In today's New York Times, David Brooks has an overall thoughtful piece, and he correctly assesses a problem in society today where too many are embracing moral relativism, leaving all ethical frameworks up to individuals; therefore standing for nothing as relative morality becomes no morality. Quoting Mr. Brooks:
“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.
The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”
Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”
Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”
This condition does exist, and it manifests itself with a lack of community and responsibility towards our fellow man, particularly those who struggle. Ironically, Ayn Rand and her disciples, which include the conservative movement and the Republican Party, have accelerated this moral relativism.
It's ironic, because Ayn Rand insisted that she hated moral relativism, she said only the objective was real, which meant only the physical world and that derived from reason, and her cult/religion/philosophy Objectivism was based upon this. From this, she produced the axiom that the self was the highest form of life, as it was objective and real, and that serving the self was the highest good. End of story.
This gospel of self serving, or selfishness, leads to individualism of the extreme kind and therefore society suffers. The whole theme of her fifty pound novel 'Atlas Shrugged' is of the individuals shunning society and leaving to be a collection of individuals.
But individualism has as many faces as there are people, and if the self is the ultimate good, then everyone has the incentive to take care of their own self. Which destroys communities.
Reason is based on premises, and Ayn would have had us to believe that her premises were truth, therefore there had to be no other outcome but hers. But with 300 million individuals in America acting on self interest, you are bound to get 300 million "truths", and none of them would call for sacrifice, community and cohesion necessary to strengthen society.
So if you serve yourself, your moral code just gets simpler. Why care about any actions you take to pursue self interest that might affect your less fortunate neighbor? It becomes a system of moral relativism disguised as objective truth. In reality it isn't anything more than objective truths tailored for whatever whims that might motivate each individual.
In our society where consumerism and status determined by wealth are deemed the governing values, the conditions that David Brooks describes are the only expected outcome.
I'd say a majority of Americans haven't heard of Ayn Rand, and if they have, they don't know what her vision entails. But the leaders of industry, fundamentalist Christianity, and conservative politics are fulfilling her vision one deregulation and tax cut at a time. Pretty soon, there will be no one who would serve in the military, and frankly, no good reason to ask anyone to, if this is the world they are protecting.
Brook's column linked here