Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Thoughts on Moral Relativism

This entry was a posting I made this evening in a web-based class I am taking on Human Development this term. The issue that came up was relativistic thinking, and whether there is any objective truth if we believe all knowledge is constructed in the mind of the learner.

My reply on this thread is now dated by a couple of weeks but I will comment none-the-less: the contention that knowledge is constructed does not seem to me to be mutually exclusive from the existence of objective reality or, as one of my philosophy profs used to say, “Big T truth.” In other words, just because you and I may have different eyewitness accounts of a car wreck, that does not invalidate the fact that something specific in fact did happen. My perception of what happened is based on many factors, as is yours, so not surprisingly our recollections of the event may differ. Yet the cars did in fact hit each other at a specific angle, with each having a particular initial velocity at impact, they each had a specific weight, and therefore specific momentum measurements at impact. Those objective facts do not change based on my perceptions of the event or yours.

I think this is actually an incredibly huge philosophical idea to address, because I think a lot of people in society today seem content to live in a morass of relativity. The reasoning might go something like: because you and I see the world differently, the world must really not be a particular way, so there is no truth and everything is relative.

What a sad conclusion. I have not read much Nietzche firsthand, but I think that is part of his worldview. Einstein’s theory of relativity can be misapplied and therefore misunderstood here too, as it was mentioned earlier in this thread. Einstein never advocated relativity in the sense that there is no objective truth or reality! He never contended that E=mc*c only in Western patriarchial societies! His contention was that this THEORY would be universal, on all planets and througout all time/space. In fact, later in his life Einstein struggled to try and find the GUT (a grand unifying theory) which would bring together the four fundamental forces of nature (gravitation, electro-magnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force.) He did not succeed, unfortunately, and we do not know if a scientist ever will, but my point here is that we should not oversimplify and misinterpret Einstein’s theory of relativity to support the general attitude within our early 21st century culture that rather vehemently supports the philosophy of relativism.

Last thought on this: there are many types of relativism, and moral relativism is the one I find the most repugnant. Taken to its extreme, moral relativism would allow an observer to conclude that ethnic genocide may be justified in some cases depending on the situational factors: it may be wrong for the Nazis to have exterminated the Jews in World War II, but fine for the Hutus to have exterminated the Tutsis in Rwanda in the early 1990s.

So I can’t pass up an opportunity to make a few comments about relativistic thinking and philosophy, especially when it is mentioned in relation to educational ethics. The fact that a philosophy of moral relativism violates the “law” of non-contradiction is also significant, I think– but I have probably said enough on this topic for now!

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On this day..


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