Roger Scruton on Moral Relativism

let's just jump right in what Roger to your mind is the problem with moral relativism well there is an intellectual problem as to what it is what just what does a moral relativist believe you know he obviously believes that moral judgments do not have any kind of absolute force but what follows from that are they relative to something if so to what are they relative that's one problem and there's a huge discussion in the literature about this very inconclusive discussion but the real problem is what it means to ordinary people who don't do who don't have the philosophical training and the philosophical inclinations that some of us have who nevertheless hear these expression moral relativism they hear phrases like it's all relative well that there are no absolute values or that any judgment that you make is your judgment from your point of view there's no objective point of view and so on these are all garbled versions of a vet of philosophical positions but they are very influential on ordinary people and have given rise to the to the feeling that really in the end there is no there is no point outside the individuals own perspective from which he can be judged he can only be judged from within his own perspective in terms of his own desires ambitions aims and so on and which means that judgment becomes a kind of impertinence and and as a result of course people cease to share any conception that they are joined in a in a common enterprise right maybe in in just a few sentences what exactly is moral relativism and maybe you can put it in sort of layman's terms and what's been its unique contribution to Western thought well I would say that in layman's terms a moral relativist is somebody who believes that a moral judgment is the expression of the subjective opinion of a particular person and that it cannot be evaluated from any other position than his own so everything every judgement is relative to the interests and position of the person who makes it so that in the end there is no position that we outside the individual from which he can be judged right so then maybe an older view of thinking or philosophy or of approaching life would have been an endeavor to discover truth or something like that yeah obviously one contrast with this is the religious worldview which says that there is a position outside the individuals interests from which is judged that is the position occupied by God who as it were provides that overview systematic overview of all our desires and all our aims and is in a position to judge us weaken them by as it were discovering what his position is come to an objective view of our own situation and obviously the obvious thing to say about moral relativism is that it's what is left when the religious worldview collapses and that's perhaps one reason why it is so prevalent now right do you have to have I though a religious worldview would have what an Aristotle have viewed it that way do you necessarily need to be religious to to recognize that truth might exist and and and it would be worthwhile to discover what that is now you don't and of course that has been one of the efforts of philosophy down the centuries Aristotle is only one example Kant is another the effort of to produce a fulcrum on which our worldview can can turn which is not simply our individual desires and I think for a long time after the Enlightenment Western intellectuals believed that they had discovered that in the the idea of morality put forward by Kant or perhaps some version first that was downstream from that like the utilitarianism of the of John Stuart Mill and so on which gave a secular grounding to a shared moral position which would not be the position of any particular person but the position of all of us and from that we could come to conclusions about what was right and wrong which didn't privilege the individual and his desires but of course I think it's there's been an increasing during the 20th century and increasing despair that that project was possible and this despair had many forms but were the most important from the point of view of rhetoric was the existentialist position of people that Assad Safra said he argued that there is no position from which I can be judged except my own so that the only thing that can authenticate my moral judgments is my choice that those are my judgments so the difference between a moral and an immoral person on Santas view is simply that the moral person is somebody who wills his own desires as sit as commitments whereas the the immoral person is someone who just has those desires so on that view you that you know the authentic existentialist rapist is the one who you should pray it's not the person who simply is tempted by his sexual appetites right so there's the subjective understanding of truth where I can't necessarily judge your value system or whatever else we're told that this has led to an age of toleration and and yet a lot of those folks who espouse I think maybe a postmodern moral relativist view use the words ought and should and must quite a bit so how do we arrive at that sort of a didactic moral relativism it's a very good question that it is obviously a part of human nature to affirm ourselves through moral judgments and when people adopt the view that all moral judgments are relative or subjective they turn that into an objective morality too so it becomes a kind of sin to be other than a relativist you know some and you see this happening especially in things like the European Court of Human Rights where when you fight you find people with old-fashioned objective systems of values constantly being called before the judges and reproached for the fact that they are discriminating against people who don't share their values right so it it becomes ever more difficult to retain those old fashioned objective views of what morality is without being condemned on moral grounds for having those views so it's subjective as kind of subjectivism becomes a moral norm so it's not that people have really given up on the idea of objective morality is that they're making a certain kind of subjectivity into an objective morality it's a kind of paradox and you see this paradox already in Nietzsche and people like that who who nature affirmed this some something