Are moral choices just a matter of individual taste?

During the summer of 2008, the imminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted an in-depth interview with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, and Patricia Snell-Herzog, and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth. When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at the parking spot.

When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong, but aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school, or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it. The default position is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “Who am I to say what’s right or what’s wrong?” many of them concluded.

There seems to be a moral confusion in our world today. I contend that God is the ultimate moral lawgiver and his moral law is found in the Bible. The Bible is our moral compass, where we can have moral certainty. It eliminates the confusion that we see all around us, in what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil, what is moral and what is immoral.