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 prob­lem with moral rel­a­tivism specif­i­cally, namely, that is that it doesn’t exist. It’s a myth and an espe­cially dan­ger­ous one to believe in.  As expe­ri­ence always indi­cates, even the sup­posed moral rel­a­tivist is, when pushed, a moral objec­tivist in the very least.

In doing quite a bit of read­ing on moral rel­a­tivism the name which came up for me most often was (well I guess, is) Peter Kreeft. Kreeft presents at least five argu­ments for and against moral rel­a­tivism in his books (i.e., A Refu­ta­tion of Moral Rel­a­tivism) and talks². Which, to be fair, after pre­sent­ing argu­ments for moral rel­a­tivism, Kreeft imme­di­ate knocks them down. Though to say, the argu­ments brought up by Kreeft are those I hear most often in con­ver­sa­tion so I’ll be focus­ing on what Kreeft has said. Hope­fully with­out turn­ing what fol­lows into noth­ing more than a sum­mary of some of Kreefts thoughts and views.

With that, lets exam­ine the argu­ments for and against moral rel­a­tivism (more or less accord­ing to Peter Kreeft).

Argu­ments for Moral Relativism

1. The Psy­cho­log­i­cal Argument
2. The Argu­ment from Cul­tural Influence
3. The Argu­ment from Social Conditioning
4. The Argu­ment from Freedom
5. The Argu­ment from Tolerance

1. The Psy­cho­log­i­cal Argument

In his book, A Refu­ta­tion of Moral Rel­a­tivism, Kreeft has one of his char­ac­ters — a reporter named Libby — phrase the psy­cho­log­i­cal argu­ment for moral rel­a­tivism the fol­low­ing way:

Libby: Good moral­ity has good con­se­quences, and bad moral­ity has bad con­se­quences. Hap­pi­ness and free­dom and self-esteem are good con­se­quences, and unhap­pi­ness and unfree­dom and guilt are bad con­se­quences. Abso­lutism gives you those bad con­se­quences, and rel­a­tivism gives you the good con­se­quences. There­fore, abso­lutism is bad, and rel­a­tivism is good³.

We need to first dis­cuss what the pur­pose of absolute or rel­a­tivist moral­ity is. Absolute moral laws exist to max­i­mize hap­pi­ness, whereas the pur­pose of rel­a­tive moral laws is to min­i­mize unhap­pi­ness; suf­fer­ing which is sup­pos­edly the result of absolute moral laws. Absolutely moral­ity is a pos­i­tive, rel­a­tive moral­ity is a neg­a­tive. In essence, rel­a­tive moral­ity is a response to absolute morality.

It needs to also be real­ized that the above ‘bad’ con­se­quences shouldn’t  nec­es­sar­ily be viewed as bad. In fact, guilt itself could be a good thing. Kreeft responds to Libby’s argu­ment, say­ing that, “Guilt obvi­ously makes you unhappy in the short run — like pain. But it’s nec­es­sary, like phys­i­cal pain, to avoid greater unhap­pi­ness in the long run“⁴. Short term guilt has a role to play in long term hap­pi­ness. That is to say that with­out short term guilt, the chances that we will expe­ri­ence long time hap­pi­ness is greatly dimin­ished. While it’s true that remov­ing guilt makes one hap­pier in the short term, it should be evi­dent that this isn’t nec­es­sar­ily the case in the long term.

Ulti­mately the argu­ment itself is wholly sub­jec­tive. If the argu­ment is to be taken as true, then moral­ity is to be judged by our feel­ings and we all know how unsta­ble and sub­jec­tive those are. This would nec­es­sar­ily lead to the legit­imiza­tion of any act as long as it brought one hap­pi­ness: the act would be moral. As Kreeft notes, “that Hitler’s prob­lem was his lack of self-esteem”.

