Relativism is hardly just a leftish principle. Much of the mess we are in with respect to Iraq and terrorism is because we didn't forcefully condemn terrorists when they were aligned with the U.S. Saddam was already clearly a terrorist when we were embracing him. Same with the Shah of Iran. But, we said that fighting the Soviet Union was relatively more important. So, truth became that Saddam was acceptable.

Relativism is what has left the conservative Catholic church with far less moral authority on sexual issues. Why? Because in relativist church thinking, preservation of an institution was relatively more important than stopping abuse or seeking justice for its victims.

Relativism passed down the chain of command seems to be responsible for the Iraq abuse scandal. Getting information was relatively more important than the truth that mistreatment of detainees is immoral.

Conservatives in the Reagan administration aligned themselves with right-wing death squads and apartheid in South Africa because the evil of bondage had to be subservient to fighting the Soviet Union. But in these cases, once again, we muddied up the principles we were trying to spread.

Joel,

That events are seen as relative to each other, and that judgments must be made between unattractive actions on the basis of their relative costs and benefits is not what is generally meant by "relativism." Generally — and it is a leftish principle — "relativism" is meant to indicate the notion that judgments can't be made, because, relative to somebody else, priorities might be reversed.

All of your examples are either vaguely relevant, presumptuous, or incorrect. But to keep on the specifics of relativism (rather than approach your various slanders), it is a way of viewing the world that denies absolutes. All of your examples are judgments that ultimately stem from absolutes, whether you agree with them or not. (And I'll stress again, this is in no way meant to suggest that your examples are valid or correct.)

Justin,

I knew that would be your response, but I don't buy it.

I'm considered "left" by some, "moderate" by others, and "conservative" by many. I have some very conservative friends who nevertheless believe the theory of evolution might be true. We all laugh when I remind them that many other conservatives would consider them relativists for their opinion on that topic.

Let's take the issue of homosexuality. Some would consider me to be a relativist because I don't consider homosexual practice, per se, to be sinful. However, am I really a relativist? I'm not so sure because I don't consider my judgment to be relative truth, but to be absolute truth, period. In other words, my position isn't based on the idea that homosexuality is just one sin among many, or that it is a lesser sin or that we shouldn't judge or that we should be forgiving. I don't regard it as sin at all.

Torture is either right or wrong. That is absolute truth. But the Bush administration in effect has claimed that torture is relative; that is, wrong usually, but not always and depending on the circumstances. I say it is wrong everywhere and absolutely under all circumstances.

Is premier conservative Rush Limbaugh a relativist or just a hypocrite? He wanted to throw the book at drug abusers and law breakers in general, but appearing to himself be caught, makes all kinds of distinctions and exceptions.

Is someone who personally opposes drinking alcohol but is also against laws outlawing its sale a relativist or just being pragmatic?

Conservatives used to teach deficit spending as an absolute evil. Now, the issue isn't so much how big the deficits are or how big government is but how low taxes are. Is that pragmatism, relativism, or new revelation?

Your way of approaching relativism allows you an easy out for your own moral failings, mistakes or misjudgments, for you can just claim that you were choosing among competing truths, rather than truth versus falsehood or good versus evil.

Joel,

What are you talking about? Of course things are relative to each other, but that's not what relativism means. Whether the error is yours or people who wrongly accuse you of relativism, I don't know.

Whether or not torture is wrong is an absolute question. What constitutes torture can be relative. Some would characterize a long commute with a radio that only receives NPR as torture; others would believe that a blessing. The relativist would blur this line in one of two ways (usually depending on political expediency): 1) Anything can be torture, as defined by the tortured, so we can never have hard rules about what is or isn't torture (or is or isn't acceptable torture), or alternately, 2) from some perspectives a given thing is not torture, so claims that it is can be ignored. In short, a relativist would say, not that torture is right, wrong, or wrong under most circumstances, but that we can't determine whether it's right or wrong.

This isn't my "way of approaching relativism"; it's what relativism is. (That's an absolute truth, by the way.) Furthermore, you're entirely obscuring the line between "competing truths" and competing benefits and costs (which is, in itself, a very relativist thing to do).

Justin,

I believe that there are absolute truths; I just don't agree with you as to what some of those absolutes are.

Also, some things are not currently knowable as either true or false. We cannot, based on current knowledge, know whether God created the earth 5,000 years ago or billions of years ago. Reasonable people can disagree. But there is some absolute truth out there, whether it is humanly knowable or not.

