Relativity vs. Relativism

Before I start this post, I must apologize for the 2 week delay in posts. We have had a flu bug in the house, and our weekends have been busy. My hope is to publish one post a week, every weekend.  I will try to stick to that, but occasionally things come up that delay publishing.  The saying of Peter Kreeft comes to mind, when asked what the best book he ever wrote was, he answered, "The one I didn't write when my kids were little."  My blog may follow that, but I will try to be here once a week.

With the pope stepping down, one of his most famous sayings has been on my mind as of late. At the funeral oration of John Paul the Great, then Cardinal Ratzinger coined the phrase, "the dictatorship of relativism."  Today we are going to look at relativism vs. relativity.  I am going to argue that there is relativity in morality, but not relativism.  Is this just a sophistical play on words?  We shall see.

First, what is relativism?  Numerous of my previous posts have highlighted the quiddity or "whatness" of relativism.  It is our dominant social ethic, coming from the elites and spoon fed to us daily by a sycophantic media preying upon our desiring element.  In a nutshell, relativism is the claim that there is no moral truth, that actions are socially constructed, and the rightness or wrongness of actions is impossible to determine. What is right depends on personal preference, i.e. do I think it is right? Obviously, on a social scale this is a very dangerous ethos as it realizes itself in the domination of the weak by the strong.  Basically, relativism says there is no right and wrong; nothing is absolutely impermissable if it feels right.  Obviously, when talking about actions or theories of actions, you really have to involve all of the powers of soul, things like sex drive, food consumption, sight, hearing, growth, nutrition, etc. all contribute to the conversation.

The question that ethics ask are, "What is good for the human being to do? Is there such a thing as good?  If so, is it pleasure or something else?" Many wish to associate what is good with pleasure, but as Plato questions, are there pleasures that are not good? If so, pleasure cannot be the good.  Following Aristotle and Aquinas, though, we can say that pleasure is concomitant with good, and when someone is truly good they have the best taste in pleasures.  What does this mean?

For Aristotle, the virtuous man is the happiest man and virtue is something that needs to be lived. The virtuous man, in light of his virtuous character, knows what the best pleasures are and therefore chooses what is truly good for himself.  Virtue, on Aristotle's definition, is a state of character that consists in the choice of a mean as made by the practically wise man.  In other words, virtue is a rather permanent state in someone's character that has been developed through practice.  They practice that by continuosly choosing the mean in ethical situations, and it is the practically wise man who consistently chooses the mean.  What is the mean?

We will use the virtue of temperance as our example.  The virtue of temperance has as its object (that which it aims at or its goal) pleasures of touch.  Basically, temperance involves sex and food, as these are the two pleasures of touch.  The temperate man will, through habit or practice, always choose what is a temperate action relative to him.   So, Milo the wrestler (Aristotle's example) has a different mean than a 100 pound woman.  Milo needs to eat 10,000 calories per day to maintain his physical conditioning to have the ability to compete.  If a 100 pound woman were to eat that, she would fall into the excess of over indulgence, because relative to her and the context in which she lives, 10,000 calories per day would be excess.  You and I can look and say that an NFL athlete who consumes 10,000 calories per day is not acting immorally, while anyone else, not involved in physical training, could be said to be immoral for eating that way.  This is what I am calling relativity.

Relativity in ethics simply means that there is a right way to act in moral situations, but what that right way to act is depends upon the context in which it is realized.  This is to be distinguished from relativism, which says that there is no right way to act in moral situations, all that is right is what I feel is right.  Reason easily says otherwise. This is why we find it morally repugnant when people are morbidly obese, it is a lifestyle of over indulgence; a lifestyle of sin that has gotten them there.  We wouldn't have that innate reaction to sloth or overindulgence if reason didn't tell us that this person was acting immorally.

The dictatorship of relativism, then, tells us we cannot make judgment calls in ethics because no one ethical system is superior rationally to any other.  Some people do things their own way, and others do it theirs, no reason to judge.  Except that we do and there is a reason we do.  It's called the natural law, which is the ultimate ground, or context in which human beings can make judgments about what is moral or what is immoral.

In short, virtue is realized in a context, as our wrestler and small woman demonstrate above.  The ultimate context we have is the natural law as it governs how every single human being behaves. Not in the Kantian sense of an external tyrant dictating all that we do, but an internal prompting that draws us to what is true and good.  We can judge other cultures based on whether their actions contradict the natural law.  We'll discuss the precepts of the natural law at a later date.

It is clear that context matters in morality, as was shown above with temperance.  We can make that same claim with the other virtues.  Is it courage that drives a man to save his comrades in war?  Or is it something else? It depends on the context.  If he jumps in foolishly, thinking that he can win because he's overwhelmed his enemy every time, but then realizes he is overwhelmed, and runs scared, then it wasn't courage, but expectation of success that drove him.  We can do this for the other virtues as well.

So, for Aristotle, and I think he's right, virtue is realized as a mean. So temperance is the mean between the excess of overindulgence, and the defect of insensibility.  What is over indulgence, and insensible, depends upon the context; but there is sin for all of us.  Choosing what is temperate is realizable for all of us, again relative to the context.

In Catholic circles, this means we ought to try to hit the mean through communication with God.  We see in a mirror darkly, but then face to face.  Now, what is right is sometimes cloudy, but virtue theory at least gives us a map in which we can aim at the mean.  In shooting golf, if you hit the green and not a hole in one, you're still doing pretty well. The same goes for us.  The next question is how to be virtuous?  Find someone who is virtuous and mimick them.  Or, simply think as Christ taught us to think, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  This simple phrase will make you practically wise in the gamut of the infinite activity we find ourselves in. 

So I'll let you be the judge, relativity vs. relativism.  Which coincides more with our natural knowledge of right and wrong?  It is as if our morality copies the very universe in which we exist. Einstein's Theory of Relativity says that the measurement of quantities are relative to the velocities of the observers.  Measurements of morality are relative to the contexts they are realized in. Yet there is moral right and wrong.  We all know it inherently; it's time we start thinking and living that way.