It struck me that in every family, culture, or religion, ideas of right and wrong are the hot cattle prods, the barking sheepdogs that keep the masses in the herd. They are the bars that keep us caged. I decided that if I kept doing the "right" thing, I would spend my life following someone else's directions instead of my own. I didn't want to live my life without living my life. I wanted to make my own decision as a free woman, from my soul, not my training. But the problem was, I didn't know how.

Most things are right or wrong only in their backgrounds; few things are good or evil in themselves. But things that are right or wrong according to their culture, really are so.

All conscious beings are struggling, struggling to keep themselves in joint with their environment. Those things and creatures and events that aid them in their struggles are desirable and they call them good, and those things and creatures and events that oppose and defeat the satisfaction of desires are called bad. Right and wrong exist as conceptions of mind, because there are portions of the universe capable of happiness and misery. Erase sentiency from the universe and you erase the possibility of ethics. Every conscious portion of the universe, therefore, has ethical relations to every other conscious portion (man, woman, worm, Eskimo, oyster, ox), but not to inanimate portions (clod, cabbage, river, rose), because the ones are sentient and the others are not.

We have adopted in the modern world a sort of a relativistic ethic ... Most people can't stand up for their convictions, because the majority of people might not be doing it. See, everybody's not doing it, so it must be wrong. And since everybody is doing it, it must be right. So a sort of numerical interpretation of what's right. But I'm here to say to you this morning that some things are right and some things are wrong. Eternally so, absolutely so. It's wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong. It's wrong in America, it's wrong in Germany, it's wrong in Russia, it's wrong in China. It was wrong in 2000 B.C., and it's wrong in 1954 A.D. It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong. It's wrong to throw our lives away in riotous living. No matter if everybody in Detroit is doing it, it's wrong. It always will be wrong, and it always has been wrong. It's wrong in every age and it's wrong in every nation. Some things are right and some things are wrong, no matter if everybody is doing the contrary. Some things in this universe are absolute. The God of the universe has made it so. And so long as we adopt this relative attitude toward right and wrong, we're revolting against the very laws of God himself.

There's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate.

In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be. We look to someone to tell us what is right or wrong behaviour, what is right or wrong thought, and in following this pattern our conduct and our thinking become mechanical, our responses automatic. We can observe this very easily in ourselves.

Wherever there are right and wrong answers to important questions, there will be better or worse ways to get those answers, and better or worse ways to put them to use. Take child rearing as an example: How can we keep children free from disease? How can we raise them to be happy and responsible members of society? There are undoubtedly both good and bad answers to questions of this sort, and not all belief systems and cultural practices will be equally suited to bringing the good ones to light. This is not to say that there will always be only one right answer to every question, or a single, best way to reach every specific goal. But given the inescapable specificity of our world, the range of optimal solutions to any problem will generally be quite limited. While there might not be one best food to eat, we cannot eat stones — and any culture that would make stone eating a virtue, or a religious precept, will suffer mightily for want of nourishment (and teeth). It is inevitable, therefore, that some approaches to politics, economics, science, and even spirituality and ethics will be objectively better than their competitors (by any measure of “better” we might wish to adopt), and gradations here will translate into very real differences in human happiness.

Each living being of the universe, therefore, sustains to every other living being the relation of possible right and wrong, but to the insentient universe no such relation exists. Right is that relation which is conducive to happiness, or welfare, or complete living, or whatever synonym is preferred. Wrong is that which conduces to the opposite of happiness—misery, ill-fare, maladaptation.

When you look closely it is a question whether that which is a wrong to the present community may not prove to have been a right to the interests of posterity. That sounds a little foggy; but I will make my meaning more clear when I say that I think right and wrong are both tools which are being wielded by those great hands which are shaping the destinies of the universe, that both are making for improvement; but that the action of the one is immediate, and that of the other more slow, but none the less certain. Our own distinction of right and wrong is founded too much upon the immediate convenience of the community, and does not inquire sufficiently deeply into the ultimate effect.

Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.

"There is no correct dogma or perfect ideology. There is only what your experience has shown you to be right for you - and even then, that experience is probably somewhat wrong too. And because you and I and everybody else all have differing needs and personal histories and life circumstances, we will all inevitably come to different "correct" answers about what our lives mean and how they should be lived."

They speak about 'right' or 'wrong' as vehemently and passionately as if they believed that these names represented real existences, and that a human figure is really capable of choosing between them.

See, if evolution is true, who owns the world? Who makes the rules? How do we decide right from wrong? If man is God, and that's what humanism means, there is no absolute standard. How do you tell right from wrong? I mean, maybe Osama Bin Laden should tell right from wrong for everybody. Maybe congress should decide. Maybe Bill Clinton ought to decide. "Right and wrong? Never heard of that before." How do you tell right from wrong? Where are the rules?