Liberalism and relativism make necessary bedfellows

Elsewhere on this page the frontiers of liberalism are explored, so this post will delve into its heartland. I take relativism to be one of the principles of liberalism, although it is not very often mentioned explicitly. Relativism is a controversial approach to ethics, as it questions the existence of a universal set of ethical rules. Briefly, it means that if person A holds one ethical opinion, and person B another, it is impossible to determine which opinion is correct, as both persons have an equal right to be correct. Relativism claims, therefore, that it is all-right to hold a certain opinion, but it is wrong to condemn anyone for having another opinion. It is the direct opposite of bigotry.

While this sounds appealing, it is only too easy to come up with lots of examples that most people will find very hard to accept as ethically correct—just think of any atrocity wherein the perpetrator was convinced he was in the right. Some thinkers believe that therefore relativism is not a satisfactory ethical theory: it fails to condemn some acts that surely must be wrong. These judgements, however, are often made from a certain point of view, often one that does not itself contain the norms of the society or individual whose act(s) must be wrong. The testing of an ethical theory by means of certain acts that must be wrong, implies determining beforehand which acts must be wrong: before testing relativism as an ethical theory, some other ethical theory (or just instinct) determined the required outcomes for relativism to pass the test. This hardly seems fair. Besides this, there are countless examples also of individuals who turned out to be right, even though they were reviled by their environment.

(In order not to clutter this page with philosophical ramblings, this post will continue as comment on itself.)