Hi, H. Sorry it's taken me so long to respond. I thought that other posts would be very quick, but it turns out that some of them were rather involved, leaving me with little energy to respond here.
I'm also not very sure what your intentions for this thread are. Excuse me while I try to push it in various directions. There are a number of moral absolutists around (as well as, as you pointed out, a number of absolutists who think that they are relativists), and so I think the whole topic tends to be interesting.
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Just to let you know, it was Ratz which came up with the phrase dictatorship of relativism.
Heh. That pretty much is consistent with my thought that Bush isn't even original in his stupidity.
But the accusation is an old one -- I suspect that it predates Benny16 -- that the so-called relativists are intent on stifling peoples' free exercise of their moral conscience or to discuss right or wrong.
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I agree that in general a moral absolutist would be interested in imposing her moral code on others whenever possible. However, I don't think such a thing is necessarily true for all absolutists. I think a great many absolutists (although too few, it would seem, these days) would recognize that even if there is some objective standard for ethics, they don't necessarily know how to apply it in every single particular instance. I think that in many instances, an absolutist would allow for incomplete knowledge of what this standard is, and allow some leeway in allowing people to come to their various conclusions.
The other point is that simple self-interest would caution against setting up mechanisms for the state to impose moral standards out of fear that the other side can then use them when they come to power. I think this was an opinion held by many of the founders of our nation, that one must keep the powers of the state limited since one can never be sure just who was going to eventually come to power.
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In the same vein, being a relativist doesn't mean that one will accept
anyone's moral standard as equal value. One can realize that morals are subjective and none are more "correct" than any other, but nonetheless decide that some are worth fighting for.
I mean, to be completely "consistent" (in this simple-minded sense) with relativism, one would have to be completely apathetic. Yet I would still intervene if I saw someone attacking someone else on the street -- knowing that the attacker's moral sense that he's completely justified in his attack is no better or no worse than the victim's moral sense that the attack is unwarranted or my sense that this is wrong. I would still call the police if not physically intervene if necessary.
In the same way, even though I refuse to say my morality is somehow "better" or "superior" to others', I would still not refrain from putting some restrictions on what can occur even in peoples' private homes, or from advocating universal standards of international justice and human rights.
On the other hand, I do think that a relativist would be more likely to "let and let live", at least within certain bounds. But I can see that a person might recognize that her ethical standards are purely arbitrary, but nonetheless feel so compelled to act on them that she ends up trying to regulate the minute behavior of other people around her. I can't think of any examples like this, but I don't see anything that would prevent such a thing from occurring.
Speaking personally, I find few things more awesome than contemplating this vast and majestic process of evolution, the ebb and flow of successive biotas through geological time. Creationists and others who cannot for ideological or religious reasons accept the fact of evolution miss out a great deal, and are left with a claustrophobic little universe in which nothing happens and nothing changes.
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M. Alan Kazlev
™ Version 4.2
