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Friday, June 27, 2014

Right and wrong exist independently of human opinion

Any truly eternal ethical laws would be independent of God.  What is right is right and what is wrong is wrong, and this applies to any divinities as well as to people.

This of course assumes that right and wrong exist as objective, real "things."  One is tempted to say they are analogous to ideas of beauty and ugliness, entirely in the eye of the beholder.  But beauty is not entirely in the eye of the beholder (while superficially this is so we have to recognize that beauty does have a deeper quality that outlasts cultures and fashions).

A better analogy might be right and wrong are analogous to truth and falsehood.  Even though people have varying ideas of what is true and what is not, we tend in the end to agree that truth and falsehood exist on their own independent of our opinions.

Don't confuse human ideas of right and wrong with real right and wrong.  Human ideas change and indeed seem to progress (slavery is not condemned as wrong), but in the end mankind has always known slavery was wrong, and just buried its head.  At least those who stopped to think objectively about it reached that conclusion.

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