De la relativité des jugements moraux

Dialogue ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-97
Author(s):  
Pascal Ludwig
Keyword(s):  
Moral Relativism ◽  
Ethical Relativism ◽  
Moral Statement

ABSTRACT: In the first part of this paper, I criticize the indexical interpretation of meta-ethical relativism. According to the indexical interpretation, the content of a moral statement varies with the context of its utterance. I argue that such an interpretation is not empirically plausible, and that it cannot explain the seriousness of radical moral disagreements. In the constructive part of the paper, I offer an alternative, minimalist interpretation of moral relativism, which is based upon an analogy with the case of the relativity of motion.

Moral relativism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David B. Wong
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Relativism ◽  
Ethical Relativism ◽  
Moral Diversity ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
Normative Relativism ◽  
The Subject

Often the subject of heated debate, moral relativism is a cluster of doctrines concerning diversity of moral judgment across time, societies and individuals. Descriptive relativism is the doctrine that extensive diversity exists and that it concerns values and principles central to moralities. Meta-ethical relativism is the doctrine that there is no single true or most justified morality. Normative relativism is the doctrine that it is morally wrong to pass judgment on or to interfere with the moral practices of others who have adopted moralities different from one’s own. Much debate about relativism revolves around the questions of whether descriptive relativism accurately portrays moral diversity and whether actual diversity supports meta-ethical and normative relativism. Some critics also fear that relativism can slide into nihilism.

Buffalo Crusaders: The Sacred Struggle for America’s Last Wild and Pure Herd

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Farrell
Keyword(s):  
Brucella Abortus ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Moral Relativism ◽  
Religious Conflict ◽  
Field Campaign ◽  
Activist Group ◽  
Religious Dimensions ◽  
Post Hoc

This chapter examines the bitter, long-lasting, and sometimes violent dispute over the Yellowstone bison herd—America's only remaining genetically pure and free-roaming herd, which once numbered more than 30 million but was exterminated down to a mere 23 single animals. This intractable issue hinges on current scientific disagreements about the biology and ecology of the disease brucellosis (Brucella abortus). But in recent years, a more radical, grassroots, and direct action activist group called the Buffalo Field Campaign (BFC) has found success by shifting the focus of the debate away from science, toward the deeper religious dimensions of the issue. The chapter shows how the infusion of the conflict with moral and spiritual feeling has brought to the fore deeper questions that ultimately needed to be answered, thus making this a public religious conflict as much as a scientific one, sidestepping rabbit holes of intractability. It observes the ways in which BFC activists engaged in a phenomenon called moral and religious “muting.” This has theoretical implications for understanding how certain elements of culture (e.g., individualism and moral relativism) can organize and pattern others—especially in post hoc explanations of religiously motivated activism.

scholarly journals The Discarded Image and the Debunked Tao: Objective Value in C.S. Lewis’ Medieval Model and His Critique of Modernity †

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 597
Author(s):  
Yuxiao Su
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Relativism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Parallel Study ◽  
The Status ◽  
Implicit Belief ◽  
Objective Value ◽  
Medieval Model ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Spiritual Resource

This paper considers C.S. Lewis’ “doctrine of objective value” in two of his major works, The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image. Lewis uses the Chinese name Tao, albeit with an incomplete understanding of its origins, for the objective worldview. The paper argues that Tao, as an explicit theme of The Abolition of Man, is also a determining undercurrent in The Discarded Image. In the former work, Tao is what Lewis wants to defend and restore against twentieth-century secular ideologies, which Lewis condemns as infected with “the poison of subjectivism”. In the latter work, where Lewis presents one of the best accounts of the European medieval model of the Universe, objective value (the Tao in Lewis’ argument) underlies both how the model has been shaped, and how Lewis, as a medievalist, accounts for and draws upon it as an intellectual and spiritual resource. The purpose of this parallel study is to show that Lewis’ explication of the Tao in The Abolition of Man, which is a “built-in”, implicit belief in The Discarded Image, provides a critique of tendencies towards the subjectivism prevalent in Lewis’ lifetime. These tendencies can be traced into the moral relativism, pluralism and reductionism of the twenty-first century, giving Lewis’ work the status of twentieth-century prophecy.

