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Are right and wrong common universal aspects of law that come out of our inherent nature as human beings, expressed through our common biology and the heritage of our upbringing? Or alternatively, are they merely relative to the culture one happens to live in? Fred Alford's quest is whether morality is an opinion, or a law of our nature.
Alford questions whether the contemporary and extreme emphasis on individualism has eradicated shared law or morality (Macintyre, 2000). Crisis threatens if moral certainties no longer exist, and, on the basis of our wide multiculturalism, other people are entirely at liberty to hold to their own, however diverse. The only moral good, it seems, is that one should never press one's own moral beliefs on anyone else.
In his opening essay, Alford describes how Sophocles' Antigone is torn by a dilemma - to follow a universal law decreed by the gods, or to bend to the will of the local state law. Natural morality demanded she bury her dead brother, a universal obligation above all personal opinion, but the decree by her brother's enemy, King Creon, proclaimed that she be put to death if she perform the rituals. Antigone appealed to a higher law than that of the state. Aristotle argued that she represents a pure form of natural law endowed by the Gods, fated to die in her confrontation with Creon - the universal against the local and temporal. Most mortals are confused by such conflicting demands, but, in contrast, Antigone defends natural law, and does so precisely because it brings her close to her own death - this is Alford's central argument: moral loyalty is close to the deathly forces. Natural law is only won by passing through the valley of death: “Dark eros”, Alford names it. Natural law is a far more subtly derived than the prosaic Manichean sense of an eternal war between dark and light. Although Antigone's predicament has been discussed by philosophers from Aristotle via Aquinas and Augustine to George Steiner and Alasdair Macinty