Putin is Evil! Sez who?

Posted in: News By House Divided on March 4, 2022

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, politicians and pundits have referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin as “evil”. Putin’s biographer recently wrote, “he’s not mad, he’s evil”. By what standards do we decide if someone is evil?

Except for sociopaths, all human beings are born with a sense of morality. We have a sense of what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong. Is our sense of morality purely subjective or culturally constructed? Can one person say Putin is evil while another says he is good and both be correct, from their point of view? How do we determine if something is right or wrong?

Seinfeld aficionados will recall the episode where George is called into his boss’ office and the boss says, “It’s come to my attention that you and the cleaning woman have engaged in sexual intercourse on the desk in your office”. To which George responds, “Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?” George pleads ignorance saying, “If anyone had said anything to me when I first started here that that sort of thing was frowned upon…I’ve worked in a lot of offices and people do that all the time”. In the world of Seinfeld, right and wrong are purely subjective: it depends where you work.

In recent times, Americans have been told to “follow the science”. But science, being values neutral, cannot tell us whether Putin, or anyone else, is evil. As Scientific atheist Richard Dawkins said, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if, at bottom, there is no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference”. In a dog-eat-dog world, where only the strongest survive, we should expect the strong to oppress or kill the weak: it’s not evil, it’s natural! As Sam Keen said, “Mother Nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw”.

How do we decide if someone is evil? A person who grasped the complexity of this simple question was the late Yale law professor, Arthur Leff. Leff posed an unsettling question: “When would it be permissible to make the formal intellectual equivalent of what is known in barrooms and schoolyards as ‘the grand Sez Who?’. …In the absence of God…each …ethical and legal system will be differentiated by the answer it chooses to give to one key question: who among us …ought to be able to declare ‘law’ that ought to be obeyed? “

Theologian Timothy Keller argues, “If there is no God then there is no way to say any one action is ‘moral’ and another ‘immoral’ but only ‘I like this’. If that is the case, who gets the right to put their subjective arbitrary moral feelings into law? You may say, ‘The majority gets the right to make the law’ but do you mean the majority has the right to vote to exterminate a minority? If you say, ’No, that’s wrong’ then you are back to square one. ‘Who Sez’ that the majority has a moral obligation not to kill the minority? Why should your moral convictions be obligatory for those in opposition? Why should your view prevail over the will of the majority?”

Leff closed his essay stating, “As things are now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless, napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved. There is such a thing as evil. All together now: Sez Who? God help us”.

America was founded on a religious proposition: all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If this proposition is true, it contains moral implications for how we are to view and treat our fellow man: every person has God-given dignity, value and worth and each one is entitled to have their God-given rights respected by others and protected by our government.

If America’s founding proposition is false, God cannot help us. Mankind is “lucky mud”. He lives on the battlefield of competing personal moral preferences: “It’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation!” Sez who? “Putin is evil!” Sez who?!!