Relativism is the first topic on the OCR syllabus. Truth is, it’s one of the hardest to pin down.

Ever since the relative/absolute distinction was introduced it has been (and remains) a confusing oversimplification. This is because allegedly absolute theories like Natural Law are actually more relativistic than is often conceded. For example, one of the five primary precepts in traditional Natural Law ethics is “worshipping God”, which is mysteriously thought to be absolute (despite the obvious decline in such worship in our century).

Yet this is redefined by a Papal document as “appreciation of beauty”. This makes more sense as the sense of awe in our human natures doesn’t seem to translate easily into reverence for a deity. The supposed absolute has been relativised! (Click here to read the document)

So how can we disentangle the muddle of relativism?

The easiest definition to grasp is cultural relativism. This form of relativism describes the state of affairs in different cultures or tribes, both in history and at the present time. People have different values and customs and beliefs. Ruth Benedict the anthropologist declares “morality is a set of socially approved habits”.

But this begs a question of interest to normative ethics (that is, ethics that tries to define goodness as embodying a certain value, or giving it content). If goodness is a general term, like the word “colour” then exactly what makes up colours or forms of the good? What is the red, blue, yellow, purple of goodness? Are these things or states of affairs which we can describe accurately? Is there a universal form of the good?

This is really a meta-ethical question because the great debate in meta-ethics (those going beyond ethics to the study of what the word good actually means) is the question – does goodness have certain observable features? For example, a utilitarian asks us to observe/calculate/measure the happiness consequences and then choose that course of action which maximises happiness for the greatest number of people.

In a simple way we could, for example, ask people to vote for a Wispa Bar versus a Mars Bar and count the votes. We call this prefer ence utilitarian ism – and it’s fairly clear how this could work (scroll down the Blog section of this site and you’ll find my fairly damning assessment of Singer’s version of this which I find incoherent and inconsistent),

However, one of the ironies of this debate is that when the author J.L Mackie¹ declares “there is no objective truth” he is actually making an absolute meta-ethical statement – he is saying in effect that any attempt to find a shared value is doomed to failure (a bit like a flat-earther laughing at an explorer who believes the world is round and thereby trying to halt the exploration in its tracks).

Many of us don’t think the debate should be closed off this quickly. And to make things more confusing, Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics was downgraded in the new specification from “a form of relativism” to a form of Christian ethics, because strictly speaking it is a half-way house between pure relativism (existentialism for example) and more legalistic, rule-based theories (again, we would need to study each carefully to see just how absolute they really are – see my comments on natural law above!). Situation ethics has one supreme non-negotiable absolute at its centre – agape love, and so cannot be described as “pure relativism”.

What we can say, and perhaps need to stress, is that Joseph Fletcher describes his own theory of Situation Ethics as relativism, because every value derived from the very general principle of agape love, such as generosity to a beggar I find under the arch on my way to my favourite coffee shop in town, is a value that only makes sense relative to a specific situation – and no two situations are ever exactly the same.

So perhaps we can say the term relativism looks a number of different ways and we need to be clear which way we are looking when we use it.

It can look at circumstances or consequences and say in effect “no value of goodness makes sense unless earthed in reality and situations or consequences”; it look the other way, at the origin of values – a cultural perspective if you like, and then we can argue, as the relativist Mackie does, that values come out of habits of life (not, that values or beliefs produce habits of life).

And as well as looking backwards at the origin of vales and forwards at the application of values, relativism can also look meta-ethically at the meaning of “good”, or at the question, “does it make sense to imply that goodness equates to universal truth?”

To this question the relativist answers “no”, and in doing so is very close to subjectivism and emotivism – the very stuff of much of the debate in ethics in the last century.

Are values like reflections, like the relfections of this boathouse taken on lake Windermere at dawn this summer.  Or are values like the boathouse itself, things of unchanging substance which have objective, empirical existence?

^{1. Ethics inventing Right and Wrong – see the section on this site on Relativism and Absolutism for a handout discussing Mackie’s views}