On Moral Absolutism…
Wow. This one is an amazing thing to think about. Many, on both sides of the aisle, believe in this whether or not they claim to. Many associate the liberal left with moral relativism, but their token issues and the main emotional brunt of their social justice platform makes an assumption of absolute morals of one form or another.
Let’s look at an example. Many in the left feel that many states in the Islamic world violate women’s rights on a regular basis. States like Saudi Arabia and Iran would be excellent examples.
Saudi Arabia goes so far as to ban women from driving cars. While this example is a bit exteme, its intuitive that women’s rights groups in the US have a significant problem with this. They view it as a right’s violation and a severe injustice - which it is, in the US. Intuition also tells us that these type of moral or societal criticisms rely on some concept of moral absolutes or another for their rationalization. This strikes me as bizarre, given the general acceptance of moral relativism among the left.
Furthermore, if a country is to have laws that do not align, more or less, with the views and general morality of the population being governed, they must rule and enforce these laws with an iron fist or become weak and unstable. This is the basic rationale behind democracy, I believe. Basicly put, the best type of government for any given state is one whos laws and morality align with the beliefs and moral ontology of the population. States who have and enforce laws that are in opposition to the wishes of the masses must have some sort of oppressive mechanism by which this unjust (here I use a cenception of justice that is based on the general belief set of the population it is applied to) form of government perpetuates itself in order to not become unstable and vulnerable. So, in effect, when the US left cries out for women’s rights in these type of states, because these rights do not align with the general belief set of the population, they are crying out for an oppressive government to step in and enforce these types of laws with an iron fist, as that would be the only reasonable means by which a government can foist laws viewed as undersirebale on any given population.
The right is more generally accepted as backing moral absolutism. While this is not an across-the-board type of thing, many on the right hold Christian and constitution-based morality as being absolute, metaphyscally objective, something stronger than the type morals that fluctuate based on the society they are applied to. This is necessarily a bizarre stance since the basic idea of any type of morality being entailed in the metaphysical mechanisms present in the universe is a strange and difficult stance to defend. Furthermore, the idea that the redactors who penned the old and new testaments and the founding fathers of the US were metaphysical savants who had access to objective truths, an impossibility for huamnkind, is vulnerable to attack. Obviously its clear that the ‘realists’ of Bush Sr.’s administration probably do not endorse objective morality, but the hawkish nature of the current administration and the moral superiority assumed in the spreading of US democracy on the world, and the ‘idealist’ foreign policy camp, clearly rely on intuitions derived from the chauvinistic idea that not only does our constitution align with certain objective metaphysical truths, our morals do the same.
So, despite the bizarre arguments needed to back up moral absolutism, a majority of the politicians on both sides of the aisle in current American politics seem to have an implicit belief in this type of morality. Is this intuituve? Are we simply being emotionally manipulated into believing with them? What’s going on here?
is at odds with your statements. We’re not trying to push “our values” on others… we’re trying to let them decide their “own values” without a dictator deciding them for the populace.
