Okay, I had to post something there. One point which seems to be routinely overlooked by both sides of this argument is that it's easy for moral absolutists to do end-runs around their "absolute" statements by custom-defining the labels. Maybe I'm just more sensitive to this issue than most because I've read so many cautionary tales which turned on the precise interpretation of a word or a request, but I notice things like the Eowyn surprise! ("No man can kill me!" "I am no man!" Shakespeare did it too, of course, in Macbeth.)
The relativism of moral absolutists is to say, for example, "Murder is wrong -- but this killing is not murder." Which is common sense, and the way every successful society has worked since the dawn of time -- but it puts the lie to their absolutism. They just express it differently.
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Date: 2005-01-21 02:52 am (UTC)The relativism of moral absolutists is to say, for example, "Murder is wrong -- but this killing is not murder." Which is common sense, and the way every successful society has worked since the dawn of time -- but it puts the lie to their absolutism. They just express it differently.