Moderate relativism (blog #2)

The author starts the section on moral relativism in their piece by describing a fairly extreme version of the concept, then continues by dismissing it entirely, claiming that the premise of an objective moral standard existing is not just plausible but is, in fact, the case. That argumentative path has some serious issues in it, in my opinion. I’ll skip issues in tone altogether, though, and base my response on the claim of an objective moral standard.

 

First, the author implies that despite the appearance of moral and ethical diversity between cultures, there is an underlying set of common moral principles shared between all societies, the analogized “rules of the game” that humanity acts under, so to speak. While this may be true on a superficial level, it fails to take in to account differences in individual opinion, glazing over an important part of morality (personal interpretation of societal ideals) that would call the true objectivity of these underlying “rules” into question.

The author then relies on a false analogy between historical debate on a physical feature of the universe and a hypothetical debate on moral standards to claim that disagreement on moral standards does not impact their objectivity in the greater scheme of things. This implies that there is a sort of universal morality that things can be judged off of in lieu of consensus, because otherwise disagreement on a moral concept would inherently impact its objectiveness. The author refutes their own implication several paragraphs later, however, when they admit that morality may have an essential link with human value judgments, and would therefore rule out the possibility of “objective moral truths of the sort that could exist totally apart from human beings.” That shows that the basis for the author’s argument against moral relativity is unsound, and therefore cannot be accepted.