It seems to me that if you get to the core of what most people believe to be good or bad, you find that it is just that - a belief. By definition, beliefs cannot be proven, and I think any attempt to impose one's beliefs on others will create discord. Of course, one could argue that discord is good, and so beliefs should be imposed on others - so then you fall back to attempting to define good and bad.
My supposition is that the words should be avoided at all costs because they are ultimately meaningless. They are too subjective to be used in a language meant to facilitate communication between individuals. Since they do not serve to improve communication, they should simple be eliminated from use.
A pluralistic society is one in which the members of the society are offered more than one norm of moral behavior. Such a situation presents the individual with the problem of not merely trying to do what is right, but of having to decide what is right in the first place. Expressing the same thing in the form of question:
who has the right to do what?
What should morality be based on?
Which source of morality is the right one to follow?
The following incident should help illustrate the nature of the problem.
James is a senior in high school. He wants to go to a party. His mother gives him permission and tells him to have a good time. But just as he is leaving the house, James' father comes downstairs and tells James that he cannot go because of his low grades on his last report card. Jame's mother totally disagrees. She gets angry and tells James to ignore his father and go ahead and leave.
James is faced with the predicament often described as "damned if you do, and damned if you don't". His problem arises from his parents, as two sources of morality, telling him to do two contradictory things at the same time. On a much broader scale, this is the plight of modern day youth who are often besieged with not two but many contradictory answers as to what is the right thing to do in any given situation. It is not as though the proabortionists, for example, came out and said they realized they were wrong, but were pushing abortion all the same. On the contrary, they strongly assert that Catholics are wrong and they are right. It is not hard to see why such a situation is the cause of moral confusion and uncertainty.
The following will hopefully help to further clarify this point. The following positions are held and fostered by different groups in our society today. Each of the position listed is considered to be immoral by the Church.
1. Marriage should be abolished so people could move on to another partner when they wished.
2. A woman should be allowed to have an abortion on demand.
3. We should painlessly kill the very old and the retarded because they are no longer useful to the society.
4. It is a waste of time to go to church. Besides, religion is no more than a superstitious hangover from the past.
5. The only worthwhile goal in life is to amass as much material wealth as possible. Nothing else matter.
The sharp contrast between the Church's teaching and the ideas expressed above is but a small indication of the widely divergent and often contradictory answers given for moral questions. The question that automatically emerges is: "whom are you to believe?" When your faith comes up against the thinking of others, how are you to arrive at the right answer to the problem? Surely the Church is not saying that everyone is wrong except those who follow the Church's way of seeing things. Surely the Church does not ask you not to think for yourself. The picture presented is a confusing one. It seems at times as though everyone were walking on jello, and the only certain thing that can be said about any moral question is that the answer will always be certain. In this day and age, even the simplest statement is followed by a question mark. We appear to have lost our compass in a world that constatly offers to new problems.
The sharp contrast between the Church's teaching and the ideas
Now that we have made clear some of the moral problems that arise from living in a pluralistic society, we can begin by stating a few principles that may help to clarify things.
The first point is that each person and idea with which you come in contact is only a possible source of morality. Nothing is actual source of morality until you internalize it by believing in it. As soon as we believe in someone or something, we let that idea into ourselves and are changed in the process. We see this in a child's growth and development. A child spontaneously believes, that it is internalizes, all that it is taught by its parents. This deep faith in the parents is what makes the parents such as overwhelmingly significant force in a child's life.
But as we grow into adulthood, we should no longer blindly believe everything we are told. We are not meant to be sponges that spontaneously absorb every idea that is presented to us. Rather, we have both the power and the responsibility to judge for ourselves what we will believe or not believe. The following example will illustrate what is being said here. Imagine two students who are studying communism. The first student gains much knowledge about communism but his study in no way directly affects his thinking. The second student, however, actually becomes the source that changes his whole life. So, too, with any other reality of life. They remain only possible sources of morality as long as we do not believe in them. They do not become actual sources of morality until we internalize them in an act of faith. It is one thing to learn about abortion. It is something else to believe in it. One can know about atheism and remain a Catholic. But one cannot believe in atheism and be a Catholic. One of the problems of living in a pluralistic society is that we often internalizes values we see on television and elsewhere without realizing we have done so. Living in a pluralistic society calls for clear thinking and awareness of ourselves.
"Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me" are the lines of a well-known children's lyric. The statement is true only so long as you do not believe such words. If you begin to believe them or those around you begin to believe them, words can hurt just as babdly as sticks and stones. This same idea is expressed in the words, "The pen is mightier than the sword."
The same holds true with unchristian moral values. They are harmless to te Christian unless the Christian begins to believe in them and acts by them.
The second point to keep in mind is that we must be very careful to distinguish between "the world" and "evil in the world." In other words, we must recognize that the Church has no monopoly on goodness. It is obvious that there is much good in the world, even though it is no way associated with the visible Church. For example, research projects that try to overcome diseases such as cancer, or the CARE or Red Cross programs that help the poor and underdeveloped nations. Being a good Catholic in a pluralistic society does not mean shutting one's eyes to the goodness in the world. On the contrary, a Catholic should be willing and ready to take an active part in all activities that work toward the betterment of mankind.
The third point is that the world is not only a place of goodness but also of evil actions and ideas that lead people away from their dignity as children of God. Here the Catholic must be able to rely on his or her own convictions that flow from faith in Jesus Christ and the teachings of the Church.
One well-known thinker once said, "Distinguished in order to unite." That is, just as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle must each be perfectly shaped in order to fit together into a whole, so, too, the different groups in a pluralistic society must each try to be true to their own convictions if they are truly unite and form a living society. Catholics must take their active place in the community by being true to Christ. This cannot be done if Catholics yield to every force in society, so they become invisible by becoming no different from those who are not Christians.