Posted by Dan Ewert : 3/20/2002 11:51:00 PM (Archive Link)
While I’ve mentioned moral relativity, I might as well continue. There are few things that I really despise. One of them is moral relativism. I can’t stand it. This is the notion that this or that opinion, idea, religion, etc. is equally true as any other opinion, idea, or religion, etc. Essentially, there is no truth. At least that’s my contention. Yes, yes, the moral relativist will claim that he does believe in truths… many truths… in fact, the air is thick with truth and falsity is a rare element indeed. Fortunately, I hold the upper hand because I think he’s wrong but he thinks I’m right. Tragically, though, I think he’s wrong that he thinks I’m right. Anyway, when everything is put on the same level of correctness, there ceases to be a necessary distinction between that which is right and that which is wrong. Ideas come to be happy little neighbors on an exceedingly dull plane in which everybody is right. In this manner, there is no longer “truth,” there is just, well, “is.” Now that I think about it, it’s a very socialist/communist metaphysical outlook. There’s nothing true, there’s nothing false… everything’s just been leveled out to a nice “ok.” However, these happy neighbors really don’t get along very well. (Alas, it’s the unfortunate nature of ideas that they can’t build high privacy fences to keep out the crazy things the guy next door is doing.) You see many ideas are just flat out mutually exclusive from each other. A monotheistic religion like Christianity is mutually exclusive from a polytheistic religion like Hinduism. One says there is only God, the other says there are many gods. You just can’t reconcile that. They can’t both be true. Logically, it doesn’t work. Yeah, that’s right, logic. That wacky male construct. If you don’t like it, feel free to argue against it. Only please do it in the irony booth to your right. So as I was saying, only of them can be true. In the realm of ideas, there are multiple cases of this. What it comes down to is somebody’s gotta be right and somebody’s gotta be wrong. The relativist will say that in actuality both are correct for that person in their own way. Hooey. One’s gotta be right, the other’s gotta be wrong. These aren’t just some personal choices somebody makes, these are hard-edged right or wrong ideas. To agree with the relativist is skirting the issue and abdicating responsibility for making important and difficult choices. Instead of wrestling with a number of hard topics, you come out with stock answer of saying everything is right, it’s whatever you think. It reminds of when I did debate in high school. I was a 2N. This stood for second negative and meant that when my partner and I were on the negative side of the argument, I would get up second and attempt to defeat my opposition’s affirmative position. What this involved was giving disadvantages to their plan using evidentiary material you hauled around with you. Well, if you weren’t very good at debating or if you just didn’t have anything other idea how to fight it, you would use a generic “disad.” This was a disadvantage that you could link to nearly any possible affirmative argument and related in vague ways at best. It was the last (or first) resort of the novice, the dim-witted, or the ill-prepared. I suppose this is how I view the relativist.

After that long digression… Without ever researching the issue, I like to think that relativism came about through the philosophical notion that man is unable to know truth. This is a consistent theme invigorated especially by Descartes and going forward. Often the philosophers will attempt to build back up epistemological possibilities after undergoing great labors to knock them down. Despite the constructive effort, the ing doubts remained. Can man ever truly know what good, pure, unadulterated “truth” is? It seems iffy at best. And with this I agree. However, somewhere along the way, this idea that we lack the capacity to achieve knowledge of truth mutated (not morphed, mutated) into there being no truth at all… that because we can’t know it, it’s not there. That crazy epistemological problem again. I disagree with this. There is truth and while maybe no or few ideas have fully achieved those ranks, all get closer or farther away from it. Our lack of being able to fully identify all those more true ideas doesn’t mean we should stop trying. I think we come upon many by trial and error. And I’ll expound on this more later. I’m getting tired.