The lethal cocktail being created with relativism and moral positivism
One of the most common arguments used to justify abortion and euthanasia where they are legal is simply to say that they are legal.
This week we’ve seen that argument again in relation to the euthanasia of a 25-year-old Spanish woman suffering from depression. According to some, this case deserves no reproach simply because euthanasia is legal and was applied as established by the law promoted by the left and approved by Congress in 2020. That argument is frankly weak: if a law is correct simply by virtue of being a law, why are laws often changed?
Believing that something is right simply because it is legal is a mistake that already proved very costly in the last century, and forgetting a terrible part of our history subjects us to the risk of repeating it. Hitler’s dictatorship committed enormous abuses under the protection of laws and regulations created by the nazis themselves, such as the outlawing of other political parties, the concentration of power in the chancellor, and the Nuremberg racial laws, which served to subject the Jewish population to brutal discrimination. The nazis passed these laws after winning the March 1933 elections, so according to the argument still used by some today, the unjust laws passed by Hitler’s regime would be beyond reproach simply because they were passed following a legal procedure.
This sparked a major legal debate at the end of World War II: Was it possible to prosecute Nazi leaders for monstrous but legal acts? According to the prevailing moral positivist mindset, the answer would have been a resounding no. However, the argument prevailed that there are inherent human rights that no law can violate, because if it does, the law automatically becomes abusive and sets a democracy on the path to tyranny. This is how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in December 1946, to remind everyone that laws have limits.
It seems we have forgotten the importance of natural law when passing laws, that is, the need to adjust our laws to limits derived from the existence of human rights. The wave of moral relativism in recent decades has contributed to this, creating a lethal cocktail and leading many to believe that nothing is inherently right or wrong, that everything depends on one’s perspective, while simultaneously establishing the belief that if the majority approves a law, then that law is correct and does not deserve to be considered unjust, even if it is an abusive law.
The left has been applying this relativism for many years with a double standard that considers intolerable those laws that contradict progressive dogmas, such as laws that protect human life from conception to natural death, and then considers untouchable the laws created to normalize abortion and euthanasia, a process that Pope Saint John Paul II very aptly described as the “culture of death”.
We must break with this trend once and for all. Laws that permit the killing of unborn babies and sick or depressed people are abhorrent laws that deserve to be repealed. The fact that they were passed by a parliamentary majority does not make these laws any less unjust and atrocious: it simply reveals the degree of moral confusion into which a society has fallen, a society now incapable of distinguishing right from wrong when it comes to protecting human life, after having been bombarded for years with left-wing ideological propaganda through many media outlets.
Obviously, saying this makes many people point fingers, because it implies breaking perverse consensuses that have been established by a segment of the political class to shield unjust laws they themselves created. Abolitionists of slavery were also hated by many in democratic countries when they tried to convince society of how abhorrent it was to treat human beings as objects. Those who opposed the abhorrent Nazi laws faced consequences far worse than hatred, being imprisoned, tortured, and executed, as happened, for example, to the young opponents of the White Rose.
Today it remains necessary to denounce laws that violate human dignity, and in fact, this task is one of the most important we face in many democratic countries. However, some have decided it’s better to let it go and do nothing, giving in to laziness, cowardice, and propaganda while our society hurtles down an increasingly scandalous slippery slope.
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Photo: Tingey Injury Law Firm.
