Ted Bundy’s Subjectivism
Subjectivism is one of two types of ethical relativism. It states that there are no objective values of morality. An action is right or wrong depending on the individual’s attitudes about that action. What is right for me, may not be right for you. Pojman, in his article, A Critique of Ethical Relativism, states his students would put it this way:
Morality is in the eye of the beholder.
It is amazing how many people consider themselves subjectivist, yet have not truly thought through the consequences of their beliefs. Adolf Hitler and Ted Bundy are as moral as Gandhi. Joseph Stalin is as moral as Mother Theresa. Absurd consequences follow. From Pojman’s article is a paraphrase of a tape-recorded conversation between Ted Bundy and one of his victims in which Bundy justifies his murder:
Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved either right or wrong. I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured it out for myself - what apparently the chief justice couldn’t figure out for himself - that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any “reason” to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring - the strength of character - to throw off shackles….I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment” that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these “others”? Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig, or a sheep, or a steer? Is your life more to you that a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as “moral” or “good” and others as “immoral” or “bad”? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham, and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me - after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.
Subjectivist ethical realism makes morality a useless concept. We can never condemn another for what he does.