Tolstoy’s Dilemma

Posted in: News By House Divided on April 11, 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…” and embraced “the faith of progress”. He 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. Does that mean the majority can vote to exterminate the minority? If you object, on what basis? If the majority determines right from wrong, “Who Sez” the majority has a moral obligation to recognize or protect any rights of the minority? After all, it’s the majority who determines if the minority has any rights and whether such rights ought to be protected. Who Sez the moral views and values of the majority should not be legally imposed on the minority?

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. If this proposition is true, it contains 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. The majority is not free to trample on the God-given rights of any minority.

If America’s founding proposition is false, then man is merely a random combination of molecules… “lucky mud”. Man 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?!!

God help us.