Relative Moral Absolutes Revisited

Following is a revision of the essay posted on August 10.


Relative Moral Absolutes

1. People who invoke absolute moral values in defense of their social views are usually too caught up in their rhetoric to pause and consider what their moral claims actually entail. In attacking same-sex marriage, for example, conservative columnist David Limbaugh refers to “absolute moral standards,” “traditional morality,” and “standards we instinctively know are beneficial, healthy and morally sound”(1). He seems to think that these standards coincide and that it isn’t especially difficult for people to agree on what they are, or at least it isn’t difficult for people who agree with him to agree on what they are, because that’s clearly the “we” he’s calling on. What isn’t clear is what happens when “absolute,” “traditional,” and “instinctive” moral standards don’t coincide and people fail to agree.

Slavery violated the absolute moral standards of many nineteenth-century Americans, but not the absolute values and traditional beliefs of many others. Still others, regardless of how they viewed slavery, upheld the absolute right of (white) people in slave states to follow their traditions, or, at the least, preferred not to challenge that right because of the higher priority they gave to keeping the nation intact. Presumably, each group could claim to know instinctively what was beneficial, healthy, and morally sound. The intent of this example isn’t to assert analogy between the issues of same-sex marriage and slavery, but to point to a problem both raise: What happens when the values of one person or group conflict with those of another? The Civil War settled the issue of whether slavery would continue in the United States, but force of arms can’t prove one moral view is superior to another, much less absolute.

There is a connection, nonetheless, between the legacy of slavery and the current debate on marriage. Until the Supreme Court ruled such laws unconstitutional in 1967, one third of the states restricted marriage to couples of the same race. The judge in the case brought before the Court had a belief that was both traditional and absolute, and also no doubt seemed to him instinctively sound: God placed the races on separate continents, intending them not to mix. Curiously, defenders of “traditional” marriage have yet to propose allowing states to reintroduce laws against racial mixing.

2. The apologist for moral absolutes generally starts by outlining the supposed damaging social effects of “moral relativism,” claiming that without absolute standards of right and wrong, that is, standards that are universal and objective, there would be no way to justify or condemn one course of behavior compared to another, and everything would be permitted. The problems begin when we try to determine what such an apologist might consider an absolute standard of right and wrong. Consider two favorite examples of what happens when societies supposedly abandon absolute standards of conduct, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. In fact, these were among the most repressive societies in history precisely because they did have absolute standards, which they enforced with absolute finality. The fact that conservative moralists consider Nazi and Communist ideologies illegitimate shows that by “absolute” they mean a particular kind of absolute and by “standards” they mean standards they approve. Apparently some absolutes are more absolute than others.

The main targets of conservative moralists, however, aren’t totalitarian ideologues or even people whose absolute religious values conflict with their own, but people who argue against the existence of an objective foundation for any universal moral values. To conservatives, these are the people whose ideas imperil the social order, by supposedly giving license to every form of behavior regardless of consequence. Much about this charge is debatable, but regardless of how carefully and plausibly it might be stated, it would still be irrelevant to the question of whether absolute values exist other than as arguably useful fictions. Similarly irrelevant is the charge that relativists are really only interested in creating a context in which their otherwise unacceptable desires and behaviors will be seen as permissible; even if this were true, it could still turn out that the premise of their self-serving argument was valid.

Especially confused is the notion that in saying values are relative, relativists must be referring to some implicit absolute as a standard of comparison; in fact, the relativist is not using “relative” in that sense, but in the sense of “in relation to social context.” Some claim that because moral relativists believe in the truth of what they’re saying, they show themselves to be absolutists with regard to the possibility of speaking the truth, which means they contradict themselves when they say everything is relative; or that in saying everything is relative, they undermine their claim to be saying something that is universally true. In fact, as will be shown, although these convenient misreadings of the relativist position have the virtue of allowing a triumphant conclusion to the supposed demolition of the relativist argument, they have the unfortunate drawback of missing the point.

The absolutist may begin the defense of his views by noting, quite aptly, that competing beliefs don’t necessarily cancel each other out; after all, one of them (the apologist’s of course) could be exclusively true. Although the observation is just, it’s of no relevance because the focus of the argument against moral absolutes isn’t simply the existence of competing claims, one of which, logically speaking, could be true, but the absence of objective standards for determining which claim, if any, actually is. The absolutist typically pays inadequate if any attention to this issue, and instead attributes such weak arguments to his fictitious opponent that their supposed refutation has no bearing on this central point; makes some assertions about what “everyone” believes and what that supposed consensus implies; adds some remarks on the natural or supernatural basis of morality, in the latter case bringing in God to clinch the argument; and considers the matter done. It isn’t.

