Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air by Beckwith Francis J. & Koukl Gregory

Author:Beckwith, Francis J. & Koukl, Gregory [Beckwith, Francis J.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: PHI005000, REL028000, REL067030
ISBN: 9781585582099
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 1998-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Part 4

Relativism and Public Policy

11

Relativism and the Law

Education is not the only sphere of public life that has been affected by moral relativism. In this chapter we turn to the sphere of law and especially to how relativism has allowed our public culture and the courts to dismiss cavalierly those views that do not assume it.

Those who employ relativistic premises when arguing about these issues do so by appealing to personal subjective relativism (or I Say Relativism). As we have seen, this view holds that because there is no objective good, the state or community should allow all people to decide for themselves what is good; goodness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Proponents of this form of relativism appeal to fairness and personal autonomy to justify their position.

These people claim that it would not be fair for the state or community to judge one person’s lifestyle choice as good and another’s as bad. They see any such judgment as a violation of the individual’s personal autonomy to choose whatever he or she believes is “the good. ”

One could say that fairness and personal autonomy are “objective moral norms” and that people who appeal to these concepts are therefore not moral relativists. But this would be missing the point. Relativists are not supporting fairness and autonomy as universally true prescriptions; rather they are putting them forth as instrumental goods that the state must practice so that individuals can pursue their own personal desires—that is, to choose what they feel is good. John Rawls, the most influential contemporary philosopher of liberal political thought, has presented a sophisticated defense of such a view. [1]

Rawlsian Principles of Justice

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