Some commonsense comments about moral relativism...

... in the pages of The New York Times, of all places:

Most moral relativists say that moral right and wrong are to be relativized to a community’s “moral code.” According to some such codes, eating beef is permissible; according to others, it is an abomination and must never be allowed.  The relativist proposal is that we must never talk simply about what’s right or wrong, but only about what’s “right or wrong relative to a particular moral code.”

The trouble is that while “Eating beef is wrong” is clearly a normative statement, “Eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus” is just a descriptive remark that carries no normative import whatsoever.  It’s just a way of characterizing what is claimed by a particular moral code, that of the Hindus.  We can see this from the fact that anyone, regardless of their views about eating beef, can agree that eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus.

So, it looks as though the moral case is more like the witch case than the simultaneity case:  there are no relativistic cousins of “right” and “wrong.”  Denial of moral absolutism leads not to relativism, but to nihilism.

There is no half-way house called “moral relativism,” in which we continue to use normative vocabulary with the stipulation that it is to be understood as relativized to particular moral codes.  If there are no absolute facts about morality, “right” and “wrong” would have to join “witch” in the dustbin of failed concepts.

The argument is significant because it shows that we should not rush to give up on absolute moral facts, mysterious as they can sometimes seem, for the world might seem even more mysterious without any normative vocabulary whatsoever.

Read the entire essay, "The Maze of Moral Relativism" (July 24, 2011), by Paul Boghossian.

Also see, on Ignatius Insight:

Comments

[James Findlayson]

The irony is that the NYT has it under their blog called 'Opinionator', and the address is:

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...ref=opinion...opinion...

:)