RIGHT AND WRONG Ever thought about what right and wrong really is? If you scan deeply (and honestly) on it, you can't help but arrive at a conclusion that is a tad unsettling. Put simply, might makes right (and therefore, wrong). No matter how hard I try I can't get past it. And as a philosopher, I can assure that I have tried my best to get past it, but I always find myself right back in the same place, as if I've been running around in circles. If you propose, for example, that whatever God says is right, well, it's a no-brainer. I mean, isn't He supposed to be (by definition) the Almighty? Would we truly care about anything that God said if we did not believe He was omnipotent? (If someone demands your money, do you really care if they're not pointing a gun at you, or holding a knife at your throat?) You also find yourself at the same place if you go with the majority perspective. If there were only ten people in the whole world and eight of them said that adultery was perfectly okay, then that would make it so. Adultery would be a completely acceptable behavior. And the only reason it would be so is because a majority constitutes a form of might. This is exactly what is going on with the whole gay marriage thing. It's only wrong because the majority says it's wrong. And for no other reason! There is no way it could be inherently wrong. There is no such thing. Wrongness is applied to something from the outside, like a coat of paint. Depending on your personal sensibilities, it can be disturbing to see it this way. But in the interest of total honesty, I don't see how it could be any other way. The very idea of right and wrong is just that: an idea, a purely social dynamic. It is not, after all, something that we find in the natural world. We don't even think of right and wrong taking place in the animal kingdom. It only appears within the context of people in groups, who create it (it seems) out of thin air. I remember watching a nature show once in which some night-vision cameras were used to film a mother rhino, with her baby trying to stay close to her for protection from some marauding hyenas, which, if you ask me, look like the scum of the animal world. Of course I found myself rooting for the baby rhino, and somewhere deep inside it felt wrong for those horrible-looking hyenas to be trying to kill it. But then I looked a little deeper and realized that right and wrong had absolutely nothing to do with it. If the hyenas could have succeeded in separating the baby from its mother to gang up on it and kill it, then that would have been right, because it would have been a simple manifestation of might. Just ask the hyenas. It must be so. Think about yourself. How did you get here? Because of might, the might of a single spermatozoon. At your conception (as opposed to another person's who could have come to be if the conception had taken place but a moment sooner or later) how is it that you were the one conceived and not someone else? How many sperm were there swimming toward your mother's ovum? Which one made it? Was it right? Should another one have won the race? Is it wrong for you to be here? Is it right? The particular spermatozoon that did make it, at the precise moment in time that caused you to be made, resulted in the person you call yourself. A different one, at a different moment in time, would have caused a different person to form. Your brothers and sisters (from the same parents of course) are proof of it. If you feel you have some sort of right to be here it can only be so because of the might of one spermatozoon that just happened to win the race to the ovum at the precise moment in time in which it occurred. Might makes right. The whole universe says so.
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