3. Consider the following remarks by David Klinghoffer:

"We know what's right because God or his earthly agents inform us through objective revelation or tradition. … A believer in objective morality accepts the right of established religious tradition—as revealed in a book (the Bible, the Talmud or the Koran) or in the decision of an ordained religious hierarchy—to define right and wrong"(2).

Who is Klinghoffer’s “we”? He’s an Orthodox Jew; his political hero, George Bush, a born-again Christian; and Bush codependent Osama bin Laden, a radical Muslim. How does accepting the right of their differing religions to define right and wrong lead to an objective moral code? Klinghoffer seems to think that a revelation or a decision is objective if a person or a tradition that claims to have the right to so declare it so declares it. Coming from a self-proclaimed believer in objective morality, this seems like a remarkably emphatic and confused embrace of moral relativism.

Even people more coherent than David Klinghoffer can believe that following God’s commands is doing good and behaving morally. However, is following God’s commands being moral or just doing what an all-powerful ruler wants us to do? Do we have to assent in a way that distinguishes being moral from merely being obedient? One answer is that God is perfect, perfection entails goodness, and God’s goodness entails providing humanity the guidance it needs to participate in that goodness. Moral behavior, then, is acting in accord with God’s wishes not out of hope for reward or fear of punishment, but because our love for God makes us want to conform our will to God’s. Such assertions raise additional questions, not the least of which concerns why a God of perfect goodness (or an “Intelligent Designer,” unless with malicious intent) created a world marked by pain [theists such as C. S. Lewis confronting “the problem of pain”(3) typically shift the argument to evil and its relation to free will; it’s easier to rationalize a God who creates people who bring harm to themselves and others, or who suffer for the sake of their spiritual improvement, than a God without whose power and will pediatric cancers could neither come into nor persist in being]. Fortunately, we don’t have to deal with such questions here. Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that behavior is moral when it follows God’s word, enough problems remain to preclude any attempt to base absolute values on this assertion.

4. As suggested earlier, one problem is, which God? Religious absolutists typically proceed as if the answer is so self-evident there’s no need to even raise the question—their God. For those who don’t share their beliefs, the issue isn’t so simple. The forgiving yet unforgiving God of born-agains like George Bush welcomes repentant Nazi murderers to heaven, but allows Jews who died in death camps to languish eternally in hell. The God of the murdered Jews imposes a different scheme, which in turn differs from that of the God of Osama bin Laden, who sanctions the murder of both Jews and Christians, as well as of Muslims of the wrong persuasion. Which of these (or some other religion’s) Gods should we follow?

Even if we confine ourselves to one religion, say, Christianity, how do we determine God’s views on, for example, divorce, priestly celibacy, and whether marriage is a sacrament, issues that go to the heart of the Christian view of marriage? Christians who dispute these and other matters claim to have divinely inspired texts that describe the intent of their founder, but don’t agree on what those texts mean. Even the creeds within the different Christian traditions derive from often-rancorous arguments over doctrine, although each tradition downplays those struggles and asserts that its beliefs, and not those of the so-called schismatics and heretics who disagree with it, are true and eternal. According to what objective standard should we accept the claim by one tradition that the stories selected and interpreted by its rules confirm its miracles, prophecies, and reading of history, and thus validate its understanding of the Christian God and God’s commands, whereas the stories and interpretations that others cite in support of their views are false and misleading?

