Truth Month - July 2024
Day 18 - Good and Evil both exist. Fight for good. Resist evil. (Ethics - Do the greater good)
A principle in ethics is "Choose to do the greater good." Sometimes this is recast as "Choose the lesser of two evils." Regardless, our responsibility is to first identify good and evil, and then to work toward the former and against the latter.
For most people, it is obvious that some form of evil exists. But what defines evil and does it actually exist? For real evil to exist, there must be an objective standard by which to judge it. Relativism has a hard time with calling anything evil, since it is just the subjective opinion of the individual, group, or culture. An individual may even belong to different groups with different moral standards. Take this example, “Terrorists like to kill people; I like to save them." Now who’s to say which is better… and more importantly how does the relativist make a determination that is more than just their preference or opinion? Perhaps they just deny that objective standards exist by which to determine right and wrong, truth and falsehood.
In reality, we can't define good and evil on our own, but we can recognize it because we have a moral intuition that is built into our nature. We know in our core that evil is real, and that it is something to be opposed and fought. There is a way to ground morality, and that is in the morally perfect Creator who is the standard.
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