Moral Relativism

It is human nature to believe that one’s own ideas of right and wrong are the absolute standard and that anyone who doesn’t agree is a moral relativist.

The very definition of moral relativism — a view in which moral standards are not absolute or universal, instead emerging from varied social customs, laws, religious beliefs, etc — can be interpreted to mean that everyone, even those who believe that their own personal moral standards are the absolute, is a moral relativist.

Since ethics is usually defined as a set of principles of right conduct and morals are concerned with the judgment of good and evil as they apply to human behavior and character, whether some morals are absolute or relative comes down to the question of objective versus subjective views of right and wrong.

This means that so-called moral absolutists — whose heads are often so swollen with the intoxicating effects of sanctimoniously minding everyone else’s business that they cannot tell the difference between ethics and morals — are actually preaching ethics rather than morality, which makes them just another bunch of moral relativists, everything being relative, of course.

Indeed, the semantics of these philosophical constrcts can make your head spin, but that’s nothing compared to the way that some people have –rightly or wrongly — put them into action in order to validate their own sins as righteous and virtuous while serving their agendas of controlling, via secular legislation, those natural human needs and desires, which according to their relative ethics are wrong/evil/immoral.

Those who would rather reflect upon the specks in their neighbors’ eyes rather than the logs in their own express a pious contempt for the notion that the only moral absolute with which most humans can freely and peacfully concur is that those actions and behaviors which cause harm to come to others are wrong/evil/immoral and everything else is a matter of cultural, religious and personal ethics, principles and values.

I submit that these busybodies cannot/will not accept that very narrow definition of moral absolutism because such an admission would mean that they would have to give up the distraction of judging other peoples’ sins to reflect upon the moral relativism of their own sins.