like a subjectivist view of morality that that what matters he says is is to will your own desire as a law you know it's your own desire and the will to power that has expressed through it that's the essence of the moral position but of course the nature very quickly turned that from a doctrine of liberation into a doctrine of condemnation condemnation of all the people who couldn't live in that way and needed the support of an objective framework and I think you finding that happening now in the the kind of moral ISM that surrounds the European enterprise I I suspect that what this becomes obscure because very often modern moralism clothes itself in the concept of a human right you know the idea of of universal human rights isn't a sort of political expression of the 18th century enlightenment morality especially it grows out of Locke and out of Kant and it is what we have retained in the modern world of that noble effort to construct an objective morality without God and this morality had the form of a respect for universal human rights that we all possess by virtue of our human nature and which we can affirm against each other we can lay claim to them and expect others to acknowledge that claim so it gives a a fulcrum outside the individual desire on which the issue can be turned but it all went terribly wrong in my view after the Second World War when people lost any sight of what the list of human rights consisted of originally in people that Locke and add also incant human rights are fundamentally negative things in a right not to be interfered with not to have your life taken away not to have your freedom taken away not to have your property taken away and so on and these would have been ideas that the American Founding yes essentially liberal ideas and we it's a sort of axiom of that way of thinking that your right is my duty so if you have a right I have a duty towards you to respect it if your right is simply not to be interfered with it's easy for me to fulfill that duty I don't interfere with you I don't kill you to take your property and enslave you and so on but with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the Second World War all kinds of new rights came into existence or they didn't come into existence they were postulated by them the process that then was initiated including that the right to have a job the right to have security of home life the right to to have sufficient to cover the basic needs of of existence the right to health care and so on and gradually these these this list of Rights expanded these are not freedoms but claims they're very different that it's not a freedom to go about your business undisturbed but a claim that people are given against the dreamers rooted in in what a communal desire for well at the time it was part of the whole move towards a more socialist conception of the state because once you make these claims if you hold on to the axiom that that my right is somebody else's duty you automatically have to answer the question whose is the duty to provide and of course it's not the duty of any particular person it becomes the duty of society that which is another name for the state and so it led to massive expansion of the state's embeddedness in human relations whether this was a good thing or a bad thing is of course part of disputes in politics to this day and it's one of the things which separated liberals from from socialists but irrespective of whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing it clearly involves a radical change in our conception of what a right is the right becomes a claim that we can each make against each other and of course then this tends to undermine people's sense that there really is any objective or thought itg the idea of a right when somebody comes along and says you know to me that he has a certain claim against me even though there is no relationship I think I tend to think of that as nonsense and so that there's a this confusion about the idea of human rights means that there's a considerable amount of nonsense embedded in our legal systems in a political order sort of founded on this on this idea where rights or sort of dictated or or coming from the state if you feel like you're a victim of nonsense what can you appeal to this very good question and people there's let me give you an interesting case in my country and we have a very important tradition of planning law which was arose from between the wars what was solidified after the Second World War according to which you cannot build houses in the countryside not with that not without very special permission because people valued the countryside in where as you know overcrowded Ireland and wanted to preserve it and this law creates certain duties on the part of the citizen to obviously to obey it not to not to build just anywhere anyhow and people accepted it as a piece of legislation doesn't talk about anybody's rights just talks about you know what's duties are under the law but then Irish travelers enjoying freedom of movement under the European Union laws come and settle in our countryside with their caravans scraping away the topsoil putting down concrete and littering the place with these what to you Americans would call trailer parks set and then of course this is against the law but they appeal to the European Court of Human Rights saying that we have a right as an ethnic minority to live in our traditional way and this is our traditional way now if the if the court upholds that judgement and says that they do have a right then all other interests are cancelled by it because a right is a non-negotiable privilege right whereas the pit their local the neighbors of these people just have whatever ordinary legislative rights and duties are have been laid down so the result is that that this law is no longer applicable it would this isn't me is it no the one thing that happens as a result of that of course is that is social tension I indeed we've had a couple of murders in one of these camps as a result of this you know people most people don't accept the fact that they having obeyed the law to maintain the beautiful environment in which they were conceived just taken away from them but people who who can don't have to obey the law because they can overreach it through these