2. The Argu­ment from Cul­tural Influ­ence

Kreeft states the cul­tural influ­ence argu­ment for moral rel­a­tivism as follows:

The claim is that anthro­pol­o­gists and soci­ol­o­gists have dis­cov­ered moral rel­a­tivism to be not a the­ory but an empir­i­cal fact. Dif­fer­ent cul­tures and soci­eties, like dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als, sim­ply do, in fact, have very dif­fer­ent moral val­ues. In Eskimo cul­ture, and in Hol­land, killing old peo­ple is right. In Amer­ica, east of Ore­gon, it’s wrong. In con­tem­po­rary cul­ture, for­ni­ca­tion is right; in Chris­t­ian cul­tures, it’s wrong, and so forth⁵.

Out of all the argu­ments for moral rel­a­tivism, this is the argu­ment that I hear most often. At the same time I think it is also the most con­fused argu­ment for moral relativism.

The first con­fu­sion is between one’s view of moral­ity with what moral­ity actu­ally is. Nei­ther does it  fol­low that because a cul­ture views an action a cer­tain way, that that action is right or wrong in that cul­ture and wrong or right in another. It would be just as if we were dis­cussing the nature of God. If God exists then our var­i­ous views of who or what God is do not deter­mine the nature of God. Gods nature is inde­pen­dent of our per­cep­tion of it.

The sec­ond con­fu­sion is that it’s ques­tion beg­ging. As Kreeft points out, it assumes that “moral right­ness is a mat­ter of obe­di­ence to cul­tural val­ues“⁶, therein pre­sup­pos­ing the moral rel­a­tivism it attempts to prove.

The third con­fu­sion is that its “empir­i­cal fact” is sim­ply wrong. The real­ity is that while cul­tures have dif­fer­ent moral val­ues, they do in fact share in the same basic morals:

“Beneath about all dis­agree­ments about lesser val­ues, there always lies an agree­ment about more basic ones. Beneath all dis­agree­ments about apply­ing val­ues to situations—for instance, should we have cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment or not—always lies agree­ment about values—for instance, mur­der is evil since human life is good. Moral dis­agree­ments between cul­tures as well as between indi­vid­u­als would be impos­si­ble unless there were some deeper moral agree­ments, some com­mon moral premises. Moral val­ues are to a culture’s laws some­thing like what con­cepts are to words. When you visit a for­eign coun­try, you expe­ri­ence ini­tial shock. The lan­guage sounds totally dif­fer­ent. But then beneath the dif­fer­ent words you find com­mon con­cepts. And this is what makes trans­la­tion from one lan­guage to another pos­si­ble. Anal­o­gously, beneath dif­fer­ent social laws, we find com­mon human moral laws. We find sim­i­lar morals, beneath dif­fer­ent mores. The moral agree­ment among Moses, Bud­dha, Con­fu­cius, Lao Tzu, Socrates, Solomon, Jesus, Cicero, Moham­mad, Zoraster, and Ham­murabbi is far greater than their moral dif­fer­ences“⁷.

3. The Argu­ment From Social Conditioning

This is essen­tially the same argu­ment as above although it dif­fers in that it’s psy­cho­log­i­cal, rather than anthro­po­log­i­cal, in focus. Kreeft sum­ma­rizes the argument:

The fact is that soci­ety con­di­tions val­ues in us. If we had been brought up in a Hindu soci­ety, we would have had Hindu val­ues. The ori­gin of val­ues thus seems to be human minds them­selves, par­ents and teach­ers, rather than some­thing objec­tive to human minds. And what comes from human sub­jects is, of course, sub­jec­tive, like the rules of base­ball, even though they may be pub­lic and uni­ver­sally agreed to⁸.

This argu­ment com­mits the same errors as the argu­ment from Cul­tural influ­ence (moral right­ness is defined by adher­ing to one’s cul­tural teach­ings; equiv­o­cat­ing between moral val­ues and the nature of morals, etc.) except that it com­mits one fur­ther error and that is it assumes that what one learns in soci­ety is always sub­jec­tive. One need only thing of the teach­ing of math­e­mat­ics to real­ize that we are taught things which are objec­tive in nature. What’s fur­ther, Kreeft notes, is that “the exis­tence of moral non-conformists is empir­i­cal proof of the pres­ence of some trans-social ori­gin of values.”

