Putin is evil! Sez Who?

Posted in: News By House Divided on August 16, 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”. How do we determine if someone is evil?

Whether by evolution or design, 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? Can one person say Putin is right while another says he is wrong and both be correct, from their point of view? Does it even matter?

One man who took the simple question – “what is right and what is wrong” – very seriously was Russian author, Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy was a Progressive, stating he believed in “progress as a rule for life…” . He embraced “the faith of progress” and believed people ought to be “…free to choose the way of progress which they thought best.” But in his fiftieth year, Tolstoy’s began to challenge his own beliefs and concluded, “…to the simplest of all problems in life- what is right and what is wrong – we had no answer…”.

When Tolstoy asked one of life’s ultimate questions, “Why do I live?” he was told to follow the science: “Infinitely small particles, in infinite combinations, in infinite space and infinite time, change their forms in infinite combinations and when you have learned the laws of these changes, you will know why you live.” He would later say, “in the days of my mental weakness I was satisfied with this reasoning”. Tolstoy was beginning to grasp what fellow Russian author, Dostoyevsky meant when he wrote, “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.”

Few modern thinkers understood Tolstoy’s dilemma better than Yale law professor, Arthur Leff. Leff posed a disturbing 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?” He argued that in the absence of God, every legal and ethical system will be differentiated by the answer it gives to one key question: “who among us …ought to be able to declare ‘law’ that ought to be obeyed?” Stated that baldly, said Leff, “the question is so intellectually unsettling that one would expect to find a noticeable number of legal and ethical thinkers trying not to come to grips with it…”

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”.

Many Americans believe that in a Democracy the majority ought to determine what is right and wrong. But does democracy exist only to ratify the desires and decisions of its majorities or is American democracy wedded to a set of fundamental propositions that those majorities are accountable to? And where do those propositions come from? Is there a moral core to our American Democracy?

The Declaration of Independence is referred to as America’s Birth Certificate. The Declaration reminds us that America was founded on a God-centered proposition: all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This proposition is either true, or it is false. If America’s founding proposition is true, it continues to offer moral guidance 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 our founding principle is true, then American democracy was never concerned only with the exercise of rights apart from doing what is right: the majority is not free to trample on the God-given rights of any individual or minority.

If America’s founding proposition is false, then man is lucky mud …the result of the random combination of infinitely small particles in infinite time and space…and morality is a socially useless prejudice. Mankind lives on the battlefield of competing personal moral preferences where “might makes right” and everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless, it’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation, white supremacy is wicked, and Putin is evil!

[All together now:] Sez who?!!

God help us.