Objective, absolute moral standards have at least three elements
- motive of the person
- situation or circumstances surrounding the act
- the nature of the act itself.
Thus a theft could be 3) a wrong act, mitigated by the fact that the individual committing the theft was 1) doing it to feed a starving family and what was taken 2) was only a small amount of food from a large supermarket.
Compare that to an individual who 3) steals a purse from an old lady knowing that it contains her life savings, out of 1) pure greed and malice after which he 2) savagely beats her.
You could hold that both acts, involving as they do, theft of property, are equally objectively wrong. However, what is also clearly true are the mitigating elements of motive and situation that would make the second act far worse, objectively speaking, than the first.
This seems valid, so long as one still grants that “ultimately, both are morally wrong.” It’s when one says, “the first was a sin, but the second wasn’t, due to the circumstances” that the appearance of moral relativism creeps in.
In the case given above, the question is that of knowingly killing children, during warfare. Presumably, no concept of just war theory can justify the intentional killing of children or babies.
I’ve noticed that the somewhat tricky thing about Christianity is that sexual ethics are
absolute – there are
no circumstances (not even to save a life, seemingly) when pre-marital sex, rape, or even masturbation, are morally justified. Mitigated in terms of the degree of moral blameworthiness, perhaps, but never morally justified.
With violence, the danger of relativism is more acute, because some forms of violence
are morally justified – non-sinful. This creates the danger of confusing, to follow the analogy, “mitigating circumstances to masturbation” (e.g., the culture in which one lives; one’s age; one’s marital status) to saying that it was no sin at all, or hardly so, under the circumstances.
further point that needs to be made about God’s commands to the Israelites to wage particular forms of war on neighboring cultures is that we cannot forget that God’s purview in the matter far exceeds ours. Being all-knowing he would take into account factors that we have no idea about, for example, the consequences on all of history from that point forward through all time. We are not in a situation to know all of the potential repercussions that could be considered, so we are in no position to make judgements on the acts in question with anything even approaching sound moral judgement.
That’s true, perhaps; but how do we know when God is talking to us? This notion can easily be abused, if we think the form of violence we were propagating is God’s will. It could be a rationalization.
What is also ironic about the above is that it is saying that,
because God has a complete purview of the consequences of an action, what we call “utilitarian” thinking is justified, in His case.
I’m not sure how many Christians are willing to grant in principle, though, that God could say, “have that abortion” or “commit that pre-marital sex act” because the normal rules don’t apply. For example, God saying to Hitler’s mother, “have that abortion” or a voice in someone’s head saying, “kill that pregnant woman” (Hitler’s mother).
God commanding that women or children be killed, in combat, is not far from these disturbing examples.
I think most Christians today would posit that there would practically need to be a
voice from the heavens, to justify the deliberate killing of children or infants, and to interpret it as the will of God.
