"National Review Online today offers a 1966 column by William F. Buckley Jr. outlining that philosophy and its consequences.
If that was the case, with no transcendent basis, how could morality be other than a “personal affair best left to [an individual’s] own conscience”? The conclusion is inescapable and it has left some of the more candid evolutionists unable to condemn anything, any behavior, any ethical system, at all. As Dr. Weikart has written here:
It would have been interesting to put the same question directly to Hugh Hefner, see what he’d have to say. It’s too late now." EN&V
Mr. Hefner’s Playboy is most widely known for the raciness of its prose and the total exposure of the female form. It is more than that, Mr. Hefner insists — and many agree, including professors and ministers and sociologists. It is a movement of sorts, and its bible is an apparently endless series, published monthly by Mr. Hefner, entitled “The Playboy Philosophy,” the key insight of which is that “a man’s morality, like his religion, is a personal affair best left to his own conscience.” The phrase sounds harmless enough, and the tendency is to cluck-cluck one’s agreement to it.But as scholars including our colleagues Richard Weikart, John West, and Benjamin Wiker have pointed out, the ethical impact of his writing, in The Descent of Man in particular, was to thoroughly undercut any notion that morality could be more than an evolutionary byproduct.
The trouble with Hefner’s law is that society is composed of nothing more than a great number of individuals, and if each man’s morality is defined merely to suit himself, then everyone will endure the consequences of the individual’s autonomously defined ethics.
If that was the case, with no transcendent basis, how could morality be other than a “personal affair best left to [an individual’s] own conscience”? The conclusion is inescapable and it has left some of the more candid evolutionists unable to condemn anything, any behavior, any ethical system, at all. As Dr. Weikart has written here:
I have encountered some true believers in Darwinism who have told me that their Darwinian-inspired moral relativism leads them to the conclusion that Hitler was neither right nor wrong. I once held a conversation with a philosophy graduate student who defended moral relativism on Darwinian grounds. After I pressed him to see if he was willing to be relativistic about Hitler’s atrocities, he uttered the stunning words, “Hitler was OK.”As far as I know, Hugh Hefner’s libertinism stopped short of Dawkins’s confused refusal to condemn Hitler. Or is it confused? Come to think of it, it is not. If right and wrong are an “illusion fobbed off on us by our genes,” which is simply a modern translation of Darwin’s account in The Descent of Man, the evolutionist who affirms absolutes can do so on only a purely arbitrary basis. Grant him this: Dawkins, when questioned, was honest enough with himself to recognize what lies downstream from his Darwinism. To judge from his writing, Darwin himself was not.
Maybe you think this student was just off his rocker. However, the leading evolutionary biologist and world famous atheist Richard Dawkins took a similar position in an interview, where he was being questioned about his moral relativism. Dawkins asked, “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question.” If this is a tough moral question for Dawkins, he should stop pontificating about how religions are “the root of all evil,” especially since he doesn’t believe that evil actually exists!
It would have been interesting to put the same question directly to Hugh Hefner, see what he’d have to say. It’s too late now." EN&V
How long shall they utter and speak hard things?
and all the workers of iniquity boast themselves?
Psalm 94:4
