Nascent Thinker | Contemplations Along The Way

The Myth of Moral Relativism

Peter Kreeft warns that rel­a­tivism is the sin­gle most impor­tant issue of our age; for the soci­ety that adopts rel­a­tivism, col­lapse is not too far behind. The ques­tion is then why has the West adopted, by and large, this phi­los­o­phy of rel­a­tivism? The rea­son, says Allan Bloom, is that “the rel­a­tiv­ity of truth is not a the­o­ret­i­cal insight but a moral pos­tu­late, the con­di­tion of a free soci­ety, or so they see it.… Rel­a­tivism is nec­es­sary to open­ness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all pri­mary edu­ca­tion for more than fifty years has ded­i­cated itself to incul­cat­ing. Open­ness — and the rel­a­tivism that makes it the only plau­si­ble stance in the face var­i­ous ways of life and kinds of human beings — is the great insight of our times“¹. Tol­er­ance nec­es­sar­ily requires moral relativism.

As my title would sug­gest, I believe there is a sig­nif­i­cant … (Read more)