5. Believers often claim God provides humanity an inner light to aid in discerning truth, although to account for the existence of error, they acknowledge that such lights can be clouded or work improperly. However, to confirm that an inner light is not working improperly, we have to weigh its judgment against what is in fact the truth; if we need an external standard to determine what is in fact the truth, we’re back where we started. Some apologists, such as Peter Kreeft, on the other hand, don’t think we need an external standard: “Conscience immediately detects real right and wrong, just as your senses immediately detect real colors and shapes.” This “shows that absolutism is scientific. It’s true to the data, the experience.” These “immediate good-and-evil detectors—consciences” come from God (4). If that’s the case, one might ask why people disagree about moral issues to an extraordinarily greater extent than they do about colors or shapes. In particular, why can’t some people see the truth? Presumably because, although a person’s conscience is as infallible as the God whose prophet it is, people can be driven by inappropriate desires or confused by false teachings. Thus, individuals who say they disagree with people who, like Kreeft, know the truth aren’t hearing clearly the voice of conscience, or are hearing it, but are lying about what their conscience tells them, and are letting things other than their conscience dictate their beliefs and actions. But how can we tell who is speaking and acting out of the genuine dictates of the one true universal conscience? By observing whose actions are in accord with true moral teachings. And how do we know which moral teachings are true? Our conscience immediately tells us. But what about people who disagree with us, and make the same claim about what their conscience is telling them? Their claims are false. How do we know their claims are false? Because they disagree with what our conscience tells us and with what their conscience, if they were honest and clear with themselves, would tell them.

What these data show is not that absolutism is scientific, but that Kreeft and people who argue as he does believe that their conscience is absolutely infallible because they believe that God made it so, and know this to be so because the tradition they believe in tells them it is, and they believe that tradition is true because their infallible conscience tells them so. And round and round, with nothing on which to rest this self-reinforcing circle of certainty.

In particular, religionists like Kreeft confuse the degree of certainty with which they hold a belief with how objectively true it is, as if anything they believe in absolutely is therefore absolutely true. Such a claim rests on the assertion that God does not allow those who love him to be deceived. But what if one loves the wrong God, and the true God does allow the mistaken believer to be deceived (or, God forbid, there is no God at all)? Such a believer would be convinced he was one of the elect that God would not allow to be deceived, but he would be wrong, and the peace or joy he feels on having found the truth wouldn’t just be irrelevant to whether in fact it was the truth, it also could be an especially deft bit of demonic misdirection: The believer would have been deluded into believing he could not be deluded.

Thus, the general assertion by most believers about why they think their values are absolute usually comes down to the following form: My values are absolute because they rest on a truth I know is absolute because a text/tradition/teaching tells me so, and I know that that text/tradition/teaching is absolutely true because it tells me that the strength of my faith in it guarantees the truth of what it tells me.

6.Unfortunately, having an absolute conviction one is doing God’s work doesn’t guarantee one is, nor does it guarantee conduct that even those of the same religion would necessarily approve. As examples, it would be difficult to imagine a more vivid testimony to the strength of one’s faith in Allah than to board a bus and detonate a bomb attached to one’s chest; many a Christian has answered a divine call to kill Jews for their disrespect of the Savior; and many a devout Jew has shown a willingness to punish transgressors of God’s sacred geography. A tender conscience might consider an unacceptable act carried out in the name of an absolute religious belief a violation of that religion’s “true” nature, but how does one determine the true nature of a religion if not by observing what its followers say and do? Some who call themselves Christians, for example, might claim that others who speak in its name betray “true” Christianity; rather than try to decide who holds the key to the kingdom of absolutes, it seems fair to view Christianity as a broad family encompassing sometimes ambiguous teachings, even if, to some of its followers, religion is literally nothing if not certain. The same attitudes hold, of course, in other religions. Claims of certainty have led religionists to murder not just those of other faiths, but also those of nominally the same faith over points of doctrine about which the combatants were equally convinced God had given them exclusive understanding.

There are also instances in which “absolute” moral truths seem to have changed, unless the Catholic Church still finds it morally acceptable to deal with dissenters by setting them on fire. If the truth is always there but sometimes needs to be “unfolded,” how can one be sure that what a religious tradition holds at a given time has reached fruition and isn’t on its way to some further, as-yet-unrevealed elaboration or supposed rediscovery of God’s true intent?

Thus, an individual’s religious judgment is fallible and subject to deluded self-certainty (as disputatious believers are apt to point out to one another), and religious tradition is but a collection of individual judgments reinforced by institutional self-interest (as warring traditions are apt to point out to one another). Neither can provide the objective foundation absolutists claim for their values.

