Peter Kreeft. Refutation of the Refutation

A Refutation of Moral Relativism. Peter Kreeft. 1999. Ignatius Press, San Francisco.

Here are the arguments for moral relativism that Kreeft believes he demolishes: 1. Absolutism has bad consequences. 2. Different cultures have different values. 3. Values are socially conditioned. 4. Relativism gives people freedom. 5. Relativism is tolerant. 6. Morality is relative to changing situations. 7. Morality is relative to changing intentions. 8. Morality can be explained by evolution as a survival device.

As a moral relativist, even I find that not one of these is a worthwhile argument in favor of moral relativism, and thus “refuting” them is completely beside the point.

Kreeft either ignores or is ignorant of the core of the true relativist challenge: No one can provide objective support for a claim to have an absolute foundation for moral values. Kreeft certainly can’t. His argument in favor of absolutism rests primarily on what he calls the data of moral experience, which comes down to the claim that "Conscience immediately detects real right and wrong, just as your senses immediately detect real colors and shapes.” He believes that this proves that absolutism is “scientific” and empirically verified. He doesn't realize that two distinct propositions are involved. The following Proposition A is obviously true: Peter Kreeft believes he has a faculty—a conscience—that can immediately, absolutely, and objectively detect right and wrong. The following Proposition B is not necessarily true: Peter Kreeft has a faculty—a conscience—that can immediately, absolutely, and objectively detect right and wrong. The truth of Proposition A might be considered self-evident, even "scientific," if by that one means that it’s based on experience and evidence (if Kreeft says he has a particular belief, it's reasonable to acknowledge, lacking strong evidence to the contrary, that he does have that belief), but Kreeft never addresses why Proposition B should be considered true (i.e., that his belief is correct).

In other words, Kreeft believes that just as he can know that the sky is blue merely by opening his eyes, so too he can know whether any given moral proposition is true or false just by considering it and allowing his conscience to come to an unmediated instant perception of its rightness or wrongness. His claim that this ability to make judgments that he believes are absolute proves that absolutism is "scientific" shows what a poor guide he is to moral philosophy.

Kreeft's view seems to be that he and Christians like him with the proper interpretation of the revelation to Abraham and its subsequent revisions ("God [came] down to Abraham with the real religion") have a way of knowing when a moral position is objectively correct, but he fails to mention what guarantees the correctness of his organ of moral judgment, which leads me to assume that he knows his conscience is correct because his conscience tells him it’s correct.

Here’s an example of how Kreeft, who claims that his book offers “respectable logical arguments” from a “clear and very intelligent” viewpoint, in fact abuses language and logic. To defend the idea that changing situations “change how you should apply the rules, but they don’t change the rules,” he gives the example of lying to a Nazi searching for hidden Jews: “The Nazis had no right to know that truth” so it wasn’t wrong to “deceive” them. “Lying is always wrong, and that wasn’t wrong, so that wasn’t a lie.” To safeguard the absoluteness of the rule that says “Lying is always wrong,” Kreeft redefines “lying” from “the speaking of a falsehood” to “the speaking of a falsehood when it’s not permissible to do so,” and so the rule becomes “The speaking of a falsehood when it is not permissible to do so is wrong.” Besides the irony in a professed absolutist ignoring the common meaning of a word to suit his purpose—and in particular redefining “lie” in defense of a belief in absolute truth—this raises the problem of how we’re to judge, by objective standards, when “speaking a falsehood” is permissible and therefore not lying; otherwise, this rule is completely empty. If his semantic juggling is to be of any use, Kreeft’s needs to prove that he has objective standards for making such a judgment, and he fails to. In fact, Kreeft’s arguments in favor of absolutism are as follows:

1. Absolutism has better consequences.

The issue of whether relativism or absolutism has better consequences is irrelevant to the question of which view is correct, and, besides, it simply brings us back to the initial problem of deciding which moral framework to use in weighing what consequence in a given situation is “better.”

2. Common consensus: “nearly everyone who has ever lived has been a moral absolutist.”

He acknowledges that this is only a “probable,” not a conclusive argument. It’s hard to see what this could prove, even probably, even if were true. A majority vote doesn’t establish something as eternally valid.

3. Moral experience. “The first and foundational moral experience we have is always absolutistic. Only later do you get relativism—later in the life of the individual or of the society … we can all remember what moral experience was like before we became sophisticated. It was absolute.”

Children are told what they must and must not do; early societies ruled by priests and kings laid down the law and demanded obedience. What this proves is that people and societies are told that moral rules are absolute; it doesn’t prove that they actually are.

4. How we use moral language.

a. According to C. S. Lewis, we speak as though we believe that there are moral absolutes.

Even if it were true that “we” (and who are these “we”?) speak in this way, it wouldn’t prove that the things spoken of actually exist.

b. Kreeft follows Lewis in claiming that, in essence, all moral arguments are about how to apply, in particular situations, what everyone agrees are certain universal, objective, and unchanging principles.

In addition to the weakness already mentioned of basing conclusions about the actual nature of something on how "we" supposedly talk about it, this version of the assertion relies on an appeal to principles “everyone” supposedly agrees on. In fact, it turns out that by “everyone,” apologists like Kreeft and Lewis mean people with values close enough to theirs for those people to be considered morally competent or reasonable. What they’re really saying is, “Everyone agrees on what is right and wrong, except for people who disagree with me (e.g., relativists, fascists, feminists, fanatics of religions other than mine, sociopaths, mental incompetents, etc.), and such individuals or groups can be discounted because their views are obviously unacceptable to reasonable people like me,” which begs too many questions to support an argument for the existence of common principles.

That’s pretty much the substance of Kreeft’s “refutation.” He also throws in quite a bit of invective against people and principles he disagrees with, but he never addresses the following question: What are your objective, universal, and timeless reasons for claiming that your foundation for absolute values is true? This failure, taken in conjunction with the rest of Kreeft’s falsely triumphal performance, raises the question of just what qualifications are required to teach philosophy at Boston College.