I believe that we should reject the idea of moral relativism for several reasons. All of these reasons can be summed up in the overly generalized, not really accurate, statement: No one actually believes it.

Now of course any statement that makes this broad of a claim cannot be accurate but the preceding statement isn’t actually as broad as it sounds. The truth is that true moral relativists are hard to find. This is because true moral relativism is quite a horrifying thing. It requires an almost unbelievable amount of narcissism.

As previously stated, moral relativism is the idea that morality is not a real thing and that we have just been conditioned to believe what we currently believe about right and wrong. The problem is that the vast majority of people who claim to believe this actually believe that there is one absolute good that should be elevated above the rest. The most common, and perhaps most noble version of relative moral relativism is that we should do what is best for society as a whole. It is not the only maxim however, appeals have been made to survival of humanity, progressing the human race, promoting the strong by eliminating the weak. A true relativist realizes that morality, if up to society, is really up to the individual. He would always do whatever he wanted regardless of the effect on society or survival of the human race.

Some say a true relativist would want to promote the survival of the species in order to increase their chances of survival but why should he care if anyone survives besides him? Very few people would be ok with essentially sacrificing the good of the whole human race in order to live the way they wanted, but the moral relativist has no grounds to condemn such behavior. To go a step further, the moral relativist cannot claim that there even is a good of humanity.

Most moral relativists, as stated above, are really absolutists who have just chosen another maxim to live their lives by than that of the current status quo. But that, argues the relative relativist, is the exact point, our maxims have changed over time where once we valued piety we now value individual liberties. We once valued combat ability but now we value argumentative ability. But a change in what a society values most does not necessarily mean a change in what a society sees as good. Piety is just a high level of integrity, combat ability is just an intense way of testing strength, individual liberty is merely saying to treat everyone fairly or to put it another way “Do unto others as you would have done unto you”, and argumentative ability is intelligence, wisdom, and tact. It may be true, maybe, that the amount of value we put on these things changes over time but the things themselves never change. Compare (if you will forgive me the cliche) apples and oranges. Apples may be worth more than oranges one day and less the next but no one is claiming that there is no such thing as fruit, merely that we value one over the other and someday for whatever reason we will value the other.

Another issue, and what I consider to be the most damning argument, is that a moral relativist on some level has to equate all moral actions. If good and bad is merely up to society then whatever society says goes. Meaning that in the 1800’s southern US, slavery was good and anyone who opposed it, say a slave, was a moral delinquent. So if promoting the good of society is something to be strived for then, at that point, slave owners should be lauded where slaves are condemned.

Most people are not this extreme however. Most relativists would claim that you could not call the slave immoral for going against what society said because there is no such thing as immoral. Now we have already established that most people do not think this way, even if they claim to, but let’s say for the sake of argument that they did. If a person truly believed this then he would say that all moral actions have the same value. What a slave owner did and what Harriet Tubman did are equally morally valuable, the same would go for saving the lives of a bunch of children and murdering those exact same children. There would be no moral scale, all things would be permissible. To a true moral relativist this would not be a problem, but even a true moral relativist would have to admit this is not the way most people think.

On a side note the moral outrage that we are experiencing in our culture at present is not a result of a return to moral absolutism but instead a result of increased embracement of moral relativism. Anger over a moral injustice can be very useful, a mom protecting her child from a dangerous person, Martin Luther King Jr. fighting for civil rights, even Jesus used anger to right wrongs. But these people knew how to be slow to anger and only use as much as was necessary when the time came (with the possible exception of the mother, don’t mess with a mother’s child). On the other hand you have outrage, which by definition is an extreme form of anger, it does not stem from a desire to see justice, but instead a desire to satisfy one's individual discomfort. Note that a frequently outraged person often does not care about injustices that don’t affect them or that wouldn’t get them much attention. Outrage demands that we meet the desire of the outraged at once and does not allow for the possibility of the outraged party being wrong. Even if the outraged party is right to be angry, their method of combating immorality is concerned less with fixing the injustice than it is giving the angry person what they want. This sort of thing is indicative of a mindset that says my idea of good is just as good as anyone else’s