7. It’s sometimes asserted that all people acknowledge the distinction between doing good and doing evil, an awareness presumed to derive from participation in the divine law that directs the just ordering of the world. Even secularists may refer to a “right reason” acting in accord with nature or to the existence of a “universal” set of moral sentiments. However, there’s neither need nor reason to assume any such faculty or innate moral toolbox. As conscious and not merely instinctive agents, humans have to choose among alternative possible behaviors; cultures drape a particular realm of behavior with the aura of “morality,” labeling preferred choices “good” and disfavored ones “evil.” Thus, what “all people acknowledge” is that when a certain type of behavior is looked on favorably, it’s described by the word “good.” The type of behavior meant by “good” may differ, however, depending on the moral framework, and people with differing views aren’t agreeing just because they characterize their conflicting preferences by the same word, they’re merely showing they understand the significance of applying words like “good” to their actions. If this ability to dichotomize behaviors and valorize one set is all that’s meant by a moral sense, it signifies little at best, and at worst represents nothing more than the ability to parrot one’s culture’s rhetorical cover for its preferences.

Moreover, persons who claim there are things all people find right or wrong based on an innate moral sense or natural reason mean by “all people” those with values close enough to theirs to be considered morally competent or reasonable. People with “aberrant” values are labeled sociopathic or irrational, and therefore ineligible to speak on moral issues, rather than taken as counterexamples that disprove the claim of universality. Saying “everyone agrees on what is right and wrong except for people who disagree with me, and they can be discounted because their views are clearly unacceptable” is hardly a convincing move in an argument for the existence of an innate moral sense or common values. It’s akin to declaring your candidate a unanimous victor after deciding not to count any votes for his opponent. It’s true we can speak of humans as having, for example, an innate capacity for language even though that ability might be defective in some members of the species. Any analogous argument about an innate moral sense, however, falsely assumes that we can identify objectively, and not just because it agrees with our beliefs, a conscience that is properly functioning. Another strategy taken by those who claim to find universal values is to simply ignore what “universal” means. Reportedly, 89% of respondents gave a similar response to an Internet-based morals test, leading the Harvard cognitive scientists who constructed the test to claim that this shows that the “moral instinct” is apparently universal (5). If 89% of respondents had brown eyes, presumably these scientists would conclude that all humans had brown eyes.

What humans do have is not an innate or divinely infused capacity to distinguish what is objectively and universally “good” from what is objectively and universally “evil,” but an ability to internalize behavioral rules, anoint a socially valued class of them “moral,” and call their preferences “good.” Even if one insisted on calling a “moral sense” the propensity to construct and follow rules that label certain forms of behavior “good” and others “evil,” the individual and cultural differences in those rules and in how to apply the words “good” and “evil” render this supposed faculty useless as a means of underwriting universal values.

8. Consider an observation of the sort often cited as proof that everyone has at least the same core moral beliefs: Supposedly, everyone condemns the killing of an innocent person (leaving aside the difficult moral calculus relating to “collateral damage” and the targeting of civilians in warfare). However, not merely have many cultures sanctioned the killing of certain categories of their newborn, but the killing of children has also been urged as a particular necessity by proponents of genocide from the vengeful God of the Bible to agents of ethnic cleansing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. One could claim that even people who commit genocide accept the universal moral rule against killing the innocent and don’t really violate it because they consider none of their victims innocent, not even children, who, after all, are of the race or ethnic group they consider malignant and worthy of extermination. It isn’t likely, however, that everyone will find it acceptable for people to kill children as long as they first declare them to be not innocent. To forestall such an interpretation and make the rule acceptable to those who don’t want it to sanction the killing of children, it needs to be restated to include conditions either exempting children or stating what it means for someone to be innocent, for example, “Don’t kill the innocent, a category that always includes children.” Proponents of genocide, however, wouldn’t agree to the rule as understood in these terms, and opponents of genocide wouldn’t accept it otherwise. Thus, the rule not to kill the innocent can be called universal only if it’s allowed to mean different things to different people, or if some people are disqualified from having the right to have an opinion about it; both options contradict what we mean by a universal rule.

Other problems attend a rule sometimes claimed to be at the basis of “all” ethical systems, “treat others as you would have them treat you.” If I were accused of a crime, for example, I’d rather have the charge dismissed than risk even a “fair” trial. Am I morally obligated to offer every accused person that choice? In addition, what objective guide does this rule or the rule to love your neighbor as yourself give on issues such as war and abortion? The injunction to treat others as you would be treated or with the love you have for yourself would hinge morality on the preferences and psychological makeup of every individual and lead to conflicting choices unless there was a preexisting consensus on the “best” preference, which brings us back to the problem of objectively finding such a consensus.