4.The Argu­ment from Freedom

The argu­ment from free­dom essen­tially states that moral rel­a­tivism guar­an­tees free­dom while moral abso­lutism threat­ens free­dom. As Kreeft notes, “Peo­ple often won­der how they can be truly free if they are not free to cre­ate their own values”.

What can imme­di­ately be said of this argu­ment is that it’s so sub­jec­tive as to be offen­sive and many will actu­ally aban­don it when taken to its log­i­cal extremes. For instance, if we are all free to cre­ate our own val­ues, why should it be objec­tion­able at all that in my value sys­tem, women have no rights (for the sim­ple rea­son that they’re women). It could also be that in my value sys­tem I am god and every­one should do what I say. Mus­solini had his own view on the argu­ment from free­dom and this was exactly it.

Another prob­lem with this argu­ment is in what it pre­sup­poses about free­dom. Kreeft rightly observes, “free­dom can­not cre­ate val­ues, because free­dom pre­sup­poses val­ues. Why does free­dom pre­sup­pose val­ues? Well, first because the relativist’s argu­ment that rel­a­tivism guar­an­tees free­dom must assume free­dom is really valu­able, thus assum­ing at least that one objec­tive value. Sec­ond, if free­dom is really good, it must be free­dom from some­thing really bad, thus assum­ing some objec­tive good and bad. And third, the advo­cate of free­dom will almost always insist that free­dom be granted to all, not just some, thus pre­sup­pos­ing the real value of equal­ity, or the Golden Rule“⁹. Thus the moral rel­a­tivist, in stat­ing the argu­ment her­self, actu­ally under­mines the moral rel­a­tivism she is try­ing to prove.

The most glar­ing objec­tion to this argu­ment, how­ever, is the real­ity that expe­ri­ence tells us we can­not cre­ate new morals, con­trary Nietzsche’s attempt at a trans­val­u­a­tion of all val­ues. “All you can do is refuse the whole moral order. You can­not make another one. You can choose to rape, but you can­not expe­ri­ence a moral oblig­a­tion to rape“¹⁰.

5. The Argu­ment from Tolerance

The argu­ment from tol­er­ance basi­cally states that rel­a­tivism is tol­er­ant, while abso­lutism is intol­er­ant (as was said by Allan Bloom). Kreeft notes eight objec­tions — which you’ll have to excuse me, I’ll be quot­ing in full — to the rel­a­tivists claim to tolerance:

• First, let us be clear what we mean by tol­er­ance. Tol­er­ance is a qual­ity of peo­ple, not of ideas. Ideas can be con­fused, or fuzzy, or ill defined, but that does not make them tol­er­ant, or intol­er­ant, any more than clar­ity or exact­ness could make them intol­er­ant. If a car­pen­ter tol­er­ates 3/16 of an inch devi­a­tion from plane, he is three times more tol­er­ant than one who tol­er­ates only 1/16 of an inch, but he is no less clear. One teacher may tol­er­ate no dis­sent from his fuzzy and ill-defined views—a Marx­ist, let’s say—while another, say Socrates, may tol­er­ate much dis­sent from his clearly defined views.

• Sec­ond, the relativist’s claim is that abso­lutism, belief in uni­ver­sal, objec­tive, and unchang­ing moral laws, fos­ters intol­er­ance of alter­na­tive views. But in the sci­ences, noth­ing like this has been the case. The sci­ences have cer­tainly ben­e­fited and pro­gressed remark­ably because of tol­er­ance of diverse and hereti­cal views. Yet sci­ence is not about sub­jec­tive truths, but about objec­tive truths. There­fore, objec­tivism does not nec­es­sar­ily cause intolerance.

• Third, the rel­a­tivist may fur­ther argue that absolutes are hard and unyield­ing and there­fore the defender of them will also be hard and unyield­ing. But this is another non-sequitor. One may teach hard facts in a soft way, or soft opin­ions in a hard way.

