The riots this week in Libya and other Arab countries in protest against a film The Innocence of Islam illustrate tragically how the debate between absolutism and relativism is everywhere in world affairs.  For in truth, it was one set of absolutists in the US who have provoked another set of absolutists in the Middle East into disagreement by violence. 

But what do these terms mean?  Pope Benedict has spoken of the “tyranny of relativism”, the idea that the view that there is no absolute truth is itself an absolute view used to denigrate absolutists.  Yet both terms, “absolute” and “relative’ are ambiguous and seem to mean at least three things.

• “Every human shares some common values” (absolutist) versus “no-one can agree about common values” (relativist) –  the question of universality.
• Values depend on an external reality (for example, God), and are in this sense objective (out there already) “absolutist” versus values depend on culture and society – they are contingent on the circumstances in which we are born (relativist).  They are in this sense subjective and “up-to-me”.  This is the question of where values come from.
• Goodness and badness only make sense with reference to a situation or set of circumstances (relativist) versus goodness is completely independent of circusmtances (absolutist).  This is the question of how values are applied.

The first statement, that values are shared universally seems to be an empirical statement which could in principle be proved true or false.  For example, we could examine the research into tribes done by anthropolgists like Colin Turnbull.  But on the surface, it seems unlikely that we can prove universal values.  After all, just think of how differently women have been treated, or black people, or slaves in different cultures (even today’s cultures) – it is difficult to argue for a universal view of human rights.

The second statement, that values depend on an external reality like God is I think a faith-statement rather than an empirical one.  The issue here is whether we can subject such statements to reason and the force of logical argument.  Does the Roman Catholic view on contraception make rational sense?  Is the Islamic faith willing to be subject to rational review and scrutiny by reason (I am not suggesting the above film does this – it almost certainly does not, as my opening paragraph makes clear).  The historical problem has been that absolutists have too often resorted to violence or burning or torturing to establish the truth of their claims.  But surely both absolute and relativist must agree that moral behaviour involves conversation, not violence, and so the very method of people killing and burning condemns them, irrespective of their religion.

And here we have an interesting conundrum.  Is the absolutist view inevitably authoritarian, based on a leadership’s view of what God says for example?  And is the relativist’s view inevitably democratic, whereby people vote on whether abortion should be allowed, or euthanasia legalised.  In this democratic process debate and evaluation are listened to and weighed and a majority view is taken.  Is morality anything more than a majority view?

And what of the third set of meanings?  Here the Kantian and the Utilitarian divide on the issue of whether circumstances and consequences affect the morality of things like killing and truth-telling.   It is ironic that the absolutists who claim they uphold the Koran and show their rage by murdering the American ambassador are actually the generalisers who move from “one American filmed this” to “every American thinks this” and fail to notice that in the world today it is the war waged between the absolutists, or as Richard Rorty preferred to call them, the fundamentalists with absolute certainty in the words of a higher power, which is causing so much misery and instability.

Colin Turnbull’s book The Mountain People provides a fascinating account of how one tribe abandons many of the values which you and I hold dearest – and seems to disintegrate as a result.