If you want to accuse me of doing an injustice to relativists, fine. All the rest is nonsense.
Actually, though, you are quite wrong about Nazis. They were relativists, as were Communists. They thought that "moralities" were incommensurable, and a product of the inner life of the Volk. Thus, there was no independent standard by which to critique a People's prevailing morality, it could only be critiqued in terms of fidelity to its own premises. Similarly with the Communists. Morality was something which served class interests and reflected the way of life of the dominant class. The hegemonic morality in the modern world was "bourgeois morality". However, the emerging solidarity of the proletariat would lead to the ascendancy of its its budding morality, and after a period of conflict, the proletariat would become the dominant class, and enforce its morality. Neither is absolutist, in the sense of holding there to be an objective morality derived from the nature of man as such. Both are relativist, considering morality to be a combination of arbitrary choices and utilitarian constructs, that favor one People over another, or one class over another.
I did not, by the way, refer to absolutism. I merely said that there is an advantage in the assumption of a discoverable, objective moral order, so that we have a standard to aim at in our discussions of what is right....... |