• Fourth, the sim­plest refu­ta­tion of the tol­er­ance argu­ment is its very premise. It assumes that tol­er­ance is really, objec­tively, uni­ver­sally, absolutely good. If the rel­a­tivist replied that he is not pre­sup­pos­ing the objec­tive value of tol­er­ance, then all he is doing is demand­ing the impo­si­tion of his sub­jec­tive per­sonal pref­er­ence for tol­er­ance. That is surely more intol­er­ant than the appeal to an objec­tive, uni­ver­sal, imper­sonal, moral law. If no moral val­ues are absolute, nei­ther is tol­er­ance. The abso­lutist can take tol­er­ance far more seri­ously than the rel­a­tivist. It is abso­lutism, not rel­a­tivism, that fos­ters tolerance.

• Fifth fal­lacy: It is rel­a­tivism that fos­ters intol­er­ance. Why not be intol­er­ant? He has no answer to this. Because tol­er­ance feels bet­ter? Or because it is the pop­u­lar con­sen­sus? Well sup­pose it no longer feels bet­ter. Sup­pose it ceases to be pop­u­lar. The rel­a­tivist can appeal to no moral law as a dam against the flood of intol­er­ance. We des­per­ately need such a dam, because soci­eties, like indi­vid­u­als, are fickle and fallen. What else will deter a humane and human­is­tic Ger­many from turn­ing to an inhu­mane, Nazi phi­los­o­phy of racial supe­ri­or­ity? Or, a now-tolerant Amer­ica from turn­ing to a future intol­er­ance against any group it decides to dis­en­fran­chise. It is unborn babies today, born babies tomor­row. Homo­phobes today, per­haps homo­sex­u­als tomor­row. The same abso­lutism that homo­sex­u­als usu­ally fear because it is not tol­er­ant of their behav­ior is their only secure pro­tec­tion against intol­er­ance of their persons.

• Sixth fal­lacy. Exam­i­na­tion of the essen­tial mean­ing of the con­cept of tol­er­ance reveals a pre­sup­po­si­tion of moral objec­tivism, for we do not tol­er­ate goods. We only tol­er­ate evils in order to pre­vent worse evils. The patient will tol­er­ate the nau­sea brought on by chemother­apy in order to pre­vent death by can­cer. And a soci­ety will tol­er­ate bad things like smok­ing in order to pre­serve good things like pri­vacy and freedom.

• Sev­enth, the advo­cate of tol­er­ance faces a dilemma when it comes to cross-cultural tol­er­ance. Most cul­tures through­out his­tory have not put a high value on tol­er­ance. In fact, some have even thought it a moral weak­ness. Should we tol­er­ate this intol­er­ance? If so, if we should tol­er­ate intol­er­ance, then the tol­er­ance objec­tivist had bet­ter stop bad-mouthing the Span­ish Inqui­si­tion. But if we should not tol­er­ate intol­er­ance, why not? Because tol­er­ance is really good, and the Inqui­si­tion was really evil? In that case, we are pre­sup­pos­ing a uni­ver­sal and objec­tive trans-cultural value. What if instead, he says it is only because of our con­sen­sus for tol­er­ance? But his history’s con­sen­sus is against it. Why impose on ours? Is that not cul­tur­ally intolerant?

• Eighth, finally, there is a log­i­cal non-sequitor in the rel­a­tivist argu­ment too. Even if the belief in absolute moral val­ues did cause intol­er­ance, it does not fol­low that such val­ues are not real. The belief that the cop on the beat is sleep­ing may cause a mug­ger to be intol­er­ant to his vic­tims, but it does not fol­low that the cop is not asleep. Thus, there are no less than eight weak­nesses in the tol­er­ance argument.

The eight objec­tions to the argu­ment from tol­er­ance really speak for them­selves, noth­ing can be added (I don’t think, any­way). How­ever, this is the end of our argu­ments for moral rel­a­tivism (which don’t appear to have sur­vived all that well). We’ll now turn to the argu­ments for moral Absolutism.

