Feature
Moral Relativism, R.I.P.
Virtue and authority are back in fashion, as Bruce Wayne and Harry Potter can attest.
(Page 2 of 2)
In the last culture war, relativism’s influence was evident in the stock arguments that kept appearing in magazines and op-ed pages: Breaking taboos is valuable for its own sake; people have a right to make their own choices and not be judged for it; what you call a social evil is really just a cultural difference; et cetera.But those articles are no longer seen so often. Now, the most annoyingly ubiquitous genre in journalism is the social-scientific analysis, as if a person can’t speak with authority without citing economics or sociology.This is bad enough in political conversation, but it has begun to affect people’s ethical thinking. Under the new cultural rules, moral condemnation is a legitimate thing to express, but only if you can demonstrate that the sin you want to condemn makes someone twice as likely to take antidepressants or 40 percent less likely to be promoted at work. Malcolm Gladwell and the Freakonomics guys have more moral authority than the archbishop of New York. Great artists are producing movies, TV shows, and songs about tough moral dilemmas, but although liberals buy the tickets and the albums, they don’t take the art they consume very seriously. When moral questions arise, they forget The Wire and The Hold Steady and ask what the studies show.
An excellently ludicrous example of this mindset was offered by an article on weight loss I read earlier this summer. It opened by citing a handful of studies showing obesity to be correlated not just with heart disease but also with slower career advancement and a greater likelihood of developing mental-health problems. Let’s leave aside the fact that the author didn’t feel he could take the undesirability of being fat as a given. The bigger problem is that this sort of argument tries to have it both ways—to have all the benefits of authority without the burden of being answerable to people who disagree. On one hand, the author isn’t saying obesity is bad, science is, which makes it a fact and not an opinion. Your personal experience or common sense might tell you that a few extra pounds aren’t always such a disaster; but that just means you’re in the statistical minority for whom these bad outcomes do not eventuate. In other words: My moral claim is objectively correct, but that doesn’t mean it has to be true in your case. The same evasive maneuver can be seen in the argument that there’s nothing wrong with pornography because its prevalence isn’t correlated with higher crime rates, or that there’s nothing wrong with gay marriage as long as children of same-sex couples aren’t more likely to receive reduced-price lunches at school. The idea that something might be spiritually harmful (or beneficial) in a way that can’t be demonstrated statistically has been written out of the conversation.
The columnist Theodore Dalrymple believes that this new form of moral abdication, like the last one, was born on college campuses:
The vast expansion of tertiary education has increased by orders of magnitude the numbers of people who think in sociological abstractions rather than in concrete moral terms. Statistical generalizations are more real to them, and certainly more important, than the trifling moral dilemmas of their own lives.
Now that Shakespeare is out of the dead-white-guy doghouse, perhaps colleges could reverse some of the damage they’ve done by teaching All’s Well That Ends Well, which opens with Parolles trying to convince Helena to change her attitude toward sexual continence:
Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost.That you were made of is metal to make virgins.Virginity by being once lost may be ten times found; by being ever kept, it is ever lost.
The idea that promiscuity would yield a net increase in virginity makes perfect sense quantitatively but no sense morally. It’s just the sort of thing an economist could prove.It is also self-evidently ridiculous, even to a person accustomed to treating moral questions technocratically.
The great attraction of this new utilitarian mindset is its certainty—the fact that answers to such questions are not just a matter of opinion (and therefore, not relative)—which is why continuing to demonize the old enemy only makes the new one more appealing. Conservatives should be pleased, maybe even a little proud, that Americans are in the market for moral claims they can make with authority, but now it’s time to worry about which authorities they choose to trust. Economics can tell a country how to satisfy its desires efficiently, but not which desires are noble. Sociologists can put out a survey asking whether people are happy or fulfilled, but can’t give them the moral vocabulary they need to make sense of the difference between happiness and mere contentment, or between fulfillment and shallow self-regard. Some social-scientific studies make claims that turn out to be false, and others make claims that are correct on their own terms but not in the messy world of the human soul. The culture war goes on, and probably always will, but constant condemnation of relativism has become a distraction. As long as technocratic amorality keeps trying to turn every cultural question into a matter of optimization, the Right can’t afford any distractions.
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Freedomist | 9.17.12 @ 1:13PM
Talk about relativism reminds me of talk about exceptionalism. They're code words used between some conservatives to criticize people and ideas they don't agree with.Truth be, conservatism is a close couzen of pragmatism which is just a step away from relativism. Exceptionalism is a close couzen of relativism too.
spike59| 9.20.12 @ 6:53AM
hey, where can we conservatives get one of those cool 'decoder rings?' you libtards all sem to have them...
Gary B| 9.20.12 @ 6:58AM
Very good. LOL
JimH| 9.20.12 @ 8:08AM
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
Von Mises Jr| 9.20.12 @ 8:51AM
"Decoder rings" are useless since they talk gibberish. Liberals do not confine themselves to the dictates of logic and words can mean just about anything.
This is why it is a waste of time talking to liberals.
To normal people, freedom means lack of coercion and ability to seek one's own ends. To a liberal it means that someone else is responsible for their housing, food, clothing, entertainment and children.
How can you have a useful conversation starting at this divide.
