But Wasn’t Hitler Evil?

Apologists for objective moral codes often seek to make their point by posing questions such as, “Wasn’t Hitler absolutely evil,” “Wasn’t Stalin absolutely evil?” or some variant thereof. The argument is emotional rather than rational, and relies on the manner in which our moral nature is wired in our brains to deny the dependence of morality on that wiring for its very existence. In other words, they rely on the fact that our brains cause us to perceive morality as an objective thing to argue that, therefore, it really is an objective thing.

Archeologist Timothy Taylor presents a variant of the “Wasn’t Hitler Evil?” argument in an essay entitled “The Trouble with Relativism,” that appeared in one of Edge.org’s latest publications, “What Have You Changed Your Mind About?” In this case, the “self-evident” evil he cites is the human sacrifice of children practiced by the Incas. According to Taylor,

In Cambridge at the end of the 1970s, I began to be inculcated with the idea that understanding the internal logic and value system of a past culture was the best way to do archaeology and anthropology… A ritual killing was not to be judged bad but considered valid within a different worldview… But what happens when relativism says that our concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, kindness and cruelty, are inherently inapplicable? Relativism self-consciously divests itself of a series of anthropocentric and anchronistic skins – modern, white, Western, male-focused, individualist, scientific (or “scientific”) – to say that the recognition of such value-concepts is radically unstable, the “objective” outsider opinion a worthless myth.

He then goes on to dismantle the historical myths that claimed “that being ritually killed to join the mountain gods was an honor that the Incan rulers accorded only to their own privileged offspring.” In fact, his research team discovered that they were actually “peasant children, who, a year before death, were given the outward trappings of high status and a much improved diet in order to make them acceptable offerings.”

Taking advantage of the moral high ground thus established, Taylor goes on,

We need relativism as an aid to understanding past cultural logic, but it does not free us from a duty to discriminate morally, and to understand that there are regularities in the negatives of human behavior as well as in its positives. In this case, it seeks to ignore what Victor Nell has described as “the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control.” By denying the basis for a consistent underlying algebra of positive and negative, yet consistently claiming the necessary rightness of the internal cultural conduct of “the Other,” relativism steps away from logic into incoherence.

Taylor is mistaken in equating recognition of the subjective nature of morality with “relativism.” I am familiar with the mentality of the people he describes, and I reject it as much as he does. He is quite right in pointing out the inconsistency of defending moral relativism while claiming at the same time that the internal cultural conduct of “the Other” is necessarily right. However, he also “steps from logic into incoherence” himself when he exploits the emotional impact of the murder of children for cynical ends to defend a “basis for a consistent underlying algebra of positive and negative.” If, in fact, those who would affirm the objective existence of morality have some logically defensible basis in mind then, as so eloquently suggested by E. O. Wilson in “Consilience,” they should “lay their cards on the table.” They have not been able to do that to date.

Morality is an evolved trait of human beings. We perceive good and evil as absolutes because that is our nature. That is the way we are programmed to perceive them. In reality, they are subjective mental constructs. No moral revulsion or emotional response, no matter how strong, not even to Hitler’s Holocaust, or Stalin’s mass slaughter, or the ritual murder of children, can convert morality from what it really is into that which we perceive it to be.