Argu­ments for Moral Absolutism

1. The Argu­ment from Consequences
2. The Argu­ment from Tradition
3. The Argu­ment from Moral Experience
4. The Argu­ment from Moral Language
5. The Ad Hominem Argument

1. The Argu­ment from Consequences

The argu­ment from con­se­quences forces us to look at what the con­se­quences are of adopt­ing moral abso­lutism as opposed to moral rel­a­tivism. One of the results of adopt­ing moral rel­a­tivism is the ‘if it feels good, do it’ phi­los­o­phy of ethics. The destruc­tive nature of this phi­los­o­phy should be bla­tantly obvi­ous. There is also the ‘if it’s not hurt­ing any­one, it’s alright’ school of thought. How­ever one must ask two ques­tions: why does it mat­ter if you’re hurt­ing some­one else or not and who’s to say what is really right or wrong? Finally, it can also be said that soci­eties which are founded on moral rel­a­tivism do not last, as opposed to those soci­eties which are founded upon moral absolutism.

Kreeft, in quot­ing Mus­solini, shows one such (alarm­ing) con­se­quence of relativism.

Every­thing I have said and done is these last years is rel­a­tivism, by intu­ition. From the fact that all ide­olo­gies are of equal value, that all ide­olo­gies are mere fic­tions, the mod­ern rel­a­tivist infers that every­body has the right to cre­ate for him­self his own ide­ol­ogy, and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capa­ble. If rel­a­tivism sig­ni­fies con­tempt for fixed cat­e­gories, and men who claim to be the bear­ers of an objec­tive immor­tal truth, then there is noth­ing more rel­a­tivis­tic than fascism.

—Ben­ito Mussolini

2. The Argu­ment from Tradition

The argu­ment from tra­di­tion states, quite sim­ply, that tra­di­tion moral­ity has always been viewed as an absolute, rather than a rel­a­tive. It is the rel­a­tivist who breaks the mold in pro­mot­ing their rel­a­tivism over the tra­di­tional abso­lutism. Kreeft rec­og­nizes that, “Even soci­eties like ours that are dom­i­nated by rel­a­tivis­tic experts’ pop­u­lar opin­ion still tends to moral abso­lutism. Like the Com­mu­nists, rel­a­tivists pre­tend to be the party of the peo­ple, while in fact scorn­ing the peo­ples’ phi­los­o­phy. In fact, for a gen­er­a­tion now, a minor­ity of rel­a­tivis­tic elit­ists who have gained the power of the media have been relent­lessly impos­ing their elit­ist rel­a­tivism on pop­u­lar opin­ion by accus­ing pop­u­lar opinion—that is, tra­di­tional morality—of elit­ism.” The rel­a­tivist has no recourse to such an argu­ment unless they are will­ing to rec­og­nize the exis­tence of absolutes, in effect refut­ing themselves.

3. The Argu­ment from Moral Experience

The most pow­er­ful argu­ment for moral abso­lutism (and the one I alluded to at the begin­ning of this post) is the argu­ment from moral expe­ri­ence: every­one is born an abso­lutist. Peter Kreeft uses an illus­tra­tion I sim­ply can’t sum­ma­rize, nei­ther can I come up with my own. So, rather, I’ll quote his at length:

Moral abso­lutism is cer­tainly based on expe­ri­ence. For instance, let’s say last night you promised your friend you would help them at 8:00 this morn­ing. Let’s say he has to move his fur­ni­ture before noon. But you were up ’til 3:00 am. And when the alarm rings at 7:00, you are very tired. You expe­ri­ence two things—the desire to sleep, and the oblig­a­tion to get up. The two are gener­i­cally dif­fer­ent. You expe­ri­ence no oblig­a­tion to sleep, and no desire to get up. You are moved, in one way, by your own desire for sleep, and you are moved in a very dif­fer­ent way by what you think you ought to do. Your feel­ings appear from the inside out, so to speak, while your con­science appears from the out­side in. Within you is the desire to sleep, and this may move you to the exter­nal deed of shut­ting off the alarm and creep­ing back to bad. But, if instead you get up to ful­fill your promise to your friend, it will be because you chose to respond to a very dif­fer­ent kind of thing: the per­ceived moral qual­ity of the deed of ful­fill­ing your promise, as opposed to the per­ceived moral qual­ity of the deed of refus­ing to ful­fill it. What you per­ceive as right, or obligatory—getting up—pulls you from with­out, from itself, from its own nature. But the desires you feel as attractive—going back to sleep—push you from within, from your­self, from your own nature. The moral oblig­a­tion moves you as an end, as a final cause, from above and ahead, so to speak. Your desires move you as a source, as an effi­cient cause, from below, or behind, so to speak.

