Relativism and Beyond

Excellent . . . David Vellemen's gone and written a useful primer on what "moral relativism" is and isn't that people interested in the Pope's anti-relativist campaign ought to check out. I would just add that there's also a rather esoteric philosophical controversy about the ontological status of morality -- is it "real" or in some sense "not real" -- that often gets collapsed into relativism versus not-relativism. That's a move people ought to resist, since the implications of where you stand on realism about morality are going to have a lot to do with in what sense you do or do not think a bunch of other stuff is real. Most of us, I think, don't think that the entity denoted by "two" is real in the same sense as the entity denoted by "Matthew Yglesias left shoe" is real. Thinking about that you can, if you squint really hard at it, begin to be puzzled about how it can be true that "two plus two equals four" given that there don't seem to be a 2 and a 4 out there in the world for this to be true of. There are difficult questions in that neighborhood, and somewhat similar ones about morality, but nobody is led by this to think that "two plus two equals four" is true for me, but false for you.

My best guess is that Benedict XVI is mostly concerned about moral authoritarianism rather than relativism and anti-relativism. Even Protestants who do think the Bible provides an authoratative account of moral truth accept that nobody in particular has privileged access to the correct understanding of the text. Catholics are all committed to some stronger brand of authoritarianism about this (it's an ugly-sounding term, but this isn't meant to say that they're secretly hankering for dictatorship) and back in the day Benedict XVI was known for trying to strengthen this element of Church operations, thinking it very important to get all the Bishops on more-or-less the same doctrinal page. But I'm not completely sure that's the full extent of his concerns.

The only kind of real relativism that I hear anyone seriously endorsing (as opposed to sloppily seeming to endorse when they're not really thinking through what they're trying to say) is agent-relativism about the past. That is, it seems natural to take a relaxed attitude to, say, George Washington's slave holding or Abraham Lincoln's racism on the grounds that they were "men of their times." People don't go full-bore on this and usually say it was good of Lincoln to have been a racist but people don't really condemn him for it the way they would if a contemporary politician were to turn out to have those views. Probably the best interpretation of that practice is to steer it away from relativism and say it's an effort to try and avoid a wrongful self-righteousness. Lincoln held more enlightened views on this subject than did most of his contemporary and we all understand that beliefs and behaviors are heavily affected by background culture, so it would be pointless to get too up in arms about the fact that Lincoln reflected to a large extent the bad ideas that prevailed during his lifetime. But in an abstract sense, racism wasn't "more okay" in the 1860s than it is today.