Absolute Good: Dogs as Family, Pigs as Pork? On Human Hypocrisy
The Relativity of Morality and the Endless Questioning Toward Absolute Good
Dogs as Family, Pigs as Pork: Speciesism and the Double Standard of Zoos
Dogs receive names and the status of family, while pigs and cattle of equal or greater sentience pass through factory farms to become packaged meat. Discriminating against suffering merely by species is speciesism. Although every sentient animal is a subject-of-a-life with inherent worth, humans measure the value of life by cuteness and taste, and the essay argues that even zoos touting education and species conservation are closer to exhibits that strip animals of their wildness to serve human dominance and entertainment.
Righteousness That Flips at the Border: The Relativity of Positive Law
Law, too, is riddled with contradiction and malleability. It is a normative system forged by the needs of a given era and society, with no absolute moral code built into it. Practices legalized as basic rights in one nation — euthanasia, capital punishment, the bounds of free speech — can be capital crimes just across a border. Positive law, enacted through the political consensus of particular groups at particular times, is a flexible instrument of control packaged as a social contract, and it cannot guarantee an absolute standard beyond the written text.
The Universal Ban on Murder: Sacred Moral Law or Survival Contract?
Amid legal relativity, nearly every civilization has prohibited murder. It looks like evidence of an absolute moral law, yet at root it is closer to a self-interested contract made to escape the dread of violent death in a war of all against all. Evolutionary psychology and biology likewise read the ban on murder and mutual cooperation as a survival strategy selected to raise the group's odds of survival, a product of reciprocal altruism — for a society that permits killing for private ends loses the mutual trust it needs to exist.
Where Surveillance Disappears: Inner Ethics Under Anonymity and Deindividuation
Even social contracts collapse easily once external conditions change. Human ethics proves fragile when judicial punishment and the gaze of others are removed: ordinary people placed in situations of anonymity and power see their inner moral codes break down, and under deindividuation, where identity dissolves into a crowd, they commit violent acts without remorse. The question of the deserted island and the surveillance vacuum asks whether an ethics that evaporates the moment the fear of punishment vanishes can be an absolute good native to the human mind.
Murder in Peace, Duty in War: State Power and the Banality of Evil
Moral contradiction erupts most openly at the level of the state. In peacetime the state condemns private murder as absolute evil, yet once war is declared those across the border are redefined as enemies and killing becomes a legal duty. On the view that politics rests on the distinction between friend and enemy, the state holds the power to declare a state of exception and turn homicide into legal necessity. Within that machinery individuals carry out bureaucratic duties without reflecting on the killing they commit — the banality of evil — and peacetime evil is transfigured into wartime heroism.
Conclusion: Not a Ready-Made Answer, but Skepticism as the Compass
The speciesist double standard, the relativity of positive law, the ban on murder as a survival strategy, the fragility of inner ethics exposed by surveillance gaps, and evil normalized by state bureaucracy together show that human-made moral codes and customs can never be absolute good in themselves. If neither religious law, nor the legal codes of states, nor evolved ethics can guarantee it, the illusion of finding a ready-made absolute good outside ourselves must be abandoned. Only a skepticism that refuses blind obedience to imposed justice and keeps asking “Is this genuinely right for life itself?” can serve as the sole compass.
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