4. The Argu­ment from Moral Language

This is another argu­ment which is itself eas­ily stated. It states that peo­ple live as if and use lan­guage as if moral­ity is a real thing, rather than a fic­tion. The Golden Rule is an exam­ple of this. The view that you can do what­ever you want as long as you don’t hurt some­one else is another exam­ple of this. No mat­ter how rel­a­tive a moral­ity a per­son may have, they always seem to make room for this sort of Golden Rule men­tal­ity. Strange.

5. The Ad Hominem Argument

The Ad Hominem argu­ment goes almost hand-in-hand with the argu­ment from moral expe­ri­ence. It’s more of an argu­ment in prac­tice, than in the­ory. The premise is that the moral rel­a­tivist will react in some sort of moral protest when treated immorally. Moral rel­a­tivism in the­ory is not adopted in prac­tice. Kreeft uses the example:

Even the rel­a­tivist always reacts with a moral protest when he is treated immorally. The man who appeals to the rel­a­tivis­tic prin­ci­ple of “I gotta be me,” who jus­ti­fied break­ing his promise of fidelity to his own wife, whom he wants to leave for another woman, will then break his fidelity to his rel­a­tivis­tic prin­ci­ple when his own wife uses that prin­ci­ple to jus­tify leav­ing him for another man. This is not excep­tional, but typ­i­cal. It looks like the ori­gin of rel­a­tivism is more per­sonal than philo­soph­i­cal. More in the hypocrisy than in the hypoth­e­sis. The con­tra­dic­tion between the­ory and prac­tice is evi­dent even in the relativist’s act of teach­ing rel­a­tivism. Why do rel­a­tivists teach and write? To con­vince the world that rel­a­tivism is wrong and abso­lutism wrong? Really right and really wrong? If so, then there is a real right and a real wrong. And if not, then there is noth­ing wrong with being an abso­lutist, and noth­ing right with being a rel­a­tivist. So why do rel­a­tivists write and teach? Really, for all the effort they’ve put into preach­ing their gospel of deliv­er­ing human­ity from the false and fool­ish repres­sions of abso­lutism, one would have thought they really believed this gospel.

The sim­ple fact is that peo­ple do live as if moral­ity is a real thing (rather than a human con­struct, a fic­tion). I remem­ber hear­ing an illus­tra­tion once where a uni­ver­sity stu­dent handed in a paper attempt­ing to prove the rel­a­tive nature of moral­ity. Well, the pro­fes­sor gave the stu­dent an F for the rea­son that he had placed the paper in a blue binder. The stu­dent, fran­tic, went back to the pro­fes­sor rant­ing about how he was being treated immorally and unjustly. Point proven (I do believe that, accord­ing to the story, the stu­dent was given an ‘A’). I don’t know if this is a true story or not, how­ever it illus­trates what most of us can prove with most peo­ple: if you treat some­one wrongly, they will rec­og­nize their being treated poorly. What’s fur­ther­more is they will not accept that they were treated poorly because your eth­i­cal sys­tem allowed you to. The same would be true of any of us if we were treated poorly by another (with the excep­tion of those of us who are extreme enough to ‘bite the bul­let,’ so to speak).

Con­clu­sion

With that we end the brief overview of the argu­ments for and against moral rel­a­tivism. I hope it hasn’t been too much of a sum­mary of Kreefts argu­ments, I tried to avoid that wher­ever I could. In any case, I believe it shows the basic defi­cien­cies of the argu­ments for moral rel­a­tivism. I think for my next post I’ll be doing some­thing a lit­tle more orig­i­nal. I’ll see when I get there though.

Related posts:

1. Moral Foun­da­tions #1
2. Moral Foun­da­tions #2
3. Old Tes­ta­ment: Moral Monstrocities
4. Just Arrived: Is God a Moral Mon­ster, by Paul Copan