Last year it was relativism, and this year it could be the word ‘absolutism’ that appears in our summer AS exam (for my AS and A2 predictions please click here for Ethics and here for Philosophy of Religion). Be aware, though, that the word itself is ambiguous between three meanings: it can mean ‘a rule which a cannot be broken” as in Kantian categoricals, or ‘an objective test for ethics’ as in utilitarianism and Natural Law, or  it can mean ‘universal and so not particular to any culture’. I want to suggest that relativism is philosophical nonsense and that there are absolutes in at least two out of three meanings of the word. Indeed, we need urgently to apply the absolutist lens to events going on around us to prevent politicians walking the road of relativist pragmatism.

As I write this Oskar Groning is on trial in Luneburg, north Germany, for his part in the terrible events of the Holocaust. He was a guard at Auschwitz and admits to seeing an SS guard seize a screaming baby from its mother and smash it’s head against the side of a train, among other horrific things. He is testifying now, partly out of moral guilt, party out of a desire to speak against the Holocaust deniers who believe it or not, still exist as extreme forms of relativist (denying even the objectivity of historically witnessed events).

Holocaust victims are testifying at the trial. One such victim is Eva Kor, a 93 year old survivor. I feel for her because she, like me, is a twin. She and her sister Miriam survived because she was chosen for medical experiments by Dr Mengele. Despite the best efforts of Simon Wiesenthal and other Nazi hunters, Mengele evaded capture in Brazil and died in freedom in 1969. I find her testimony particularly shocking. In 1944 she was just twenty-one.

“On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we were taken for inspection and measuring, standing wiithout any clothes for up to eight hours. They took a lot of blood from me. One day they injected my right arm with five injections. I developed a high fever, my arms and legs swelled up and I came out in red spots all over my body. Dr Mengele laughed when he saw me: “Too bad she is so young and has only two weeks to live”, he said. If she had died, her sister would have been murdered by lethal injection and her body parts examined in an autopsy. But she didn’t die. Amazingly she concludes, addressing Oskar Groning “I have forgiven all the Nazis, including you”.

Absolute evil has some clear, objective, naturalistic features (and yes, the naturalistic fallacy is also just so much philosophical nonsense). It increases human suffering, it has a deliberate cruel intention, it is cold and lacking the common moral sense of human sympathy, and it has long-term terrible effects on the common good. It fails the Kantian test of respect for the dignity of every human being, the utilitarian test to measure every person’s welfare equally, and the natural law test of the common good, that of a society marked by eudaimonia or Aquinas’ ideal of God’s perfection. As Ebbs says in the film 12 Years a Slave, if the law sanctions such behaviour (as it did in Nazi Germany) then “begging the law’s pardon, the law lies..there are universal truths…we are all equal”. You could say that this equality principle, strengthened by respect and sympathy, is the starting point of moral thinking.

So the absolute position, by which we argue for absolute evil, is a democratic, naturalistic feature of our world. It is democratic because as the utilitarians recognised, it is characterised by that which makes most human beings flinch and recoil. Of course, Mengele did not flinch and recoil – he was absolute evil incarnate. And it is naturalistic because we can measure the human effects of absolute evil: in pain, human suffering, social dislocation and lack of logic. Absolute evil is often insane and morality can only function where we accept the insight of moral philosophers that there are reasonable criteria by which to judge its awful presence.