international courts but increasingly that is happy that overreaching of the law through the doctrine of human rights and through these claims that people make claims to lifestyle and so on and you're suggesting that there really is nothing to appeal once you reach a certain state well this is a this is a technical problem but in our law and I think in all laws if something is a right attaching to an individual then that's it right the judge is obliged to grant it there can be conflicts of rights but you see the neighbors of the travelers in the case I'm considering didn't have any rights in the matter they just had interests so the court had no way of judging in their favor so but often laws are made with interest in mind oh yes and that's the whole purpose of legislation that it tries to take all the interests into consideration and find an acceptable compromise solution and that's only one example that I took but there there are plenty that are much more relevant perhaps to life in this part of the world although I suspect you you know the European Court of Human Rights will certainly upset relations between hungarians and roma in this country by over overriding settled ways of dealing and you might you might have the same sort of problem but more important of things like the conflict that arises between the Catholic worldview and the world this new concept of human rights Catholics have always said you know we were the true originators of the human right idea look at San Tomas it's all there there our concept of natural law and we uphold human rights and that we believe then deed that there is this universal jurisdiction which is God's but these rights are not for us to determine according to political criteria or according to the the desires of people in secular society they are eternal so you know for instance although there is a right to life the Roman Catholic will say that right attaches to the unborn - you know add to the child in the womb and the European Court of Human Rights will say no because that that interferes with the right to abortion that that we will that we guarantee because it's part of the what is offered and - by way of settling disputes in a secular society so the poll of the Polish government has had to confront this and I'm not sure it's resolved it yet as to whether it can change where it's going to change its law on abortion or not right so you seem to be suggesting that you know the phrase different strokes for different folks sounds all well and good but in fact when you have such may be radically different ideas about justice and life and truth and you have to build a society or live and make laws have neighbors that it actually it can be an impediment and may actually not lead to toleration well yeah we got off the concert top topic of toleration the influence of moral relativism is to say that you know it's intolerant to make judgments at all right this is what we find often said in my country that someone being judgmental it is committing the primary moral fault you know unreal toleration means not discriminating at all against any against rival views accepting all views as as equally valid but actually toleration means the opposite of that toleration means accepting what you don't approve of accepting what you do disagree with and our tradition in England of toleration from which grew up in the 17th century was a solution to radical conflict it was people learnt to be tolerant precisely of the things that they really hated not learning not to hate them means not tolerating at all because there's nothing to tolerate and this is a very important virtue in this case TACA toleration but it depends upon having objective moral values right so in that sense toleration the way we might understand it today is actually quite a bit different than maybe the Christian concept of brotherly love or or the golden rule yeah so I mean the Christian concept of brotherly love means loving the sinner and hating the sin right and I mean that's a very different conception from the modern version which is more like loving the sin and not regarding it as one right well before we turn to questions from the audience let let's discover what the absence of truth claims or making judgments what that means in other areas of life so you've written that in art and architecture whereas maybe an art the original idea was to try to to point the the viewer of that sculpture of that painting towards some sort of higher plane and toward a closer realization of some sort of truth and and in architecture of course the the main idea was to create structures that were to be inhabitable for for humans to live or to or to work in has that changed no it's much more difficult to defend some kind of objective aesthetics than it is to defend an objective morality in the end once you've once you stated the questions of morality clearly an awful lot of it is plain common sense as the name of your society commemorates but plain common sense about art is quite difficult to obtain but in fact seems to me it's architecture is the only very only clear example in which people's do spontaneously agree with each other everybody let's say except architects and that's because architects make money out of it and I think you will find that it's certainly in the European context there is you know a natural tendency to to accept certain forms and to reject others except those accept forms which give the air of a settlement a place where you can be at home and that is architecture is touching on something which is deeper than aesthetics which is need to settle together as communities and from that need follow things like the shapes of windows the shapes of roofs the heights of buildings right and even things like like details you know shadows you can't live in a building you can't look at a building which doesn't have shadows there's one over there which has none which a glazed monstrosity like a big eye looking at the people of Budapest and defying them you know it's not it's not something in the shadow in the in the vicinity of which you can you can actually feel at home that's part of its purpose because it's there to sell things not to soothe people but I think in the sphere of architecture you can draw on other things than the pure look of buildings in order to establish