Nothing I have said so far has been very revolutionary. The ideas I have presented above have been around for centuries and are so basic that it doesn’t take much philosophy to reach the same conclusion. Many non-philosophers, like me, have come to these conclusions very quickly. Yet many of them still subscribe to relativistic morals. This is because while almost no one is a true moral relativist there is a growing number of people who are intellectual relativists. A large amount of people have come to the conclusion that the only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know anything for sure. This comes, I believe, from an underdeveloped idea fed by an intense desire to live the lives we want, not the lives we should. This idea that we can’t know anything is specious at best.
For one, if stated as stated above, the speaker is admitting that something is in fact knowable. But of course the aforementioned statement is really just a quaint way of broadly summing up the actual idea at hand. If the actual idea is that nothing is knowable then the only thing we have to do to disprove this theory is prove that at least one thing is knowable. If one thing is knowable then all things are knowable.

When searching for a knowable thing one might be tempted to use facts such as the sky is blue, or one plus one equals two, but a post knowledge thinker would merely claim that the only reason that we say the sky is blue is because of our environment it may well be possible that there are people somewhere in the world who have the same understanding of blue but see the sky as bright yellow, we don’t know that this isn’t the case. Or in the case of one plus one equals two, because numbers are given their value by us, we can’t truly know if this is the way the universe works or if we made a mistake in numerical value. The key, I believe, lies in the pithy little saying from earlier. If nothing is knowable then, “the only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know anything for sure”, cannot be true. We cannot know that nothing is knowable if nothing is knowable. The phrase “We can’t know anything for sure”, is either true or false and we know that it cannot possibly be true. Therefore it must be false, there is no third option.

So there it is, something that we know for sure. There is no theoretical way around this and if we know this one thing then we can theoretically learn everything. All questions have answers and we know that we can answer one of these questions. So we must necessarily have the potential to know the answers to the rest. For the only obstacle in our way was the idea that we couldn’t know anything and we’ve just cleared it.

Now you may be wondering what any of this has to do with moral relativism. The reason I went through this whole process is that the modern moral relativist does not claim that there is no such thing as morality, but instead that we cannot know what is right or wrong, as if that’s a legitimate reason to abandon morality. We have just proven that it is theoretically possible to know what is right and wrong, but how. If one looks back at the history of civilization one can see values that transcend the ages from the ancient Babylonians to modern day Americans.

Essentially every culture has valued loyalty, integrity, strength, fairness, respect, honesty and more. True there were cultures that raped and pillaged but I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that you would not find one that believed they were helping the people they attacked. Certainly none of these raiding cultures would want this to happen to their own people. Even pirates had laws that they followed.

The transcendence of these morals prove to us that not only does morality exist but that it is possible to know it’s will. We may not always get it right, take slavery for example, but morality very clearly can and should be studied and promoted. If we continue down the path we are on, good people will cease to exist, humanity will be fully self serving, and if this mindset is followed to its end, humanity will eat itself. This appeal to moral “freedom” is really an appeal to survival of the fittest. Many people in America claim to promote progress and yet favor moral relativism. But if we adopted this mindset then the powerful would rule everyone and the weak would have no chance. We would actually be going in the opposite direction of where we wanted to be headed. Think of it this way, imagine that there was an idea that said there really is no such thing as science, and that that idea took hold. Would we not expect scientific progress to stop? In the same way, if our goal is to progress morality the only way forward is through absolutes.

Moral relativism claims that morality is merely a whim of ours, so anyone who was powerful enough could impose their whims on us and we would have no basis to condemn them for doing so. Moral absolutism, however, claims that there is a moral law that all must follow, no matter whether they are a king, an activist group, or even a god. Absolute morality frees us from the yoke of the oppressor. We now have grounds to fight him. No matter how powerful a man gets there is always something more powerful which we can cling to and fight from. We can rally people who are being oppressed or mistreated, but how do we rally people if oppression and mistreatment do not actually exist? If ever we hope to achieve moral freedom for all then the bar must be standard and impartial and this can never be achieved by relative ethics.