There are real—and in many cases seemingly irreconcilable—differences over the moral standards and enduring principles that should undergird not only our legal system and form of government, but also the way we treat one another in daily life.
Moral standards are the principles by which conduct is judged right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust. They are the pillars by which justice can be applied fairly—not according to privilege, circumstance, wealth, power, or social station, but according to enduring rules. Such rules are not merely invented by men or governments. They have been handed down through generations and across civilizations that recognize that human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Those rights, understood as gifts from God rather than grants from government, form the basis of our laws, moral standards, and social mores.
Some of the most basic are familiar:
- Do not deliberately murder an innocent person.
- Do not lie or steal.
- Keep promises and honor oaths before neighbors and civil authorities.
- Treat all people fairly and with dignity.
“Do unto others,” “Love thy neighbor,” and “What you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto me” express moral standards that are neither novel nor disposable. They are the written and unwritten rules by which civilized people have sought to live together.
A person who believes in firm moral standards can still recognize that circumstances matter. Prudence matters. Self-defense matters. Intent matters. Mercy matters. Yet the existence of difficult circumstances does not erase the moral nature of an act. A moral principle cannot govern conduct if it is abandoned whenever obedience becomes inconvenient or emotionally difficult.
This is the central difference between enduring moral standards and situational ethics.
Situational ethics rejects the belief that ordinary moral rules are absolute. It maintains that moral judgments should be made case by case, depending upon the particular circumstances. To be fair, both sides agree that circumstances matter. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables illustrates the problem well in the character of Inspector Javert, whose rigid application of law leaves little room for mercy, redemption, or human complexity.
The deeper disagreement, however, is not whether circumstances should be considered. It is whether circumstances merely help us apply a moral standard, or whether circumstances create the standard anew in every individual case.
Those who believe in enduring standards hold that moral principles guide our actions and establish accountability.
Circumstances may affect judgment, punishment, prudence, or mercy, but they do not transform evil into good or make a wrong act morally right. Those who embrace situational ethics increasingly argue that standards themselves may change as situations change.
Every day, we are given opportunities to test these competing ideas. We test them in our families, our churches, our communities, our courts, and our political institutions. We can also examine history and ask where these ideas lead when they are carried to their logical conclusion.
The present attack by much of the political left on traditional American and Western values bears troubling resemblance to the ideological passions that preceded the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Serious moral, legal, and political discussion becomes nearly impossible when public debate is overtaken by a mob mentality—one with little grounding in philosophy, theology, ethics, or history.
Too often, the radicalism of the modern Left seems unable to state clearly what it believes, except in its hostility toward the perceived enemy—whether that enemy is a political leader, a religious traditionalist, an economic class, or anyone who refuses to submit to prevailing ideological fashions.
The great Western tradition has generally rested upon moral absolutes: the Ten Commandments, the Magna Carta, the English common-law tradition, and the American Founding documents. These traditions did not claim that human beings were perfect. Rather, they recognized human weakness and sought to restrain it through law, custom, moral instruction, limited government, and personal accountability.
By the late eighteenth century, contrasting political philosophies were already in conflict. Thinkers such as John Locke and Edmund Burke emphasized ordered liberty, inherited wisdom, natural rights, and a well-defined moral framework upon which a stable society could be built.
Other currents of European thought, associated with Rousseau, Voltaire, and later the radical Jacobins under Robespierre, placed revolutionary will above inherited institutions and moral restraint. During the Reign of Terror, violence was justified as an instrument of justice. Once terror became acceptable in the name of virtue, it devoured not only the revolution’s opponents but many of the revolutionaries themselves.
That pattern did not end in France. Variations of the same ideology appeared in Bolshevik Russia, communist China, Cambodia, Cuba, and other totalitarian systems around the world. When a government or movement decides that there is no moral law higher than its own political purpose, human life becomes expendable.
Fascist and communist regimes alike have often murdered more of their own people than they ever killed on foreign battlefields. The twentieth century demonstrated with horrifying clarity that totalitarian ideologies—whether clothed in the language of racial supremacy, class warfare, national destiny, or revolutionary justice—destroy human dignity once they discard the belief that every person possesses inherent worth.
There is another danger in moral ambivalence and situational ethics: a people can become numb to the existence of evil.
Consider the people of Germany and occupied Europe who watched the Holocaust unfold. Some participated. Some resisted. Many remained silent, fearful, indifferent, or morally exhausted. One must ask: What happens to the soul of a prison guard who watches the deaths of thousands of fellow human beings in concentration camps? What happens to a nation when ordinary people become accustomed to acts that should revolt the human conscience?
We should ask similar questions about our own time. What happens to a people who have accepted the destruction of millions of unborn children in their mothers’ wombs? The answer cannot be indifference, hatred, or self-righteousness. There is no sin beyond God’s capacity to forgive, and every one of us has fallen short of the moral law. But forgiveness begins with confession, contrition, and a recognition that evil cannot be renamed or rationalized away.
Likewise, when a mother kills her own children and then tries to take her own life, the public rightly considers questions of mental illness, criminal responsibility, and the circumstances surrounding the tragedy. Such questions are necessary if we are to understand how society should respond and how future suffering might be prevented. Yet they should not obscure the fundamental reality that the loss of innocent life is a profound moral wrong.
The question of mental capacity may determine how a person should be treated under the law. It may properly affect punishment, treatment, confinement, or mercy. But it does not determine whether the act itself was moral. Confession, contrition, mercy, and compassion belong in the equation—but not moral confusion, emotional manipulation, or a constantly shifting standard of right and wrong.
In the end, no government ever devised can answer the deepest questions of sin, guilt, repentance, forgiveness, and the human soul. Government has a necessary but limited role: it must protect those whom it has been given responsibility to protect. The unborn are among “We the People,” even though they have no voice, vote, wealth, or power to defend themselves.
Forgiveness and contrition are ultimately matters between each individual and his or her Creator. No statute can compel genuine repentance, and no government can manufacture a healthy conscience. But a free and decent society can still recognize that some truths are enduring, some acts are wrong, and some lives must be protected.