Similarly, you believe, it seems, that God has finished revealing on some topics that I think he continues to reveal about. That doesn't make me a relativist. Wrong, perhaps, but not a relatvist.

I consider the death penalty to be wrong under each and every circumstance. However, on that topic I would have to say that is my considered judgment, but that I could be misapplying Christ's teachings. But I think capital punishment is probably either entirely right or entirely wrong, as an absolute truth.

Again, I would say that if conservatives are limiting their discernment to principles of competing truths that they then avoid having to face their own conscience because they instead can come to believe that everything they hold dear is absolute truth and that they are merely sorting out priorities.

If the difference between conservatives and liberals was primarily "relativism" on the part of liberals, then evidence should show that cosnervatives are more faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. However, in my life, I have seen as many faithful and God-fearing people from one side of the political spectrum as the other and same for the unfaithful.

The bottomless pit of quicksand always wins, Justin.

Joel,

Moral rules are always very complicated, and people disagree on what the details are. If the nuke hidden in a major city will explode in four hours, and we've captured someone who knows where it's hidden, is torturing that person immoral? Some would say yes, some would say no, a few would say it depends on the kind of torture.

None of them would be relativists, because they would all agree that there is some right answer that doesn't change with the identity of the torturer. A relativist would say either 1) there is no answer, or 2) the answer depends on who is doing the torturing. The torture is only wrong if you're part of a culture that disapproves of torture, or if you personally disapprove of torture. In relativism, morals are just a matter of personal preference, and are never absolutely true for all people, times, and cultures.

Liberals usually like relativism because it justifies moral change. If you're a liberal and not a relativist, then you have a hard time justifying the changes you want. Take same-sex marriage: For many centuries of western thought, everyone assumed that marriage was limited to a man and a woman. Were they all wrong? Are the judges of the MSJC more insightful than all the great thinkers of the past several centuries?

Now maybe you're bold enough to say, "Yes, we know more about morality than those idiots in the past ever did." If so, I bet you don't study history much. Many liberals are unwilling to say that everyone in the past was an idiot about morality. Relativism offers them a way out: "The old definition of marriage was morally right for those people, that time, and that culture. But for us in our time and our culture, morality demands same-sex marriage."

Relativism is a leftish principle because it helps justify changes in morality. Conservatives usually oppose it for the same reason.

Ben,

Western thought once advanced slavery and colonialism.

"Western thought once advanced slavery and colonialism."

Western thought advanced slavery? No. Slavery was a worldwide practice. Western culture was the first major culture to eliminate slavery. We fought a major war over it in this country.

And we just fought another war to eliminate slavery in Iraq: One master, millions of slaves. Shall we invade Sudan next? Perhaps some other despotic hellhole? No. The liberals don't want us to. They're still mad that we freed Saddam's slaves. They seem to like slavery as long as the slave owners run the country and spout Marxism. It's only private slaveowners they object to.

You'll have to tell me why I'm supposed to be embarrassed about colonialism. What was it supposed to be worse than? What do you think that the Europeans should have done instead? Would the world be a better place today if they had stayed home? Didn't the Europeans generally eliminate slavery in the regions they conquered?

And is this connected to relativism in any way? Are you advocating the view that people in the past were immoral, so liberals don't need relativism? That's certainly an option, but I think it's slightly less popular than relativism among liberals, especially among the intellectuals.

If you hate history in a generalized way, then you end up hating just about everything, e.g.: You don't want to assert constitutional rights because those were created by evil slaveowners. Also, if everything old is bad, then you have to hate the most primitive countries more and the more modern ones less. And that's no good, because the point of liberalism is to hate the United States, right?

If you try to be a liberal who believes in morality, then you'll end up crusading against really nasty foreign places where people are desperately poor and have no freedoms, like North Korea or the Iraq of two years ago. Or maybe you'll join the Peace Corps and bring potable water to some dirt-poor village in Central America. That's where morals will lead you, not into marches to protest how evil this country is.

Moral relativism cuts you completely free from all that. You can be horrified that fourteen year old girls need parental permission to get abortions in the US, then shrug dismissively when you hear about foreign practices like female circumcision, muslim honor killings, etc. You can shriek about the evils of American Imperialism while ignoring the fact that Saddam is no longer putting people through plastic shredders.

Everything is so much easier once you're free from moral consistency. If you're determined to stay a liberal, you'll probably have more fun that way.

