Moral Neutrality - A Dangerous Delusion?

I never cease to be amazed at how some people from time-to-time seem to advocate a position of Moral Neutrality. That is to say, they seem to support a hypothesis which says in effect: 'There is no such thing as evil. What one person calls evil another calls good. How can you therefore label one thing as evil and another as good? Those who do things that you or I might call evil, are really just developing spiritually along different lines. In fact we are all helping each other in the spiritual process.' They then go on to attempt to argue how the victim is somehow supposedly 'helping' the perpetrator along the path of spiritual development by suffering at the hands of the perpetrator. To use a popular expression, sometimes I feel like saying to such people: 'WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE!'.

Such hypotheses as Moral Neutrality are of course easy to conjecture when you're sitting in the safety of your own home, resting comfortably in front of your computer, perhaps with your favourite music playing around you and a family member or pet who loves you for company somewhere nearby too. But, I wonder, if such a person who advocates Moral Neutrality in one of its various shades were suddenly to be transported through space and time, say to a Belgium Creche in January 2009 to be faced by a knife-wielding maniac, and if the hate-filled knife-wielding maniac was to say 'I'm just about to kill you, but I'm doing it because you are helping me to grow spiritually, just in a slightly different way than you', would the Moral Neutralitist (who seems to so easily relegate others who have suffered such atrocities at the hands of the evil) so quickly apply such willing acceptance to their own predicament? I suspect that, in such circumstances they would rapidly 'see the light', don't you? They might even (I suspect) try to fight the would-be killer, using all the energy they could muster to preserve their life - even if it meant denying the assailant the opportunity to 'develop spiritually'?
In the news today it was reported that a young Chinese woman was killed at a university in the USA by a Chinese male. She was decapitated. How could her decapitation possibly help her assailant grow spiritually? For those who subscribe to the Karma model, all the poor victim has done is (using the model of the Moral Neutralitist) 'help the murderer to earn lots of bad karma', as she died in such a brutal way. It is clear, is it not, that Moral Neutrality is a facile theory that's full of holes and which leaks very badly when examined with common sense?

I think it's very easy for someone to argue the Moral Neutralitist position - safe in the comfort of their own home - but let them find themselves on the 80th floor of a building that's spewing flames and vibrating frighteningly because it's just about to crash to earth due to the hateful actions of some terrorists who've just flown a plane smack-bang into it, or should they ever find that they and their family are stripped naked and forcibly marched towards a gas chamber as part of some 'Final Solution', well... let's see how enthusiastically they support the Moral Neutralitist stance then.

It is, I believe, time for those who hold this position to start to take account of the real world. When many people advocate this dangerous idea I believe it conveys a message to those with criminal tendencies (and did you know that approximately 3- 5 % of the world's population are dangerous sociopaths - that amounts to millions of people?) that the rest of us don't care about what they do. Worse, in a convoluted kind of way, it says that some of us might actually condone their actions. Well not me! Moral neutrality is I believe a dangerous delusion. It's one that I think needs to be urgently consigned to the history books, along with the so-called 'Final Solution' before another form of the 'Final Solution' rears its ugly head, spurred on perhaps unwittingly by the advocates of Moral Neutrality.

(This post was inspired by comments I noticed elsewhere which supported a morally neutral position to life. As my thoughts on the subject might be of interest to others I've decided to include them here on my website too.)