Another type of argument put forward in the attempt to establish universal values rests on the observation that there are things to which everyone objects, such as being beaten or being robbed. This might show that people are averse to suffering, but establishes nothing about whether, under what circumstances, and to what degree they find it acceptable to inflict it on others.

9. Even what seems to be a clear moral directive can be problematic. For example, “Thou shall not kill” is generally taken to mean “Thou shall not murder,” that is, “kill illegitimately.” The disagreement over how to apply this to capital punishment or abortion, for example, isn’t over whether or how to apply something about which everyone agrees to a particular circumstance. It isn’t a meaningful statement and can’t be agreed or disagreed on until all the words that make it up are understood. To determine what it actually directs us to do, or not do, we have to know what sort of killing is illegitimate, which it doesn’t tell us. If different people have different exemplars pointing to what it means to “kill illegitimately,” that is, of the types of actions being forbidden, then their understanding of what this statement says differs, and it isn’t universally agreed on. The fact that we can agree on the dictionary definitions of “kill” and “illegitimately” doesn’t mean that we agree on what the phrase “kill illegitimately” points to, and referring to further and further synonyms won’t help. We need concrete examples that will help us to form a picture of what the rule is getting at. But how does one objectively justify a claim to know with absolute certainty whether capital punishment or abortion is “illegitimate” killing, and is therefore equivalent to murder and is impermissible, or is “legitimate” killing, and is therefore permissible? To leave the phrase “kill illegitimately” without amplification reduces the rule to the wholly vacuous “Thou shall not do what is impermissible.” To allow everyone to decide what constitutes “illegitimate” according to his or her beliefs and criteria renders the rule subjective and local. To claim that your choices are the ones that should be applied universally begs the question. In fact, to make the statement a moral rule we need a moral context by which to understand it, so again we face the issue of how to find an objective standard by which to choose such a context.

Morality doesn’t come in the form of nuggets of objective reality that we discover independent of our systems of belief and then insert into slots labeled “moral values.” It doesn’t exist prior to or outside those systems. In particular, moral rules are guides to behavior, and their meaning lies in what they direct us to do. Consider the directive to “value life”; this current shibboleth is of little use as a moral imperative until a system of belief invests it with sufficient meaning that it becomes a concrete guide to conduct instead of just a vacuous piety. To the pope, to “value life” in the context of the AIDS crisis means, among other things, opposing the use of condoms to fight the spread of AIDS, whereas to an anti-AIDS activist, it means supporting their use. The statement “value life” only becomes a moral directive when a system of belief casts it as a guide to conduct—in this case, when two systems cast it as two conflicting guides to conduct. One might still claim that what we have in this case is one universal rule with two interpretations; if the cost of making a rule absolute is to make it so vague that everyone can accept it because everyone can construe it to mean whatever he or she wishes (so that “value life” can mean support/oppose abortion, capital punishment, stem cell research, etc.), then it isn’t so much absolutely valid as absolutely useless.

The truth of any claim that in spite of their disagreements, all traditions and all people agree on certain core values thus depends on what one includes under “all” and “core.” It isn’t surprising or especially useful that people who construct a list of acceptable traditions and then strip away what they consider inessential or incorrect in the beliefs of others find everyone’s values confirm theirs. In any event, the appeal to a supposed consensus relies on what might be called the “Tinker Bell” argument that something becomes objective when enough people believe in it strongly enough. If that were the case, moral rules could change when enough people (or at least enough people with supposedly certified moral expertise) changed their minds about them, which is hardly a defense of absolute values.

10. An objection to relativism that seems to follow in particular from the writings of C. S. Lewis is that we speak and act as though we believe there are moral absolutes. Even if this were true, it wouldn’t prove that there really are such things. But is it even true? Lewis’s remarks in Mere Christianity(6) are often used to support the view that the actual behavior of relativists refutes, or at the least contradicts, their professed beliefs:

“Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining ‘It’s not fair’ before you can say Jack Robinson.”