scholarly journals Human Rights and Cultural Identity

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon John-Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Culturally Sensitive ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Ethical Relativism ◽  
Small Core ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Universal Human Rights

Abstract Universal human rights and particular cultural identities, which are relativistic by nature, seem to stand in conflict with each other. It is commonly suggested that the relativistic natures of cultural identities undermine universal human rights and that human rights might compromise particular cultural identities in a globalised world. This article examines this supposed clash and suggests that it is possible to frame a human rights approach in such a way that it becomes the starting point and constraining framework for all non-deficient cultural identities. In other words, it is possible to depict human rights in a culturally sensitive way so that universal human rights can meet the demands of a moderate version of meta-ethical relativism which acknowledges a small universal core of objectively true or false moral statements and avers that, beyond that small core, all other moral statements are neither objectively true nor false.

Individualisation as a social-cultural process and morality

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 11-33
Author(s):  
Janusz Mariański
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Moral Relativism ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Cultural Process ◽  
Self Development ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Moral Choices ◽  
Individual Human

In this article, the issue of structural individualisation, which is one of the results of social modernisation, is adopted as the subject-matter. In the processes of individualisation, it is, first and foremost, the importance of an individual human being and matters relevant to their life, including the obligation to make constant choices in all the aspects of life, that is placed emphasis upon. In the aspect of values, the process of individualisation means transfer from values seen as responsibilities (related to duties) to values connected with self-fulfilment (self-development). The consequence of individualisation is the significant changes in the realm of morality: departing from traditional moral values and standards, permissivism and moral relativism, the destruction of normativity, and the secularisation of morality. On the other hand, it creates the opportunity to determine one's own moral choices and shapean autonomous moral personality.

Benedict de Spinoza’s Virtue

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
Columbus N. Ogbujah ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Core Values ◽  
Ethical Relativism ◽  
Ethical Egoism ◽  
Absolute Truth ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Seminal Roots

Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677) was about the most radical of the early modern philosophers who developed a unique metaphysics that inspired an intriguing moral philosophy, fusing insights from ancient Stoicism, Cartesian metaphysics, Hobbes and medieval Jewish rationalism. While helping to ground the Enlightenment, Spinoza’s thoughts, against the intellectual mood of the time, divorced transcendence from divinity, equating God with nature. His extremely naturalistic views of reality constructed an ethical structure that links the control of human passion to virtue and happiness. By denying objective significance to things aside from human desires and beliefs, he is considered an anti-realist; and by endorsing a vision of reality according to which everyone ought to seek their own advantage, he is branded ethical egoist. This essay identified the varying influences of Spinoza’s moral anti-realism and ethical egoism on post-modernist thinkers who decried the “naïve faith” in objective and absolute truth, but rather propagated perspective relativity of reality. It recognized that modern valorization of ethical relativism, which in certain respects, detracts from the core values of the Enlightenment, has its seminal roots in his works.

scholarly journals Pluralism Out Of The Sources Of Judaism: Religious Pluralism Without Relativism

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphael Jospe
Keyword(s):  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Moral Relativism ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Jewish Scholar ◽  
Epistemological Relativism ◽  
Ways Of Life

Jewish theology is compatible with religious pluralism, based on the paradigm of the Jewish obligation to live in accordance with the commandments of the Torah while accepting the legitimacy of other ways of life in accordance with the paradigm of the universal “seven commandments of the children of Noah.” Jospe here answers two challenges to this thesis, one, voiced by Christian theologians, that pluralism equals relativism, and a second, voiced by the Jewish scholar, Menachem Kellner, that there are no sources for pluralism in Jewish tradition and that pluralism itself makes no sense. In presenting his arguments, Jospe invokes a wide range of ancient, medieval and modern thinkers, probing the theological possibilities for pluralism within Jewish tradition and its boundaries with relativism. In doing so, he argues that one should differentiate between moral relativism, a non-negotiable category, and epistemological relativism, where there is room for compromise.

Moral Relativism and Moral Expressivism

2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 538-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Berit Brogaard
Keyword(s):  
Moral Relativism
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