ENLIGHTENMENT: A Story About Good And Evil

When I discuss good and evil with people, I often get the question “but what is the good?” I have been asked this in a multitude of manners. Others dive into individual moral judgements and demand to know whether X is right or wrong, as if having insight into moral theory ought to be the same as having the clarity to make accurate moral judgements. The idea that the concept of ‘good’ is either a specific type of thing, or nothing at all, has been made innumerable times to me and in many ways. Religious morality is usually objective by the virtue of being declared by God. It seems like its so-called “objectivity” is only taken as true if ignoring the fact that the declaration of moral rules is derived from God’s subjective desires or pleasures and not due to some objective truth.

Moral subjectivists hold that moral determinations are made by the individual, for the individual and are true in that sense. Though how a morally good judgement can also be morally evil is beyond me, and it is a necessary consequence of moral subjectivism that for every judgement of good, there is going to be an independent judgement of evil. These goods and evils seem to cancel each-other out. In the face of either, moral nihilism seems far saner. At least it’s easier to doubt the existence or efficacy of any moral theory and be agnostic or nihilist on the subject. But it’s intellectually lazy. Often people I talk to who adhere to one of these few views will proclaim “objective secular morality is impossible, I/a college roommate tried for 1-3 years and failed!” At this point if you’ve got someone with some knowledge about all of this and you propose objective morality. The next question is: “is it all just an illusion?”