Addressing the conditioned relativist: Part Two

This is the second half of my persuasive speech for class. First half was posted last Wednesday.

Second argument: How can we truly be free if we can’t create our own values?

Despite an almost prevalent belief that each person can arbitrarily legislate his or her own self-governing laws, this argument also falls through on the grounds of simple logic. For starters, this argument must assume that freedom is really valuable – an objective value – precisely the kind of thing it attempts to relativize and argue against. If freedom is something good, then it must be freedom from something bad. Thus the relativist has already argued from an objective good. If he’s also stated that everyone should have freedom, then he’s advocating the real value of equality too. If freedom and equality are just his subjective values, then he’s advocating the submission of everyone else to his value system – not exactly very tolerant or free of him.

Using an ad hominen, I might say that well, I’m going to create my own values too. I declare that I’m to be treated as a god, and everyone should be obedient to me. If he protests in the name of justice, then he is arguing me based on an objective value. If he protests in the name of his created value system, then neither he nor I have the upper hand, and it again comes down to a power struggle where the physically weaker, less clever person or on a larger scale – a group of people – becomes submissive to the stronger, dominant party or majority. How this fosters freedom of any kind, I’m not sure.

While we can easily manipulate the rules to our favorite game, experience shows that we cannot create alternative morals. You will never feel morally obligated to be sexually promiscuous, but you can choose to be. On the other hand, you may feel obliged to support a friend in need even if it’s inconvenient. Those are rules you can’t change.

The reality we know is governed by laws of all kinds; why not moral ones?

The desire to eliminate guilt is strong, but pretending morality is what you make it is a detrimental lie to yourself and others. Moral relativism isn’t a solution; it’s a fairy tale, a distortion of reality. By realizing the illogicalness of the arguments for moral relativism from cultural relativism and freedom, this should help provide a clearer view of truth and reality. Believing gravity doesn’t exist never gave anyone the ability to fly; it only made them foolish. Likewise, ignoring moral absolutes won’t make you happy because these unchangeable, objective, universal laws are in your nature. If you want to be a dog, eating dog food and walking around on all fours barking won’t reduce you to one. You can’t change your nature, but you can deny it and act in a way contrary to who you are meant to be.

As a side-thought:
While listening to some of my classmates’ persuasive speeches yesterday, something reoccurred to me. Not once was there a mention of truth or adherence to reality or nature. There seems to be no concern for whether something is true or good or beautiful, but only if it meets what one desires: reality must conform to us, not us to reality. I think this is extremely relevant to my speech because mine is precisely based on truth and reality, and against the desire to pretend we create our own reality (because obviously Sartre was right; there is no meaning, we must create our own, but no one seems to realize where they found this idea). In fact it seems to be an entirely different way of thinking. People no longer think in terms of truth unless these terms are being qualified, coded, and hidden under sociological, psychological, or scientific determinations. I see more closely how relativism – not specifically moral – is so dangerous; it removes that which makes us human: our desire to know. Instead we pervert the act of creation and pseudo-create personal truths and moralities.

Addressing the conditioned relativist: Part One

Public speaking is one of those classes I thought I could avoid. Since I’ve decided to get my Bachelors of Science in Nursing, this is no longer the case. On short notice I took up the project to write a five to seven minute persuasive speech against moral relativism (it was less fun than I imagined). If anyone was going to, it had to be a Parousian. This is my first direct attempt at bringing Catholicism to contemporary culture through the classroom. I give the speech (a modified version of the following) next Tuesday; pray for open minds and hearts.
(Note: the funny single-liners are “transition statements” required for class.)

What is the number one export of the United States? What is it that this country supplies in monumental quantities to the rest of the world? Ideas. However, because most people in the United States grow up with these ideas, and they are so immersed in their own culture, they may not realize how much these certain thought trends affect their way of thinking. I am thinking of a particular idea for which the United States is well known: moral relativism. In brief, moral relativism is a philosophy that denies moral absolutes and claims morality changes with the times, is subjective to thoughts and feelings, and is dependent on individuals.

The contemporary philosopher Peter Kreeft wrote, “The issue of moral relativism is merely the single most important issue of our age, for no society in all of human history has ever survived without rejecting this philosophy… There has never been a society of relativists.” Because moral relativism is such a pressing issue, especially in our country, I am going look at two of the popular arguments for this philosophy based on cultural relativism and freedom with emphasis on promoting its counterpart, absolutism – or the acceptance of moral absolutes.

To exemplify cultural relativism, let’s briefly consider a particular practice in the ancient Aztec culture.

For the Aztecs, human sacrifice was an integral part of their culture and beliefs. The question is… can we as outsiders objectively say whether or not this practice was immoral? Do we have any foundation to genuinely condemn this practice which took innocent lives? Note: I am specifically speaking of judging the action, not the people because their culpability for their actions is another matter entirely.

Some may believe that the Aztecs had the right to kill innocent victims because of their cultural understanding, but I would venture to bet that most believe that this practice should be abolished. The belief that we cannot comment on another culture’s morality is the basic tenet of cultural relativism. Like discovering different properties of chemicals, anthropologists and sociologists have discovered that moral values differ by culture. Some have concluded that this means there is no foundation for a binding system of morals. Relating back to the Aztecs then, human sacrifice would be morally right for them but considered morally wrong in our contemporary culture. Under the banner of cultural relativism, what is wrong in one culture can be considered right in another one. Morality becomes more associated with when and where you happen to be than the intrinsic value of a human person. Thus, according to cultural relativism, one of the failures of the Nazis wasn’t that they killed Jews, but they tried to bring it to other people who were equally justified by culture on their moral stance against these actions.

Besides my appeal to the moral conscience with examples, the argument for cultural relativism is fundamentally flawed. First, it assumes that morality is defined by what a culture teaches, or their values. Thus, your moral rightness is determined by your ability to always and unconditionally obey these culturally determined values. This argument is presupposing moral relativism to prove moral relativism.

So should rightness be determined solely by strict adherence to generally accepted norms of a given society, or is there sometimes a moral obligation to disobey certain values if those values can be deemed unjust? A moral relativist cannot point at Muslim terrorists and claim what they’re doing is wrong because they’re operating under their cultural influence, and thus it really is right. Nor can he look at those reformers who fought for equal rights for slaves and women as good because they went against the widely accepted cultural values of their day. All moral reform would have to be considered intrinsically evil.

To those who claim that another culture’s values cannot be deemed better or worse, but only different – this is an example of the linguistic confusion between objective true values and subjective value opinions which paralyzes cultural relativism. Analogously, we can distinguish between the objective truth that genetics influence the development of personality and the subjective opinion about to what extent genetics determine personality. Changing your opinion about how genetics influence behavior doesn’t change the reality or actually affect the way genetics and behavior is related. Just because one culture has opinions about what is right and another disagrees does not change the reality behind the debate. In fact without objective true values there would be no debate. We may never have complete knowledge of these things, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t have an adequate understanding of the moral law and that some moral systems are either more or less adequate than others.

In giving the cultural relativism argument people tend to point out differences, but cultures generally have more commonalities than differences. They may emphasize certain values over others, such as the Japanese emphasize community, whereas Americans emphasize individuality. However, there is no society that hates love and loves hatred; no society that prizes betrayal, selfishness, cowardice and despises honesty, courage, and justice. Such a society would devour itself.