However insecurely the specific moral absolutes are articulated and affirmed outside Christian faith, the formal rejection of all such absolutes, the claim that none of them can be true, is a post-Christian phenomenon.
It emerges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries among such men as Bentham and Marx. They rejected Christianity, rebelled against the false moral-cultural absolutes unjustly protecting property and status, and in their hopes and intentions transposed the Christian conception of a Kingdom—of a Kingdom built up by faith and good works brought to transcendent fruition by divine grace and providence. By this transposition of hope, the Kingdom was transformed into the inner-worldly realm of justice, prosperity, fraternity, and freedom, to be constructed by enlightened human planning and providence.
Today, Benthamite and Marxian ambitions to take charge of history are generally felt to be empty presumption. But their modeling of ethical deliberation and judgment on technical assessment and judgment—a modeling which the whole pre-Enlightenment ethical tradition had envisaged only to reject—remains powerfully attractive. Technical thinking, after all, is ubiquitous and yields many desirable and/or desired consequences. It is, moreover, the thought-form of children, as soon as they become able to organize themselves to get what they want. One envisages a determinate goal which can be attained by thoughtful disposition of effective means; scrutinizes alternative courses of action for their efficacy as means and their cost in terms of other goals; and selects and undertakes the action promising to be most effective in attaining the goal with least cost.
(John Finnis, Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision, and Truth [Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1991], 12-3)
Note from KBJ: Finnis says that consequentialism (a superset of utilitarianism) is "the thought-form of children." This is interesting, because I have long believed that progressivism is, by comparison with conservatism, childish. (See the quotation from C. D. Broad at the head of this blog.) There is a strong contingent connection between consequentialism (in ethics) and progressivism (in politics). This is not, of course, an argument against either consequentialism or progressivism; but I do find it interesting, for it suggests that different personalities or temperaments are drawn to different moral and political theories.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 