a moral relativist can't use judgmental terms like "negative impact."
Why not? "Negative" can refer to an outcome not consistent with goals we have selected. Observation tells us that government appropriation of the means of production is inevitably going to cause declining production of goods and services, which in turn will lead to shortages. Observation tells us that totalitarianism leads to political chaos, revolution, massive migrations of refugees to countries often not prepared to handle them, epidemics, hunger, etc. We call these outcomes "negative" because we have, by our own relative criteria, decided that they are undesirable. This is not a moral judgement at all.
You seem to think that a moral relativist cannot hold an opinion. This is not the case at all. Moral relativists have to decide what to believe, rather than allowing someone else to decide for them.
I do not claim to be a pure relativist. I have never met a pure relativist. Nor have I met anyone that is not, to some extent, a relativist. We all fall somewhere in between.
Look at it this way. We would all agree that killing people is a bad thing to do, though we may arrive at this conclusion through very different processes. We would all agree that killing someone in defense of self or family is acceptable. But at what level of threat is it acceptable to invoke self-defense as justification for killing? You will get many different answers, all arrived at through an exercise in relativism.
Sooner or later we all have to decide for ourselves what conduct is acceptable and what is not. Sooner or later we all have to think, though some, at least on the evidence this thread presents, put up a great deal of resistance. |
