered, then what is the point in making an argument at all?

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We would consider as evil, the treatement of an unarmed, dehumanized population by their elite masters. We consider them human so we feel for them.

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Putting the inherent bias of this statement aside, consider that, "Children's stories humanize all sorts of things, including Volkswagons." This still makes evil a subjective perception (though not a matter of perspective, since the children do not have to be Volkswagons themselves to think this way).

Still, this is getting closer to the issue of what makes something objectively good or evil. Even though the judgement is still subjective, the subjectivity is mainly tied to beliefs about reality which could be objectively verified. In other words, if you were able to present enough evidence that Volkswagons were sentient creatures capable of moral decision, then it would make sense to believe it as an objective fact. Conversely, if you were to present enough evidence that humans were deterministic mechanisms incapable of free will, then it would make sense to believe that as an objective fact. Of course, once you believed either (or both) of those as objective fact, you would be under the burden of acting accordingly.

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You must have a tough time getting up in the morning.

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Would you entertain the idea of acting to maximize utility given a subjective probability distribution over courses of action?

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Survivor, you have some very long posts. That said,

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The concept that the ends will necessarilly end up outweighing the means is inherently flawed.

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Well, I think there is a difference between that and "the ends justify the means." Insofar as enduring something unpleasant is different from justifying something repellant.

P.S. I saw a "Disney Villains" picture book in the Juvenile section of the library the other day.

The most certain effects of any action will be the effects most directly linked in causality. In other words, if you balance the possible ends by their probability of actually coming about, you'll see that the action itself (along with actions leading up to it) are among the most important "ends" of that action. This may relate to what tc said about "probability distribution".

In other words, while you can't know all the possible effects of any action, you can know the most likely and immediate effects of that action, because those effects are often an implicit part of the action itself. Take the example of murder. There is one certain outcome of committing a murder...you'll become a murderer. Whether that's a good thing or not depends on what you mean by "murder", but it is the one absolutely certain outcome of the act of murder.

Thus, it has to be given serious consideration in contemplating whether murder is good. All the less likely possible outcomes have to be judged for their likelyhood as well as for their importance.

You might say that everything in life is a gamble anyway...but does that make is smart to jump off a building because you might discover that you can fly? Learning to fly is a big benefit, but it appears to have a very low probability of occurring and the penalty for failure is extreme. You might bet your life on a 50/50 of learning to fly, but would you really bet it on the trillion to one or worse odds that are more consistent with the evidence we have?

Unless you're willing to say that the odds don't make a difference, then Apathyism is meaningless. You don't know the highly unlikely results of any act...but in ordinary decision making you discount those probable outcomes anyway because they are unlikely (i.e. you don't know what will happen). Why is your moral decision making allowed to balanced certain outcomes against highly improbable outcomes? The only reason is because it frees you from having to judge the morality of your own actions.

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So IMO since you can't really know what's good and what's evil then the difinitive truth (if one exists) doesn't really matter, as your action is necessarily independant of the truth.

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Read a lot of 20th century philosophy of science and you find the same problems in scientific knowledge as well. You're essentially providing the skeptic's position for moral truths, but those same issues arise for any knowledge (for examples and detailed discussions, read philosophers David Hume and Karl Popper). The problem with the skeptic's position is that it confuses two different issues: that you can't have perfect and infallible knowledge of truth (which appears to be true), and that your knowledge does not in any way correlate to the truth (which appears to be false).

In other words: we may never be right about everything, but that doesn't mean we're never right about anything. Thus our actions aren't independent of the truth.

People have no problem seeing this in science, but have a harder time seeing it in morality; but it's nonetheless true.

With respect to "utility", if you're really interested you should start with John Stewart Mill's Utilitarianism. It's available on my Web site in PDF and HTML formats. This work was an attempt to define a secular moral system. I think it works as a description IF there are already moral standards in place. It's circular, it fails to take into account the utility of spirituality, and it fails to define what "utility" can actually mean. But for all that, it's an interesting document by a thoughtful man.

Regards,
Oliver

That is too bad because the concept has given us some of the most compelling fiction on the last century. I believe that a prime example is Sartre's No Exit. In that story the devil is a valet who serves the humans in Hell. He never does anything that appears evil at all. It is the human characters who torment each other for all eternity with hurtful words and actions. This torment is relative to each character, i.e. what hurts Garcin would not bother Estelle. Check it out. It's good fiction.

Moral relativists hold that morality is subjective, determined by man and not by God or nature. Thus you can never build a "moralometer" machine that objectively measures good and evil.

People the world over object to moral relativism because it defies almost all religions. Moral relativism does not deny the existence of God, but it does claim that God, if He exists, has no say in what is good and what is evil. This responsibility rests on the shoulders of man.