It’s a common rhetorical move to attribute imaginary beliefs and actions to an imaginary opponent and then show them to be false or foolish, and conclude as if you’ve said something meaningful about the real beliefs and actions of real people. In this case, Lewis creates an imaginary person, attributes imaginary behavior to him, and claims that all people who have the beliefs Lewis gives to his imaginary person will behave as that fictional person does. How realistic is Lewis’s description of how every promise-breaking relativist behaves when someone breaks a promise to him? In real life, a person who complains about a promise being broken to him isn’t necessarily basing his complaint on a belief that misleading people is morally wrong; it’s possible he doesn’t like being misled because it causes him a psychological or physical harm. By having this imaginary person say, “It’s not fair,” Lewis is trying to lead the reader to conclude that the reason for the fictional complaint about being lied to is moral outrage, when it’s at least possible, and may even be likelier, that in the real world such a complaint would be based on the discomfort of suffering a personal insult or injury. Thus, in real life, a complainer needn’t be revealing—or contradicting—anything about his moral beliefs. Any attempt to use the fact that he doesn’t like to suffer to claim he’s revealed his actual moral beliefs, relativist or otherwise, is illegitimate because his avowed aversion to his own suffering says nothing about his attitude toward whether and under what conditions he finds it acceptable that suffering be inflicted on others. In any event, even if someone’s behavior contradicts his expressed beliefs about moral values, this doesn’t mean his beliefs are necessarily false; it might just be difficult or inconvenient to put them into practice. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t identified something true. The failure of a person to live up to his beliefs doesn’t mean those beliefs are false, something for which the religious apologist should be thankful.

Lewis continues:
“A nation may say treaties don’t matter; but then, next minute they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they wanted to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong—in other words, if there is no Law of Nature—what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature (absolute standards of right and wrong) just like anyone else.”

The phrase “just like anyone else” is a deft touch, with the implication that in the realm of morals, there is of course a basic truth—“the Law of Nature”—on which all reasonable people agree, reasonable people being, of course, people who agree with C. S. Lewis; of course.

A nation is trying to get out of a treaty; first it says treaties don’t matter, and then it says a particular treaty is unfair. The political point it’s trying to make is that no treaty is binding, and even if it this one were, it’s so unfair that breaking it is justified. The latter contention would seem to be bolstering, not spoiling the argument.

Lewis’s triumphant sense that he’s caught his imaginary opponent in a trap is based on two assertions:

a. Anyone who says that treaties don’t matter is equivalently saying there is no such thing as absolute Right and Wrong.
b. Anyone who claims something is unfair “really knows” there is such a thing as absolute Right and Wrong.

Neither proposition is true.

a. Someone who denies the binding nature of treaties can be acting from an attitude akin to the classic Bolshevik belief that a treaty with an Imperialist nation is not binding because any gain deriving from the expediency of such a treaty can be set aside whenever broader ideological interests (i.e., interests based on the principles of a totalizing ideology of which one is absolutely convinced) make it preferable to do so. Thus, such a person, in saying treaties don’t matter, is saying this precisely because he does believe that there is such a thing as an absolute Right and Wrong, one that excuses breaking treaties with an enemy. One might contest the truth of such a person’s ideology, but one can’t deny that he believes there is an absolute Right and Wrong and is basing his actions on it; to say his Right and Wrong aren’t the “Right” Right and Wrong begs the question. In particular, note the ambiguity in Lewis’s characterization of the Law of Nature: Does the Law merely say that there are “absolute standards of right and wrong,” or does it say what those standards are? If the latter, whose standards constitute the true Law? Elsewhere, Lewis characterizes the Law of Nature as “the human idea of decent behavior,” something that is “obvious to anyone.” As usual, Lewis’s claims turn out to be stunningly vacuous, and grounded on little more than his pleased discovery that his values are universally shared by people who agree with him.

b. A nation that claims a treaty is unfair is saying that it believes it’s giving more than it’s getting, but that, for political, economic, or military reasons, it may feel that it has to sign the treaty anyway. Its claim of unfairness can be based wholly on national self-interest, and not on an appeal to a supposed universal standard of justice. Similarly, people demanding to be treated “fairly” can be (and in real life probably mostly are) speaking out of a sense of personal entitlement rather than a sense that a universal moral rule has been broken. In addition, in both cases, it’s possible that someone who complains about being wronged doesn’t believe in absolute values at all, but is trying to gain a strategic advantage by exploiting his opponent’s (or their mutual audience’s) presumed belief in them. Thus, a complaint about not being treated fairly doesn’t mean the complainer “really knows” there are absolutes, it can mean simply that he knows other people think there are.

