Relativism II

On Jan. 31, I did a blog post on relativism. However, I thought it merited a second pass.

Moral relativism—cultural, temporal, individual—is the point of view that right and wrong are relative to position. There is no “objective” right and wrong.

This position is fraught and falls apart upon the slightest analysis. For one, this disallows anyone from negatively judging anything that anyone does. If someone, say, sold you into slavery and burned your house down, well, who’s to say it’s wrong? You might say, “That person has no right to do someone else harm!” The problem here is that that is an absolute. As soon as you invoke a standard that cuts across cultures, across eras, that applies to everyone, you have entered the world of absolutism.

Furthermore, one cannot (logically) maintain there has been any moral improvement. Either at the cultural level, the temporal level, or the individual level. If we say, “It’s better that we no longer have slavery,” one is availing oneself of a standard. You are saying slavery is bad for all time. One can attempt to assert that “slavery was okay in 1823,” but it was not okay to the slaves. Just to the people who owned them. If you took issue with someone enslaving you, same thing. You’re saying slavery is wrong. I suspect you would have held that view in 1823.

Say your grandfather makes an indelicate remark at the holiday dinner table. And then your aunt swoops in and says “Well, that’s just how they talked back then.” Your aunt is trafficking in temporal relativism. She is saying that racist and homophobic language was okay and “accepted” in the 1960s. Was it not hurtful and insulting sixty years ago? It was. Your grandfather is wrong and your aunt is also wrong.

Yes, we should be slow to judge other cultures. But some cultures are beyond the pale. The Ku Klux Klan and its history of racist terrorism? The Klan constitutes a culture. Should our hands be bound, and should we feel unable to judge such a culture? Being slow to judge might seem enlightened, but I don’t see anything enlightened in giving neo-Nazis a pass or giving ISIS a pass. We should feel perfectly comfortable judging those cultures.

Another example is female genital mutilation (FGM). “Well, that’s a cultural practice, and we have no right to judge other cultures.” Did anyone consider the thoughts and feelings of the pubescent girl getting a razor blade taken to her? Does her vote count? I suspect she’s not on board with this “cultural practice.” Same as the slave. When we invoke the concept of relativism, we end up defending the powerful: the slave owner, the person carrying out FGM, the tribal warlord sentencing adulterers and homosexuals to death.

Why are we so quick to defend these people? Because when we say things like “Who’s to say what’s wrong? That’s their way of doing things,” we assume that there is no power structure in said culture. We assume there is a level distribution of power and that the victims are willing participants. I cannot think of anything more heartless and vicious.