SacketHallI was a minor participant in a discussion where Ted Bundy the notorious serial killer was brought up as an example of someone who subscribed to the view that morality is subjective. The conversation itself was very interesting and a great illustration of the evil and ignorance of that sort of world view. Particularly interesting was the link one of the commenters made to something Ted Bundy said in a discussion with one of his victims about that very subject. You can find that here. It was his premise, and a true one I think, that if moral subjectivism is true, then no values are right or wrong. In what is characterized a paraphrase, he captures the true nature of moral subjectivism when he says:

…Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either “right” or “wrong.”

That “learning” was the seminal event that allowed him to throw off the shackles of morality and pursue his own personal pleasure without having to worry about whether he was encroaching on “the rights of others.” I had forgotten about my own personal physical and temporal proximity to one of Bundy’s horrific crimes. In May of 1974, it was the end of my freshman year in college and I lived across the street from Sacket Hall on the campus of Oregon State University. My mother had lived in Sackett Hall when she was a freshman in Pharmacy back in 1948. That was the last location Roberta Kathleen Parks was seen before Ted Bundy kidnapped and murdered her. It is believed he picked her up on the street between where she lived and where I lived at the time. They found some of her remains on Taylor Mountain in Washington State in 1975.