Playing the Hitler Card. A Losing Strategy for Moral Absolutists

Moral absolutists play the Hitler card in two ways, both of which are supposed to trump moral relativism.

In one version, they claim that moral relativism is responsible at least in part for the Holocaust. But Hitler wasn’t a relativist; he didn't claim “all values are relative, everyone has a right to his or her opinion, and so my motto is ‘live and let live’.” No, according to his absolute system of values, it was self-evident that Jews were the cause of the social problems afflicting the German people, not merely because of what some Jews did, but because of what all Jews are, something that everyone knew objectively. And because the right of self-defense is also an absolute and objective moral value, it was morally correct, absolutely and objectively, to remove that offending race from the Earth. Note, by the way, that the belief that Jews were evil by nature derives from certain aspects of Christian theology, which were put forward by absolutists, not relativists—the latter being subject to the possibility that the absolutist Church might have them set on fire to defend the purity of the absolute faith. In any event, even if the claim by moral absolutists about the Holocaust were true, it would be irrelevant to the question of whether moral relativism is still the valid position.

The second version is that moral relativists have no foundation from which to oppose people like Hitler; after all, on their view, his moral values are of the same value, as it were, as anyone else’s. Yet one can have a value system in which, even while it acknowledges that other people might have different views, genocide is wrong and it is right to oppose it. The relativist does not say that he or she has no right to oppose views that he or she disagrees with. What the relativist can’t say is that he or she has an objective, absolute foundation for his or her views. The absolutist does say this, but there is an abyss of difference between saying that you have an objective, absolute foundation and actually having one. When the absolutist is pressed to provide such a foundation, it turns out to be as subjective and bound by culture and tradition as anything he or she derides; it is simply more confused by self-deception. And once again, even if the absolutist is right about the problems that moral relativists land themselves in, this is irrelevant to the question of whether moral relativism is nonetheless correct.