Bill8472| 9.20.12 @ 3:44PM
Decorder rings: "Remember to drink your Ovaltine."
Freedomist | 9.21.12 @ 1:40PM
I think your confusing liberals with progressives and socialists. The original meaning of liberal is a freedom proponent. Most progressives and socialists conservatives call liberals don't call themselves liberal. To avoid confusion pro-freedom liberals call themselves classical liberals or libertarians. Classical liberals and libertarians favor free markets and economic freedom. When free markets and economic freedom became America's tradition, conservatives adopted classical liberal economic freedom. Before 1900, conservative economics was synonymous with privilege and slavery.
Freedomist | 9.21.12 @ 2:13PM
Obviously my comment needs more explanation. Moral relativism has also been called "situational ethics", the idea that morality is based on a particular situational context. For example, killing is not murder in situations of self-defense. Situational ethics is the recognition that rules, including rules of morality, are approximations subject to exceptions. Moral absolutism is the attempt formulate moral rules that include all exceptions to a rule within the rule. Exceptionalism has multiple meanings. The more benign meaning is extraordinary and unique. The more controversial meaning is the immunity and impunity to take a course of action, that if undertaken by someone else, like an enemy, would be condemned as immoral. For example, an attack on America's or Israel's nuclear weapons facilities would be condemned as an act of war, where an attack on Iran's nuclear weapons facilities would be considered an act of preemptive self-defense. Here the morality is based on the situation, and not a more absolutist rule that all attacks, regardless the target, should not be subject to exceptions based on who is the victim or attacker.
Appleby| 9.20.12 @ 7:25AM
The main reason that the ship is altering course, in my opinion, is that the people who are now growing up and going to college were born to conservative parents whose standards grow from religion. All the liberals were executed before birth, which I believe is another reason the Occupiers are increasingly made up of the mentally ill and the damaged who slowly come to the conclusion that running away from home isn't nearly as much fun as they thought it would be. One thing a depression does for society, that has been a long time coming back, is encourage the extended family and once again show the neighbourhood that the so-called "nuclear family" (Us Four, No More) was a creature of the Fifties when the massive population explosion spawned huge tracts of tiny houses in neighbourhoods of people who were all the same age, and that there is a lot of value in listening to points of view espoused not only by people your own age, but by people who are older than you are and have been through the mill. Daddy always told us that what we needed was a Great Depression to make us realize how well off we were. Sometimes a very hard fall is the only thing that gets people to focus on what's really important in life.
ata777| 9.20.12 @ 8:30AM
moral relativism is dead? an out-of-wedlock birthrate of 40% and 16 trillion of debt suggest otherwise.
Petronius| 9.20.12 @ 9:54AM
Liberals consider morality an arch enemy to be Defeated. And for the most part that has happened. Clinton got elected because those who voted for him wanted what he got. He Got Away With IT. IT, is anything he wants. And the liberal Trash want IT for themselves at Our expense.
Joellen| 9.20.12 @ 10:13AM
Slippery slope, black & white, absolutes, these words have meanings for a reason. Once we deny that there is absolutes and/or black and white solutions, well then you start that slippery slope which leads us into "it's all relative".
Joellen| 9.20.12 @ 10:14AM
Excuse my grammar "there ARE absolutes"...
fmm| 9.20.12 @ 10:28AM
What a meaningless barrage of words this article is. The truth is that moral relativism is so wide spread and accepted that you don't recognize it anymore.
Who Knows?| 9.20.12 @ 10:49AM
Things ARE relative. What else could they be?
I AM relative to you. Why, sometimes we’re even close relatives, with the same parents. ALL humans are related, which a simple thought experiment proves---imagine “your” genealogical family tree, not just back to where records are extant, but back to the first humans.
Why, indeed, one’s mind can even instantly flash, encompassing ALL space-time, and realize how relative we each are to the creation of chemical elements out of light.
Can the eye see itself? The tongue taste itself? Ears hear themselves? Nose smell itself? Skin touch itself? Mind think itself?
Hell no---we won’t go: THERE!
As long as separation exists, with shimmering boundaries assumed, in multiple ways, whether seen or not, relativity must be going on.
Each generation inevitably produces a relatively famous bunch of humans. Sperm always strives to SCORE!
There was “The Greening of America”, “The Closing of the American Mind”, “The Organization Man”, “The Power Elite”, “The Affluent Society”, on and on and on—all written by individual humans, relatively speaking. So what, you say.
Exactly!
Einstein’s Theories of Relativity are the tell, in the poker hand of life, not just in physics.
Appleby| 9.20.12 @ 11:21AM
Thanks for reminding me about "The Greening of America." I bought a copy of the remainder table somewhere about 20 years ago and even then I found it both funny and really weird...somebody's Dad trying to pretend he's part of the HipandCool Kids, without a clue in the world what they were actually doing...
Seek| 9.20.12 @ 11:34AM
Helen Rittelmeyer is a rare bird: A young conservative who transcends the cliches of the Red State/Culture War activism. Expertly dissembling the cliched strawman, "relativism," she exhibits a grasp of our culture well beyond what can be expected even of conservatives twice her age. Let's see a lot more of her.
Bill8472| 9.20.12 @ 3:43PM
If relativism is on its way out, maybe a canon in the liberal arts can find its way back in.