The Maze of Moral Relativism
17th September 2012
Even the New York Times has something worth reading now and again.
I really don’t buy the premise that the only two options for ‘morality’ are religion or relativism. It ought to be possible to construct a system of behavioral norms rationally based on what we know about how societies work — and have to work, if they are to survive and prosper — without respect to any religious beliefs and without throwing up our hands and saying it’s all relative. (Indeed, I constructed such a chain of reasoning regarding murder as a seminar paper in law school; got an A on it, too.)
In fact, murder is a fine example. Every society has a behavioral norm barring murder — the definition of ‘murder’ varies a lot but it almost always falls within the scope of ‘unjustified killing of another person’ — and the penalty (except in our degenerate modern age) is almost invariably execution. The evolutionary case for such a bar is intuitively obvious: any social group in which one can’t depend on being safe from random whimsical killing is going to disintegrate whenever the opportunities outside the group exceed the danger of living inside the group.
And so on — were I a trust-fund baby I could spend a productive year or two exploring this process and possibly writing it up for publication. Try it yourself; it’s easier than it looks.
September 17th, 2012 at 10:05
How very secularly humanist of you. Perhaps there’s hope after all…