11. A general objection to the foregoing discussion might run as follows. You deny absolute criteria for making moral judgments; isn’t that a moral judgment, and therefore self-contradictory? Moreover, you haven’t presented your moral values for scrutiny; aren’t they relevant to the truth of your argument? The answer to both questions is no, because people who claim to have an absolute foundation for their moral rules aren’t making a moral claim; they’re making a claim about what can be known. Moral absolutists claim they know with absolute certainty the dictates of God or the “universal” consent of that portion of humanity they feel is qualified to speak on moral issues. Rejecting that claim isn’t making a moral judgment, but a judgment about the possibility of anyone objectively having such knowledge or being able to decide who else is eligible to have it. For example, a person may say he knows with absolute certainty how society should treat someone convicted of murder; another person may deny that anyone has an objective basis for such a claim. Their argument is about the claim of certainty, not about the moral status of capital punishment, about which they might even agree.

To put it another way: “no statement is absolutely true” is a statement, and thus applies to itself, and so can be self-contradictory; but “no moral rule is absolute” isn’t a moral rule—it doesn’t tell us how we ought to behave, it’s a claim about the possibility of having a particular kind of knowledge—and so it doesn’t apply to itself; thus, it is not self-contradictory. Calling it a “meta-moral” rule—a rule about moral rules—doesn’t make it a moral rule. One could claim that believing or teaching that “no moral rule is absolute” is immoral because it leads or can lead to behavior that even the relativist, whatever his or her system of moral beliefs, would consider immoral; however, whereas this might mean relativism risks having to face actions or beliefs it finds objectionable but can’t objectively and universally refute, it doesn’t make it self-contradictory. What is at issue is not merely whether it is logically possible that absolute values exist, but whether we can with absolute certainty identify them and know with equal certainty the rules for putting them into practice.

12. One might continue the objection by asking, How can you can make a judgment about the possibility of objective knowledge if, as you claim, there are no absolutes? After all, if everything is relative, so is your claim, and it can’t be taken as an absolute refutation of anything, including the existence of absolutes. The present claim, however, is that there are no moral absolutes, not that it’s impossible to judge the truth of any statement. If someone claimed to be “a married bachelor,” it would be enough to point to accepted definitions and the rules of logic to show that, in the context of those definitions and rules, he was talking nonsense. He could reply that he defined “bachelor” to mean “someone who may or may not be married,” or followed a logic in which a statement and its contradiction were simultaneously true. In that case he would be outside the framework of language and logic shared by our community, and none of his conclusions would be worth our taking seriously (unless he was speaking in a humorous or ironic sense, in which case the context presumably would allow us to translate his remarks into something in accord with our usual rules of understanding). Those who use claims about absolute values to support their conservative social views do expect to be taken seriously, and so their arguments fall under the rules of meaning and reasoned discussion of the Western tradition, a tradition they in particular place above any other. Thus, to challenge their arguments doesn’t require appealing to the kind of universal and objective standard beyond all local cultural determinants they falsely claim to have, but rather to the sense in which our shared community understands words and constructs meaning. Based on those standards, it’s legitimate to say there is no objective basis for the claim of conservatives or anyone else that their moral values rest on an absolute foundation.

13. People who attack moral relativism should examine the soundness of their houses before throwing stones. It isn’t enough for them to say their rules are absolute because they come from God or some supposed general consent of humanity. They need to show the objective means by which they found their absolute standards and derived not only their rules, but also the framework of understanding that turns those rules from abstract pieties into guides to real-world conduct. Notwithstanding their loud declamations, they have no such means or standards, and their values are absolute only in the limited sense that they believe in them firmly and believe they apply to everyone. In fact, their moral values are no more objective and universal than those of anyone else.

1. David Limbaugh, Homosexual Marriage: A Slippery Slope? (May 28, 2004). Retrieved October 6, 2005, from http://www.davidlimbaugh.com/052804.htm
2. David Klinghoffer, What We Bush Voters Share: In God We Trust, Los Angeles Times,November 8, 2004.
3. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
4. Peter Kreeft, A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews With an Absolutist. Ft. Collins, CO: Ignatius Press, 1999.
5. Rebecca Saxe, Do the Right Thing: Cognitive Science’s Search for a Common Morality. Boston Review September/October 2005. Available at http://www.bostonreview.net/BR30.5/saxe.html
6. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, San Francisco: Harper, 2001.