Topic: All Is Permitted
The typical arguments I've had with Christians online - and there have been many - have been pretty superficial as I've discussed in previous posts. The typical Christian has plenty of roadblocks preventing her from pursuing an avenue that involves actual thought. The usual form of the discussions I have are an exercise in trying to get the Christian to understand that if the criteria must be "absolutist" or "objective" morals then atheists aren't necessarily worse off than theists. The reality is of course, I'd wager, that atheists are less absolutist and objective on the whole than Christians are, but that's only because they are serious about understanding a complex issue rather than just throwing out whatever conceptual framework is necessary to assure that whatever they believe at the time is right and can't be questioned.
"Absolute" and "Objective" often mean the same thing in ethics though you could separate the terms to mean "fixed" and "external." There are cases where, for instance, ethics could be external and variable. If you've happened to read my posts on structuralism (or are already familiar with the idea), it's easy to see how, if the thought of two societies are different and if one is more or less bound to the thinking of their society, that ethics would be externally bound to the collective resources of society but variable in that the collective resources of societies differ. I'm not saying I buy into this, but I think it's interesting to think through the problems if it were the case. The problems would actually be I think, not as bad as people imagine. The biggest fear of course, is that if morals aren't "Objective" then they could be anything. Of course logically speaking, any given number of things could be different than they are, but they aren't. Without some articulation on the driving force which would make them be anything, then I see no serious reason to accept that accusation blindly. It's logically possible for there to be 100 foot tall spiders but there aren't. And if the hermeneutical point holds that cultures don't readily translate into each other, then it does no good to say, "Aha! See, those guys over there get to cheat on their wives so I'm going to be one of them!" Since one wouldn't be thinking through the "cheating" in context of the other society's thought structures, then it would be impossible to pull off. So the egregious feats of reckless abandon in the name of technicalities aren't at least, pulled off trivially if a thought-through version of moral relativism holds.
Again, I'm not saying I believe all that. And even if I did, then I'd be willing to be a little whiggish and force my values on a society that has a tradition which looks an awful lot like child prostitution. At any rate, our desire for objective morality is rooted in our desire to have the greatest reasons for taking morals seriously in our own lives as well as in other's. But there is also a pull from moral relativism to be practical. I mean, even if we're not prepared to view acts within ancient cultures as moral, most of us are at least willing to allow for mitigating circumstances. What for instance, can we really consider to be a reasonable expectation for a Neanderthal? For only the most naive is negotiation out of the question, and they are the ones who will typically have some kind of silly notion that the Bible has enforced a consistent objective ethic on man from the dawn of time. Which is of course an outright laugh. Moral positions within the Bible and within the cultures which have relied on the Bible have been as variable in their ethics as just about anyone else. The reality of the situation is that we should all be a little confused about what's right and what's wrong. Because if there is a danger that relativistic assumptions will undermine the continuity of good, there is also the danger that absolutist assumptions will tempt us into immortalizing bad. In the balance I'd guess the latter has historically been the greater problem, despite the vivid imaginations of the religious right.
A final comment on relativism. One of the thought-terminating arguments against the very consideration of relativism is that - as virtually every Christian on the net who's never studied ethics for more than five minutes can tell you - relativism is self-refuting. If all is relative, then so is the utterance, "all is relative." Of course, all we have to do to fix that is to say, "all is relative except for this." In any case, this is more of a problem within logic regarding self-reference that unfortunately reveals itself in language use generally. Self-reference is a significant problem where naive set-theoretic assumptions reign (where there are no restrictions on what can belong to a set) and so logicians try to find ways to plug that hole. The most well-known fix being Bertrand Russell's theory of types which essentially just disallows self-reference. I'm not arguing that Russell's controversial idea is true, that's well beyond my qualifications to even have an opinion, but I'm just pointing out that the work to fix problems in logic fortuitously salvages relativism from being self-refuting. The point is that true or false, the suggestion to delimit the sentence in question isn't just an ad hoc ideologically driven one set out to make the truth anything we want.