It is perfectly clear and evident, venerable brothers, that the very notion of civilization is a fiction of the brain if it rest not on the abiding principles of truth and the unchanging laws of virtue and justice.
Essay: Inscrutabili Dei Consilio
Everyone is indignant when he hears the Germans define justice as that which is to the interest of the Third Reich. But it is not always remembered that this indignation is perfectly groundless if we ourselves regard morality as a subjective sentiment to be altered at will. Unless there is some objective standard of good, over-arching Germans, Japanese and ourselves alike whether any of us obey it or no, then of course the Germans are as competent to create their ideology as we are to create ours… The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy.
Essay: The Poison of Subjectivism
Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.
Speech: Homily to the College of Cardinals, Vatican Basilica, 18 April 2005
Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about “liberty;” that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about “progress:’ that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about “education;” that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, “Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty.” That is, logically rendered, “Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.” He says, “Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress.” This, logically stated, means, “Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it.” He says, “Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education.” This, clearly expressed means, “We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children.”
Book: Heretics
Modern “broadmindedness” has a quality that can only be called sneakish; it endeavors to win without giving itself away, even after it has won. It desires to be victorious without betraying even the name of the victor. For all sane men have intellectual doctrines and fighting theories; and if they will not put them on the table, it can only be because they wish to have the advantage of a fighting theory which cannot be fought.
Essay: Rabelaisian Regrets
How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.
Essay: Letter from a Birmingham Jail
When the essential connection between freedom and truth is severed, then democracy itself is in jeopardy. Freedom no longer anchored to the truth quickly becomes the freedom of the strong against the weak.
Speech:
In the dictatorship of relativism that Pope Benedict warns against, tolerance tends to mutate into moral idiocy. That’s because the relativist is forced, by his own principles, to abandon the notion of the good.
Essay: “The Dictators of Relativism,” National Catholic Register, Sept 7-13, 2008.
It is impossible to further the common good without acknowledging and defending the right to life.
Above all, the common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights — for example, the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture — is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition for all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination.
Essay: Christifideles Laici, 38
It is impossible to further the common good without acknowledging and defending the right to life, upon which all the other inalienable rights of individuals are founded and from which they develop. A society lacks solid foundations when, on the one hand, it asserts values such as the dignity of the person, justice and peace, but then, on the other hand, radically acts to the contrary by allowing or tolerating a variety of ways in which human life is devalued and violated, especially where it is weak or marginalized. Only respect for life can be the foundation and guarantee of the most precious and essential goods of society, such as democracy and peace.
Essay: Evangelium Vitae, 101
Finally, true freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace. There are many examples of this mistaken idea of freedom, such as the elimination of human life by legalized or generally accepted abortion.
The more serious problem for Joe Biden at this point is not the loss of his credibility as a Catholic, but as a person of conscience. When you say on national television that you agree with your Church that abortion is murder, but that you intend to support legislation that keeps abortion fully available, you leave voters wondering why you would support a right to what you consider to be murder.
Article: “The Gospel According to Joe Biden,” National Review
What the secular world now likes to call hypocrisy, Christianity has always simply called sin. For Christians, the most serious moral failing is to live in a way that is not in accord with one’s core beliefs. For the secularist, the most serious moral failing is to persist in a set of core beliefs that is not in accord with the way one lives.
We will be at “peace,” as it is called, if we tolerate everyone who disagrees with us, provided he returns the compliment. If there are those unwilling to do so, we think we can “defend” ourselves against them in order that we can discuss or dialogue about the differences. This is a noble effort. But what we cannot do is to fail to come to terms with ideas that claim to be true and seek to expand themselves into the world by means other than ideas. The solution to the problem is not to say that all ideas are fanatical or wrong. The solution is to take ideas seriously enough to state them properly and to have a philosophy that itself is sufficiently realistic to comprehend why error is attractive—again, almost always because it has some truth to it. The idea that there is no truth is itself an origin of war, an idea that denies that it too is an idea.
Essay: On Wars…and Wars of Ideas
By treating all content as comparably valid…you get nowhere… Relativism is dangerous in quite particular ways: for the shape of human existence at an individual level and in society. The renunciation of truth does not heal man.
It is unthinkable that a search so deeply rooted in human nature would be completely vain and useless. The capacity to search for truth and to pose questions itself implies the rudiments of a response. Human beings would not even begin to search for something of which they knew nothing or for something which they thought was wholly beyond them. Only the sense that they can arrive at an answer leads them to take the first step.
Book: Fides et Ratio, 29.
The rights of man towards other men can only arise from the nature of man. A walking combination of water and chemicals has no rights arising from its nature, and it is no use advocating materialism on one platform and demanding respect and freedom on another… . It is man’s immortal soul that is his passport not only to existence in the next world, but to freedom in this. His individual destiny is the basis of his rights against theories backed by physical force, whether they are the theories of dialectical materialism, or of Germanic racialism. If the world belongs not to man but to God, the powers of rulers are subject to a law higher than their wills, but if the world is man’s world, as progressives like to describe it, its character will be determined by the wills of the most determined and cunning men.
quoted in Arnold Lunn, Within That City
At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view.