Also, I don't object to moral relativism because it flies in the face of most religions. I object to it because it's obviously false; or, more precisely, that if it's not false, then everything that I care deeply about is meaningless. It's the same reason I object to the common readings of the statement "true = false".

That is also, generally speaking, my objection to materialistic determinism. It's not that they _couldn't_ be true, it's that if they are I have no reason to _care_.

Having said all, that, I think moral relativism is good fodder for characterization. I think it would be really interesting to create a character who believed in moral relativism and lived according to its consequences: he really believed that, regardless of his particular repugnance, eating a baby is objectively no worse than eating a salad; that torturing someone to death is objectively no worse than gratuitiously giving food to hungry people.

From my perspective, I can easily make the claim that everything oliverhouse cares deeply about is meaningless. It would be impossible to prove that statement false, but it would be easy to prove that statement appalling.

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I think it would be really interesting to create a character who believed in moral relativism and lived according to its consequences: he really believed that, regardless of his particular repugnance, eating a baby is objectively no worse than eating a salad; that torturing someone to death is objectively no worse than gratuitiously giving food to hungry people.

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To write him/her as a true moral relativist, your character would need to make a conscious decision about whether eating babies is good or evil behavior. The decision would need to be completely subjective: the character must believe that it is impossible to use objective tools like observation, experimentation, logic, or mathematics to prove that the decision was right or wrong. Your character would need to believe that the judgment was completely in the hands of mankind with no input from anything outside mankind, whether natural or supernatural.

We see this frequently in tragedies when a character must make an agonizing choice. Typically, a character does not even realize that he/she is guided by moral relativism. Consider Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. His tormented main characters eschew God, the law, their families, objective logic, and social convention. In the end they make their tragic choices using pure moral relativism. At the moments when they choose suicide, Romeo and Juliet each believe that they are doing the right thing relative to their situation. It's brilliant writing.

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the statement "everything you care deeply about is meaningless" is certainly not the same as "false."

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I agree; however, scientists use this kind of argument all the time to discount theories that they admit are theoretically true. Perhaps the most common example on the Internet relates to evolution.

A creationist will sometimes say, "God created the world in six days and planted fossils as a test of our faith."

A non-creationist will often respond, "If He completely altered the physical structure of the world simply to test our faith, then I have no idea what He has altered and what He has not in the geological sciences. While I can't deny that your theory is possible, it makes any further inference about history based on geology meaningless." And then he goes on to assume the falsity of the creationist's theory, because it's the only way his science can have any coherence.

My position against moral relativism (and materialistic determinism) is similar to that. I recognize that there may be no objective basis by which we can distinguish right from wrong, but if that's the case then nothing that I think on the topic has any coherence: talk about morality is simple gibberish.

I take some issue with your description of the moral relativist. He would not need to make a _conscious_ decision about what's good and what's evil; he'd only need to believe that when he says "such-and-such an act is evil" he was stating something about _himself_ and his preferences rather than anything about the world as such. He would see his preferences as arbitrary and personal rather than natural and objective. The person who is revolted by baby-eating and yet sees no basis on which he should be revolted is a very conflicted person indeed, and that's why I think it would be interesting to write about him.

All this probably runs counter to your interpretation of R&J:

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His tormented main characters eschew God, the law, their families, objective logic, and social convention. In the end they make their tragic choices using pure moral relativism. At the moments when they choose suicide, Romeo and Juliet each believe that they are doing the right thing relative to their situation.

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I'm not sure that "relative to their situation" means anything more than "in their situation." If they think they are doing the right thing relative to their situation, then they are making choices based on what they believe to be right and wrong in that situation. Well, yes, the morality of a particular decision is context-sensitive, even if you are not a relativist.

You tell us all of the things they eschew, but they are led by the rightness of their love for each other -- they adopt this as a guiding principle of their moral theory. It is, in my opinion, a mistake that completely distorts their moral theory and makes it an objectively bad one; but it does not mean that they are moral relativists or that they were guided by relativism. We're now in territory much closer to what Survivor was talking about in an earlier post -- and the fact that the Bard could write wonderful literature based on a non-relativistic but radically distorted and deeply held moral system shows that Survivor was right in that post.

This was fun -- seriously, and yes, I'm a blast at parties -- but I'm done derailing the message board. Please feel free to take the last word.

Regards,
Oliver

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I recognize that there may be no objective basis by which we can distinguish right from wrong, but if that's the case then nothing that I think on the topic has any coherence: talk about morality is simple gibberish.

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Aside: I am a life-long confirmed Catholic, not a moral relativist. But I have had lively conversations with a moral relativist and we were perfectly capable of discussing his subjective morality without breaking into gibberish.