LOLOL! Kinda sounds like the situation in "quantum theory": There are just as many quantum theories as there are quantum theorists. While disagreement in science can be fruitful and productive, disagreement about moral values can lead to social dysfunction and unrest, and often does nowadays. Yet moral relativism is a dead-end street.
And we're on that street it seems. Moral relativism has been spruced up with a new name: applied ethics. Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, is a headliner of the applied ethics school, approaching ethical issues from "a secular preference utilitarian perspective."
And where does this get you? The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, as they say. Taste this —
Singer is a champion of infanticide under certain conditions. Those conditions include the right of parents to terminate the life of a well baby, up to a year after birth, for any reason that makes sense to them. And yet at other times, he seems to hold himself out as a champion of the child.
The influential contemporary utilitarian Peter Singer often draws analogies between decisions that we all agree involve horrendous consequences and more seemingly benign decisions that he argues are ethically similar. In one essay, he poses a situation in which one can earn money to buy a new TV by selling a homeless child to a corporation that will harvest his organs for transplants. Way bad, we all agree. But then Singer argues that anytime one buys a new TV in lieu of sending money to a charity that protects homeless children, he is doing essentially the same thing. — Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar..., 2007, p. 82This, of course, is the very prescription for moral relativism and moral equivalency at the same time. It is inherently irrational. It has no criterion of truthful judgment but the ego of the person who articulates such a view.
Until recently, the moral law was understood as having an origin outside of man. It was understood as a universal — and found to be such by, for instance, C.S. Lewis, who called it the Tao. It has been seen in all human cultures of all times up to now.
But in our brave new world, man shall be the "determinator" of what morality/ethics is. As a result, the Golden Rule has been retranslated, as George Bernard Shaw wryly put it, "Do not do unto others as you would have others do unto you; they may have different taste."
Result: Total social chaos and breakdown in the end.
Did your professor mention any of this in his class? Just wondering....
Thank you ever so much for writing, who_would_fardels_bear!
Thank you so very much for your outstanding essay-post, dearest sister in Christ!
Excellent post!
The good news is that some of these philosophies are so inherently wrong that one doesn't even need to posit a single source of truth such as God or "morality" in order to demonstrate their invalidity.
Relativism was relegated to the dustbin decades ago in serious philosophical circles. Ask a few intelligent questions ... to which relativism has no good answers ... and you quickly see why it currently has the same intellectual status as phrenology or astrology:
1. Relativism states that it is OK for differing cultures to have different ethical values, but how do we define culture: the people who live on a particular plot of land? especially when the boundaries defining particular plots of land have changed drastically throughout history?
2. If a gay "couple" gets legally married in Massachusetts and moves to Utah, do they get to live by the values of where they came from, or must they start living according to the values of Utahns?
3. What about cybercultures where people sharing the same set of values live in disparate places around the world? Should they live according to their "cybervalues" or to the values of the respective places where they live?
4. Is anything OK so long as some culture believes it? Murder? Cannibalism? Throwing widows on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands?
Relativism either has no answers to these simples questions, or could be used to make a case for any and all sides. It is sad that much of humanity hasn't gotten the memo that relativism is dead and seems to act as if it is still a going concern, but that is more an issue for teachers than philosophers.
Utlitarianism has also been thrown under the bus by most working philosophers. Utilitarianism is almost the exact opposite of relativism. The hope of utilitarians is to gather enough data about the world and humans in order to come up with a universal set of ethical principles that everyone will readily agree to as resulting in the greatest good for the greatest number. There are several problems with utilitarianism that have been identified:
1. Is it really possible to gather enough data to come up with the most utilitarian scheme? What do we do in the mean time while we yet have data to collect?
2. Is there a utilitarian way to handle conflicts when one can't simultaneously do what has currently been decided as the best action, and gather more data to refine the model? For example, the data collected by Nazi doctor war criminals? Do we take time to go through the data to see if anything of value was gained, or do we burn everything up so that no doctor ever decides that if he is asked to participate in similar activities in the future he should go along because some good data might result.
3. Some forms of utilitarianism rely heavily on our prior understanding of virtue. This is especially true of the work of John Stuart Mill. In answering criticisms about utilitarians' focus on the greatest pleasure and least pain, he distinguishes utilitarianism from hedonism by asserting (without demonstration) that people will find greater pleasure in higher-order pursuits (such as reading good books) than in wallowing in drunken orgies. I don't see how you get this unless you have previously agreed to a moral ordering of pleasures. In which case utilitarianism is merely an adjunct to a hidden bias rather than a new ethical formulation. I guess this is why from the very beginning there have been both humanistic and Christian forms of utilitarianism.
4. The major critique of utilitarianism, however, is that it doesn't pass the sniff test. Imagine that you are in a burning building and only have time to save one person: do you save a loved one who isn't particularly valuable to society as a whole, or do you save the medical researcher who could come up with a cure for Alzheimers? If you are a strict utilitarian then you don't hesitate to save the medical researcher. But is this what the average person would do? Isn't it part of our nature to have special bonds with those that are close to us? Utilitarians can't add this "closeness factor" to their calculations, however, because if everyone were a true utilitarian then there would be no "closeness factor" to account for: everyone would value people by their future potential contribution to the greater good rather than to some past association via blood or friendship.
Again lots of people talk like utilitarians even though it is a dead thing. Weirder still is people that sound like supporters of both relativism and utilitarianism even though this is supremely irrational.
The good news in philosophical circles is that "virtue ethics" and neo-aristotleanism have been allowed to come out of the closet. Also, there are a large group of neo-Kantians, who although unconvinced of the existence of a supreme God, have a strong intuition that there must be a single rational ethic that applies in all situations.
If we don't lump all these folks together as just a bunch of nihilistic liberals then it might be possible to change minds one-by-one, philosophy department-by-philosophy department, etc.
The latest craze in ethics is John Rawls. The idea there is not to try and figure out what is right, but to come up with a procedure that the majority of people will agree to for determining what is right.
This is supposed to inexhorably lead to a highly regulated free-market economy bolstered by a democratically elected government, sort of along the lines of Western Europe.
The problem with Rawls's philosophy is two-fold:
1. Is he making the same error as Mills in that he is presuming a certain level of virtue in order for society to actually create a workable political economy.
2. What if his method leads to something like Singapore or China? Some say those people are happier, and even freer, if you count being able to walk the streets of big cities at night without fear of mugging.
I don't think that people having different ideas about what is right and wrong will necessarily lead to chaos. We are the six billion blind men and women and the elephant. Our views on what is right and wrong will always vary somewhat even among our closest confreres.
I fear instead that we will end up wallowing in a dumbed-down society a la Idiocracy because we have not been able to eliminate all of the demonstrably bad philosophies from universal consideration.
If we could just sweep away relativism and utilitarianism I would be happy. I have a soft spot in my head for nihilism because, although it ultimately is wrong, at least a logical case can be made for it. And nihilists tend to be hardheaded rather than the jello-like believers of relativism that just wriggle into a new indefensible position when a prior one has been squished down.