Book: Orthodoxy
The Marquis de Sade, took the argument to its logical conclusion: If human passions are mere physiological itches, man’s proverbial dignity is a fraud, and there is nothing—not even our normal revulsion against rape and torture—to stand in the way of treating other human beings as sex tools. From the materialistic perspective, nothing can be entirely unnatural.
Book: The Morality of Everyday Life
The Nazi holocaust was pro-choice; rape is pro-choice; robbery and child abuse and wife beating are all pro-choice. The term is used to conceal what everyone knows: the wickedness of the actions.
Book: The Evidential Power of Beauty
The fruits of scepticism are not at all what amiable sceptics in the universities expect. Scepticism does not produce a gentle dilettante society in which every body moves softly and hesitantly, full of unresolved doubt about the value of what they do and careful not to molest anybody else. What happens is the opposite. The professorial scepticism flows out from the academies as a dissolvent of human rights.
quoted in Arnold Lunn, Within That City
If there isn’t any God, there isn’t any problem of evil. And if there is no God, then there is a problem of good! … . As Nietzsche pointed out, atheists who follow through on all the implications of their beliefs are nearly nonexistent. Most atheists do create an as if world. They act as if reason is connected to reality, at least for pragmatic purposes. They act as if, in a rough sort of way, things make sense. They act as if progress is the law of history. They act as if reason, justice, truth, compassion, solidarity, and love were more than mere breath expelled by lying lips. But they do not say how and why they believe that reason, justice compassion, and the rest are in some way better than irrationality, oppression, the big lie, ruthlessness, and cynicism. What metaphysical commitments justify these beliefs?
Book: Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter’s Questions About God (New York: Pocket Books, 1998), 89, 97-98.
If conscience is not the voice of God, but only the voice of your parents, or your society, or your animal instincts, or your genes, then why do we all believe that it’s always wrong to disobey your own conscience, to deliberately do something you honestly believe is evil? Even moral relativists believe that. They may say, “Different strokes for different folks,” and “What is good for you is good for you and not for me; don’t impose your morality on me,” but they always have one absolute left: If you sincerely believe that it is wrong for you to do something, you shouldn’t do it. It might be alright to sin against society, against religion, against traditional morality, against the Ten Commandments, but it’s never right to sin against your own conscience. But why, for goodness sake? Why treat your conscience as if it were a prophet with divine authority, unless it is?
Ethics: A History of Moral Thought (from the Recorded Books series: The Modern Scholar: Great Professors Teaching You!)
Kant…says it is man’s will not God’s will that is the source of moral law… Now this seems rather strange—as if we locked ourselves in prison and kept the key ourselves. How can our will be both over and under the law, both the creator of the moral law and subject to it? How can the king be his own subject?
Ethics: A History of Moral Thought (from the Recorded Books series: The Modern Scholar: Great Professors Teaching You!)
Here is a pure relativity of morals, which is a polite way of saying there are no standards at all. Dimly aware that he has taken up a very shaky position, Cox justifies himself by a bizarre manner of reasoning: “the relativization of values can have a much more constructive result, the recognition that since everyone’s perspective is limited or conditioned, no on has the right to inflict his values on anyone else” (nor has anyone the right to question them). This thought might help a man who came last in a race at the Olympic Games, for he could console himself with the fancy that the winner was only relatively more successful. It would be less useful in a game of cards. When it comes to ethics, however, if there by any logic in his remark, the Nuremberg Trials were wrong for imposing our ideas of morality on the Nazis who were held for trial. The English missionaries to Fiji ought to have turned their eyes away when they came across cannibalism in 1835; nor should suttee have been suppressed by law in India. If once we accepted Cox’s justification in matters of truth and falsehood, any lie or any untruth would be excusable. Oddly enough in the very sentence which I have quoted Cox lays down an absolute, saying “no one has the right…”
Book: Humanism and Christianity
Does a permanent moral standard preclude progress? On the contrary, except on the supposition of a changeless standard, progress is impossible. If good is a fixed point, it is at least possible that we should get nearer and nearer to it; but if the terminus is as mobile as the train, how can the train progress towards it? Our ideas of the good may change, but they cannot change either for the better or the worse if there is no absolute and immutable good to which they can approximate or from which they can recede.
Essay: “The Poison of Subjectivism”
From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.
Book: Diuturna
A climate of moral relativism is incompatible with democracy.
Relativism just isn’t true for me.
Either truth is our highest epistemic goal and there is a state of the person called “believing truly”, or else we have no epistemic goal and we can engage in various cognitive projects without being held to an absolute standard by which those projects can be judged.
Book: C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason
The man who says, “There is no truth” is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Toleration is the virtue of those who believe in nothing.