The Dangers of Moral Relativism

There exists a belief that right and wrong is subject to human interpretation, called moral relativism. This is very dangerous to society for a number of reasons. Here are some:

First, and most obviously, without a fixed standard of right and wrong, people will do whatever they want.Without thinking that there is a right and a wrong, people do whatever they feel like doing. They give in to the animal side of man.
If everybody one day decided that nothing was morally superior, there would be no laws, personal or public. Murder, thievery, dishonesty- all of these, and more, would abound. It wouldn't be safe to go anywhere, because for all you know you could be killed. What would the punishment be for these actions? Nothing.

Next, happiness would be diminished, if not entirely extinguished. This happens naturally, because the soul recoils in the presence of sin, and anybody who has ever sinned knows how it feels to have that sin weighing on you. Happiness is impossible in the presence of sin.

Also, civilization would be lost if moral relativism became widespread. Civilizations are devloped through leisure, as Bastiat points out in one of his essays.* With people not having a set of moral rules, they would plunder, because that is the easiest way to gain. Work would take up mouch more time, because the people who didn't participate in plunder would have to try even harder to supposrt themselves.



Moral relativism is sometimes easy to accept. It's easy to say that there isn't any right or wrong, and that we all behave in ways that are just as moral. But it is absolutely not true. I don't claim to know everything, because I don't. I'm a young girl, and I have a whole lot of stuff to learn. But I know that God established right and wrong before this world was created, and I know that we have to try to follow the right way.

  

  "And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin. If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness. And if there be no righteousness there be no happiness. And if there be no righteousness nor happiness there be no punishment nor misery. And if these things are not there is no God. And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished away."

2 Nephi 2:13

*"And here we have a glimpse of one of the finest harmonies in the social world. I allude to leisure: not that leisure that the warlike and tyrannical classes arrange for themselves by the plunder of the workers, but that leisure which is the lawful and innocent fruit of past activity and economy.... Is not leisure an essential spring in the social machine? Without it, the world would never have had a Newton, a Pascal, a Fenelon; mankind would have been ignorant of all arts, sciences, and of those wonderful inventions prepared originally by investigations of mere curiosity; thought would have been inert- man would have made no progress."- Frederic Bastiat,  Capital and Interest. Bastiat also expounded upon plunder in The Law