> Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil.
That seems like a variation on the old "if a tree falls in the forest but there's no one there to hear it ...." By analogy: For 300-plus years, millions of kidnapped Africans and their descendants were unable to convince the white rulers of the American South that enslavement was evil — as indeed it truly is — because the enslavers, in their echo chamber, had convinced themselves otherwise and had the guns. Consequently, the enslaved workers' "natural rights" were a nullity — that is, until the U.S. Army weighed in and kicked the shit out of the southerners. (I have a lot of sympathy for an anonymous Army officer's tweet that I read awhile back: Sherman should have mowed the south like a lawn, with multiple passes.)
1 + 1 != 3 only because we agree on notation to represent the real, physical world; "right" and "wrong" aren't in the same category, because they're matters of opinion, and for practical purposes on the time scale of individual human lives, might indeed does make right.
Example: Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, if an enslaved worker escaped and fled north, anyone who helped him or her — even in a free state — could be arrested and fined; that was the law of the land for years, and it was deemed meet and right by enslavers and their sympathizers.
It's true that, in the long run and in some respects, "right" does seem eventually to converge on what humans generally agree on. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said (about investing for the long term), in the long run we are all dead — the U.S. Army's eventual vindication of "right" about slavery, in 1861-65, came too late for the millions of enslaved blacks who'd already died in the preceding 340-plus years.
(Replying to my own comment because I can't reply to the one below)
If right and wrong are not matters of opinion, then what objective test does one use to discern which is which? For example, is contraception right or wrong — and why? How about same-sex marriage? How about interracial marriage?
As to rape: You and I certainly agree that it's wrong, but that hasn't been true in all times and circumstances (are you familiar with droit du seigneur and its variations?). And the Russian soldiers who raped their way through Eastern and Central Europe in 1944-45 were told by many of their superiors that it was their right to do so.
> 1 + 1 != 3 only because we agree on notation to represent the real, physical world; "right" and "wrong" aren't in the same category, because they're matters of opinion, and for practical purposes on the time scale of individual human lives, might indeed does make right.
You're arguing over the meaning of symbols, whereas I'm talking about the underlying concepts. The map is not the territory. Right and wrong are not matters of opinion... unless you really do think that it's ok to rape someone as long as you're never caught.
That seems like a variation on the old "if a tree falls in the forest but there's no one there to hear it ...." By analogy: For 300-plus years, millions of kidnapped Africans and their descendants were unable to convince the white rulers of the American South that enslavement was evil — as indeed it truly is — because the enslavers, in their echo chamber, had convinced themselves otherwise and had the guns. Consequently, the enslaved workers' "natural rights" were a nullity — that is, until the U.S. Army weighed in and kicked the shit out of the southerners. (I have a lot of sympathy for an anonymous Army officer's tweet that I read awhile back: Sherman should have mowed the south like a lawn, with multiple passes.)