Ben,

Your comment is just a slanted rant, making too many assumptions about my views for me to reply to.

The only thing I have argued is that relativism is not tied to ideology the way Justin insists it is.

When I did my time in the military, I was content to play a small part in defending the Constitution, including the right to free speech and to bear arms.

"Your comment is just a slanted rant"

No, it wasn't a rant. It was an expression of opinion. If you don't want to talk about slavery and colonialism--the topics you brought up--then maybe we can get back to moral relativism.

"The only thing I have argued is that relativism is not tied to ideology the way Justin insists it is."

Yes, and I've responded to that argument: As we're seeing with SSM, liberals want to change traditional morality. Conservatives want to preserve it. Do you disagree with those premises?

If you're a liberal who wants to change morality, then you should explain why the moral view you want to change was incorrect. Virtually everyone in the past has viewed marriage as about opposite-sex couples. The SSM crusaders want us to believe that they were all wrong: Morality and the Constitution now require SSM. It's hard to believe that everyone in the past was mistaken about such an important issue. As I see it, you've got two ways to explain it:

1. Be bold and say that all those people in the past were wrong: Limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples has always been wrong.

2. Be a moral relativist and claim that those in the past weren't wrong, because it was OK in the past to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples. But morality changed somehow in recent years, so that now it's wrong to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples.

As a factual matter, lots of liberals take that second view. Then they take it further and claim that morality can change not only with time but also with culture: An act can be immoral in our culture today but moral in another culture today. Then it becomes not a matter of culture, but of personal conscience. Eventually you realize that moral relativism amount to a denial of morality itself, which is why it's so dangerous.

Whether moral relativism is associated with liberalism is a fact question. Show me some conservatives who claim to be moral relativists.

If you want to claim that moral relativism means that different moral conclusions derive from different circumstances, then we don't agree on vocabulary. Wikipedia has a nice concise definition: "Moral relativism refers to a view that claims moral standards are not absolute or universal, but rather emerge from social customs and other sources." That's what most people mean by the term. If you want to invent your own definition, you're free to, of course. But then you can't tell others that they're wrong for not adhering to your idiosyncratic usage.

Ben,

Conservatives don't claim to be moral relativists. They just often are.

Many conservatives to this day defend the killing (nuking) of innocent civilians in Japan during World War II. That is relativism because it is a view that says that something that is absolutely immoral (intentionally killing civilians) was acceptable under the cirmustances.

I'm not going to discuss the matter of same-sex marriage because I don't support it. I support civilian unions.

Some things truly are just customs. It was once considered immoral for a woman to enter a sanctuary with her head uncovered. We no longer have the same expectation of dress. Respect for God remains as an absolute, though.
On the terminology bit, the conservative versus liberal difference is coming to be misleading. For instance, many conservatives now support the ministries and mission of Martin Luther King, Jr., but refuse to admit the obvious, that he was a liberal.

The biggest issue that I wish to clear up comes with this, from Joel's comment above:

If the difference between conservatives and liberals was primarily "relativism" on the part of liberals, then evidence should show that cosnervatives are more faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Relativism was little more than a sidenote in my post, and I was very deliberate in using "leftish" — as opposed to "leftist." Liberals, to my experience, are more inclined toward relativism and yet apply it less readily to the one area of life in which it most applies: opinion. You seem to be making much too much out of a tempered statement. Relativism isn't "tied to" liberalism, but liberalism tends toward it. (Unless you're talking classical liberalism, which modern politics have actually pushed into the conservative category, as your reference to MLK suggests.)

Other than that, I'd like to express how appreciative I am at last to have somebody helping me out with the comment-box argumentation for which I've decreasing time. In Ben's case, the argumentation is probably better than what I would have thought to provide.

To respond to another comment from Joel:

Many conservatives to this day defend the killing (nuking) of innocent civilians in Japan during World War II. That is relativism because it is a view that says that something that is absolutely immoral (intentionally killing civilians) was acceptable under the cirmustances.

That isn't "relativism," because the conservatives' argument is that the absolute morality is, essentially, that such an attack is immoral under all but an extremely limited range of circumstances. Many who take that view will argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki fit into Just War tradition because the intent wasn't the killing, but the cessation of war. Frankly, my mind isn't made up, but it's a question of whether circumstances fit the absolute truth, not whether different circumstances change what absolute truth is.