Moral Relativism

Intellectuals of the Protestant and Judaic persuasions complain of what they called moral relativism. Dennis Prager of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University writes that,

Nothing more separates Judeo-Christian values from secular values than the question of whether morality -- what is good or evil -- is absolute or relative. In other words, is there an objective right or wrong, or is right or wrong a matter of personal opinion?

Prager dislikes moral relativism. He adds,

Without God, each society or individual makes up its or his/her moral standards. But once individuals or societies become the source of right and wrong, "right" and "wrong" and "good" and "evil" are merely adjectives describing one's preferences. This is known as moral relativism, and it is the dominant attitude toward morality in modern secular society.

Prager complains,

Most secular individuals do not confront [the] consequences of moral relativism. It is too painful for most decent secular people to realize that their moral relativism, their Godless morality, means that murder is not really wrong.

The above statement is an erroneous evaluation of how many or most "secular" people think. Because their judgments about what is ethical and what is not is not drawn from Jewish or Christian scripture does not inhibit them from concluding that killing in certain circumstances is criminal, evil, or what have you. There is the question of killing and war that Prager is not addressing here, that the Catholic Church does, but let us not get into that. Prager, here, is taking a position that is difficult to defend. He is saying that unless an idea has a source from outside our heads and is rooted in an absolute, it (opposition to murder) does not exist.

Another who accuses people of moral relativism is Steven Robert Travers, an author of over 15 published books. He has on the internet, as of today, an article he entitles "Hitler, Gandhi and the Lie of Moral Relativism." Travers writes that,

At the heart of Leftist lies is moral relativism. Liberals must try to reconcile their evil, Communism, and say that their “opponents,” the conservatives, have an equally evil ideologue hiding in their closet.

Travers continues with a comment about "some hideously barbaric practices" in the history of Aztecs. He complains that, "Some moral relativists have excused these practices as simply being part of their particular culture." He gives no example. Anthropologists, historians and others writing about the Aztecs, whom Travers may characterize as liberal, might look upon Aztec sacrifices with disgust, and most probably do. But condemnation and preaching are not a part of their craft. By describing in detail they are allowing readers to apply their own disgust.

Anthropologists might conclude that the people they are studying have ethics superior to the Christian society they are familiar with. Or they might not wish to judge which of the two societies has superior ethics. This is different from a formulation of moral or ethical equivalence. Any anthropologist worth his salt recognizes the scientific difficulty in such a formulation.

From Travers to another who has attacked moral relativism: On April 16, 2008, President George W. Bush spoke of a "dictatorship of relativism." And some of us have seen relativism condemned by a Protestant preacher or two behind the pulpit on a Sunday morning television broadcast. The complaint is that moral relativism dominates academia. It is an absurd accusation. Academics, ethics professors included, we might surmise, are as inclined as you and I to believe that persons exist whose ethical standards are lower than theirs.

An example would be describing Hitler and the British as equally responsible for World War II.

Those who complain about moral relativism usually do not point to any specific arguments for moral equivalence, although moral equivalence arguments have been made and deserve challenges. It appears that some at least who are making accusations of moral relativism are doing so assuming that a lack of God-based moral condemnation is equivalent to moral relativism.

It appears that a vast majority of humanity believes that evil exists. The question is what to do about it. It is a political question. Some have held that it is best just to make sure that they are not the ones partaking in evil -- Henry David Thoreau, for example. This is a pacifism, an inaction, a failure to help others that some consider an evil itself. But there are different kinds of pacifism. Martin Luther King Jr. was a pacifist of sorts but strong on social action. But King's pacifist activism was protected and eventually supported by the federal government's military power. At any rate, some of us label pacifistic attitudes towards evil as cultural or moral relativism -- a philosophical and rhetorical position that has made a little noise but has not always had much influence politically. It is the specific evil that has to be measured and addressed. Evil takes a path of least resistance and a society has to decide what if anything to do about it. And sometimes the response is an over-reaction born from ignorance and passion.

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