Stephen Evans was stern man. He never so much as smiled. All the students thought he was the most boring teacher, but he did know his subject well. As far as high school philosophy teachers went, no one knew more than Mr. Evans. He once spent an entire class period reciting Aristotle’s Corpus Aristotelicum, in the original Greek! He assigned enormous amounts of homework every night. Only seniors could take his class because they were the only ones who might be close to being adequately prepared for the advanced concepts. Even students taking AP philosophy agreed that Mr. Evans’ class was impossibly difficult. Rumor had it that Mr. Evans used to be a university professor, but that he had retired for mysterious reasons.
Jackson, however, had a special aptitude for philosophy. In elementary, when the teachers were first introducing the concept of moral relativism, Jackson had no difficulty in accepting it. Some of the other kids had said that it didn’t make sense. They said that their mommies and daddies had told them what was right and wrong. It was not so with Jackson. His parents were not so closed-minded. They had taught him to live his truth from an early age. Moral relativism just seemed to fit.
Despite Jackson’s philosophical abilities, Mr. Evans had always disliked him. Jackson didn’t know why, but Mr. Evans always sought out ways to hurt or humiliate Jackson. One time, Jackson had forgotten an Oxford Comma when he was dictating his essay to his digital assistant, and the grammar checker had not caught it. Not only did Mr. Evans take off 10 points from the essay, but he made Jackson rewrite his entire essay. By hand! As in, with a pencil and paper! It was like the dark ages all over again.
Jackson sat down right as the bell rang.
“Cutting it a bit close, Mr. Harris,” commented Mr. Evans as he finished writing what he had been writing on the digital whiteboard. The whiteboard corrected Mr. Evans’ sloppy handwriting into standard Times New Roman.
Jackson, sitting down next to Noah, was about to reply with an apology, when he saw what Mr. Evans had written on the board.
“Absolute Morality," began Mr. Evans, “is the concept that there are some things that are morally right or wrong, with no exceptions. A historical example would be the old Christian belief that homosexuality is wrong. It is a moral system as old as human civilization itself, and it has many merits.”
Jackson thought this was a joke. Absolute Morality? This was an advanced philosophy class, not a basic history class.
“The most common argument that adherents of Absolute Morality used to make was the presence of some sense of right and wrong in every human being,” Mr. Evans continued, “they would say that Moral Relativism is a very unstable foundation to build on, and they are right.”
The class was dead silent after this statement.
“Think about it, by what standard should we base our moral decisions? Preservation of the Species is not valid because humans make mistakes in judgement. Hitler thought he was helping preserve the “true” human race by eliminating the Jews. Should we base it on popular opinion? People used to think the sun revolved around the flat earth. Should we do it merely on the whims of what “feels” right to us at any given moment? Kim Jong Un “felt” good when he detonated the EMP that wiped out all of the United States’ electronic devices for almost a full year. If it was not for our allies and the fact that the U.S.’ survival was essential for the world economy, we could have easily been wiped out. Even so, our development of new technologies was greatly hindered. A year’s worth of time is a lot in the technology world. Even today, we still feel the effects of that devastating attack. It took almost two years after power was restored before Google was up and running again, and even then, much data was lost.”
He paused here to catch his breath.
“At this point, you may be wondering why we accept Moral Relativism at all. The answer is not because it is more valid than Absolute Morality, but because of the Problem of Authority. Whose standards do we all agree to adhere to? Many people presented options, but the most common was that we were to obey the commands of some form of ‘god.’ Because no one could decide on what to do, the government began to accept all moral perspectives. That is how we came to where we are today.”
Jackson just noticed that the principle, Mr. Jones, was standing at the door of Mr. Evans’ classroom, and it seemed that Mr. Evans had just noticed as well.
“Jackson Harris, you need to come with me,” the principal said sternly
Jackson stood and walked to the door with a confused look on his face. Had he done something wrong? Jackson and the principal began to walk slowly to Mr. Jones’ office.
“Jackson,” he said slowly, “I’m afraid I have some terrible news,” he paused for several seconds, sighed, then continued, “As you know, your father has been working for many years on creating a technology to shield us from any further EMP-based attacks. Recently, he thought he had found a solution using radiation to repel the electromagnetically charged particles. Today, as he was experimenting with it, a leak formed in the area that contained the test. He didn’t notice until it was too late. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but he died two hours ago.”
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