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.
Why would you say a thing like that? That's just plain silly. Hamas thinks it's a good thing to kill Israelites. The Chinese think it is good to execute even non-murderous criminials. The Taliban believes it is a good thing to stone adulterers to death. We think it is a good thing to execute terrorists.
The moral relativist, IMO, would have to say that for Hamas, the Chinese, for the Taliban, for us, certain killing is good. We have absolutely no agreement on which killing is good and which is bad. A moral absolutist would try to say what you say, that certain kinds of killing are always bad. The moral relativist would say that each person, each culture must define for itself what killing is good and what killing is bad, that there is no universal standard, and that the Chinese standard is just as valid for them as ours is for us as Hamas's is for them, etc. |
