Moral Relativism and Absolutism Revisited

Moral Relativism and Absolutism Revisited

When contrast is being drawn between the moral values of relativists and absolutists, absolutists take for themselves or, if the writer is a “neutral” party, are usually given a fatally problematic concession – a tacit, unexamined acceptance of their claim that, unlike relativists, they have an objective foundation for their values.

To the contrary, the claim of a theistic moral absolutist that there is a suprahuman lawgiver and that he or she has identified who this lawgiver is and how the lawgiver wants people to behave rests on a series of judgments about what constitutes the correct interpretation of the relevant text(s), a process that can scarcely be considered objective, as can be seen by placing “absolutely true” beliefs of one religious tradition alongside contradictory “absolutely true” beliefs of another (or even alongside contradictory beliefs held by the same religious tradition at different times, as with regard to Christian views of slavery or the appropriateness of putting the torch to “heretics”). The problem becomes especially acute when differing absolutists refer to the same texts. Contradictory moral absolutes can’t both be true, and the claim that one’s beliefs are more absolute than those of anyone else making a similar claim turns out, all too often, to rest on the question-begging conviction that God gave the claimant an infallible faculty of moral judgment that is nonfunctioning in anyone with conflicting views – a conviction for which objective evidence never seems to be given.

The nonreligious argument for absolutism has its own fatal flaws: it usually comes down to a claim that “everyone” believes in moral values X, Y, and Z, where  “everyone” turns out to be people the writer judges qualified to make moral judgments, who, not surprisingly, happen to be only those people who agree with the writer’s views. Such a claim to “universal” agreement also overlooks the vast range of views that actually exist across or within cultures, a variety that can’t be brushed away blithely by referring to this disagreement as a result of judgments by those “obviously” unqualified to make them. If this range of disagreement is acknowledged, the absolutist claim will be modified to say that although “everyone” agrees on the moral rules, people might disagree on how to apply them. It is misleading, however, to claim that two people share the same moral foundation simply because they both say that they believe in doing “good” and ignore what their behavior reveals about how they put into practice what might be a purely verbal concurrence. Similarly, rather than rely on broad statements that can easily obscure distinctions in behavior, one needs to look at a person’s actions in morally charged situations to decide whether his or her moral values really do reflect some supposedly “universal” agreement, and empirical examination in fact does reveal that different people do have different views on which behaviors are morally appropriate and which are not.

Clearly, being convinced that your values are objective doesn’t make them so, and absolutists shouldn’t be given a free pass on this. Before claiming or conceding that the absolutist can make universally valid moral statements and the relativist cannot, one needs to examine just what characterizes the statements of the absolutist that supposedly makes them objectively and universally valid. When one does, it turns out that a major difference between moral relativists and absolutists is that the latter, relying on their intuition or judgment about what is to them the obvious and unchallengeable rightness of their views, don’t realize that they’re actually a particularly self-deluded species of the former and therefore that their claim to have to a definitive objective standard against which to judge the moral views of others is unfounded.