Wherein David Brooks asks, "What is truth?"

David Brooks, the faux conservative New York Times columnist, wrote last week about a study of the moral lives and values of American 18- to 23-year-olds. He sounds surprised:

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either 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 a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. 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, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”

It would be interesting to press these young people for the reasoning that leads them to "generally agree that rape and murder are wrong." We suspect that as soon as a little context is provided, we'd find the same deadly relativism regarding abortion, euthanasia, and drunk party girls.

If the Universe is simply the consequence of a long series of happy, random accidents, then there exist no objective principles to which you can resort to persuade me that your morality is preferable to my morality. In a Godless world, "morality" is no more than an invention of the weak intended to persuade the strong not to kill them.