When Limitless Relativism Meets Limitless Moralism

[Chris]

Thoughts for the day.

When Limitless Relativism Meets Limitless Moralism

...In Nature’s Virtue, the Charles Patterson... argues that virtue has largely lost its luster. The Left identifies it with dogmatism and unjustified privilege; libertarians too often confuse it with an assault on individual freedom; postmodernists ridicule it for its “binary distinctions” and allegedly heavy-handed moral appeals; and deconstructionists see it as no more than “linguistic and social constructions” that justify the oppression of the weak by the strong. Feminists predictably identify virtue with male domination and the omnipresent threat of patriarchy.

As this brief recapitulation suggests, a good deal of angry moralism informs the academic and political assault on “nature’s virtue.” When virtue and morality are severed from their grounding in nature and reason, untethered moralism and political fanaticism are unleashed in the academy and the public square. We soon inhabit a Manichean social world where victims and victimizers are too readily identified by ideologues of all stripes. Nature’s virtue is thus a necessary antidote to both limitless moralism and limitless relativism, two threats to human self-understanding that increasingly converge in profoundly toxic ways....


...Pontuso draws on the recovery of the common-sense view of morality found in thinkers such as the American political scientist James Q. Wilson and the British analytical philosopher Philippa Foot. Both Wilson and Foot show how widespread, and natural, goodness is. Relativists need to come to terms with the reassuring fact that good behavior and virtue are much more widespread than generally recognized. As Pontuso teasingly remarks, “Most people do not abuse their parents, beat their children, steal from their local grocery store, wantonly destroy public property, or kick their pets.” Evil is palpably real but goodness—natural goodness, nature’s virtue—is much more ubiquitous than we sometimes acknowledge.


...The lesson is clear: Making judgments, and even fine-tuned moral evaluations, is a preeminently human activity. Solzhenitsyn added that this ability both to evaluate and comprehend morality and the full range of the virtues began when the “human race broke away from the animal world through thought and reason.” The conclusion is not hard to draw: Relativism betrays the most precious acquisition of human beings....

Reason's place, as Thomas Aquinas put it, not design but discovery, paraphrasing: Natural law is that much of God's law that we can discover through right reason.

[Mister D]

This reminds me a little of Chesterton when he argued that real progress entails making clear judgments and moral evaluations or, in a word, dogma.

[Chris]

“Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.”

― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics