MISC #1
Recently
in a class discussion we talked about the proposition that, in our world, good
is becoming more good and bad is becoming more bad.
Several
students argued that this is true, citing that our capacity as a people to do
great good or great evil has expanded so much due to technology and
communication advances. We are now able to aid and help people on a scale much
larger than ever in our history as a species, and we are simultaneously able to
hurt and destroy people on a much larger scale.
I do not
agree with this assessment, though. It is true that technology has given us a
greater ability to express our good and our evil, but I don’t believe that the
presence of greater technology impacts the quality of the good or evil in our
society. If Kublai Khan had the ability to use nuclear or biological weapons,
he certainly would have.
In my
opinion, the lines between good and evil are becoming more and more blurred in
our world. Moral relativism has become widespread in our world and is leading
to the popular sentiment that no one should impose their own moral beliefs on
others. We are all entitled to determine our own right and wrong, the
relativist argues. Or, even worse, there is no such thing as right and wrong.
This is why we have millions of people clamoring for abortion rights, when such
a thing never would have been conceived as anything but a moral abomination in
the past.
I
believe that right and wrong are objective and cannot be changed by humans, so
the discussion is flawed from the beginning in my opinion. However, if we’re
discussing how we, as humans, express right and wrong and good and evil, then I
think it is clear that these distinctions are slowly vanishing in our world.
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