some kind of consensus and it's very clear from the cities of Europe that that consensus has existed for at least 3,000 years in a very broad sense you know the column and the architrave and the roof and the window you know these are standard things that when it comes to music and and painting things look a little bit different but still you know that there's an expectation in most morally alive people that art should not as D H Lawrence puts it do dirt on life it shouldn't desecrate the ordinary expectations and the ordinary modes of fulfillment that people have and you know obscenity a destructive violence chaos a thing that works about the seem to celebrate the negative for that reason I think put people's teeth on edge and also give them a sense that that a sense of sacrilege sometimes and working out that idea is one thing that to which I've devoted you know some of my work so I have a few things to say about it right let's open it up for questions I think heaven yes the these.you international human rights organizations that but part of the problem with them is that as you imply that the agenda is has grown uncontrolled so we don't we don't really know whether there is a human right to social welfare you know is there a human right to a roof over your head or human right to health what would what would settle the question everybody knows so you know I can obviously claim that I have a human right as a red haired past person to special privileges right and traveling in places like this weather so few of them you know and people do but it but most people would laugh at and say you know that's ridiculous but but nevertheless what are the grounds nobody knows and that's it so that that is part of the problem is that there's an attempt to to produce a kind of universal objective morality but without any conception of where it comes from the idea that people can't be judges in their own cause of course it's a it's universally accepted only because everybody has an interest in their own cause other than its justice you know the the fundamental idea of natural justice at least in English law is that a dispute between two people must be adjudicated by a third person who has no interest in either side if you have no interest in the matter only justice can motivate your decision that's the idea you it is problematic they have political agendas and all that of course and they get taken over by people who have a decided desire to reform whole societies I'm in the European Union or the whether European Commission is very much characterized by this was it is staffed by people who belong to essentially the the transnational rootless elite who don't actually have very many beliefs of of traditional kind and are extremely irritated by a spectacle of a place like Poland and a place like Hungary I mean it lots to be irritated about about Hungary and no doubt but you know the European Commission is the first to be irritated and will have reference to these these these vaguely defined human rights in order to make its position known and that and that of course can produce enormous resentment it has produced resentment in certainly in my country and in Poland and who will go on doing so okay let me ask the question you're talking about the EU so in the European Parliament I think not long ago there was some sort of a decision made that you couldn't use gender distinctive terms in the documents so no Monsieur no madam no no Fraulein yeah whatever else is is this of course we know there are now folks who think of sort of different layers of gender so you can be what male bodied or female bodied which is an anatomical thing as opposed to your identity which within be male or female so does this idea also originate and that gender is not something you can observe with a rational mind and sort of know what it is but it really is about your you your identity your judgment of yourself well yes this is another issue it's very easy for these transnational institutions like the European Parliament to respond to pressure groups of a small organized people you know obviously radical feminists from France in this particular case and those people probably wouldn't be able to force their their views upon the the whole public of France through the normal democratic process because then they would come up against the fact that the French people don't wanted to lose Monsieur Madame mam'selle and so on and this is one way in which elites impose their views on majorities by using these roundabout transnational institutions although in America that elites use the Supreme Court in the same way to bypass ordinary people's feelings this has been obvious in the case of abortion that that the standard New York liberal position on a board was made into a nationwide nationwide orthodoxy through the Supreme Court okay it's moving back the other way but that's that's something like that just does happen and many people say well it doesn't matter you know what does it matter whether we drop the word Monsieur mam'selle or whatever but it's a bit like what happened in Turkey in in 1919 1920 - I think when Ataturk said the Turkish language must no longer be written in Arabic script it's got to be written in the Latin alphabet then then it that's much more sensible and straightforward and then it'd be much easier to people to learn it from the Western countries and we could relate to Western countries much more easily and it had a fantastic effect it changed Turkish society in a radical way but it cut Turks off completely from their literary past that nobody in Turkey today can read any of the classics the set a few you know the highly educated people maybe that doesn't matter because the classics weren't any good but that only thing that is true right but in a similar way but not necessarily American feminism which is insisting on the feminine pronoun is cutting off many people from the natural sense of the rhythm of English as used by those you know reactionary writers like Hume and Ranbir and even John Stuart Mill you there's a very good point um I think I don't think I've succeeded in defining moral relativism because I think it's so elusive a thing one might say that that a certain kind of conservatism which says that that custom has a validity of its own this is what you're saying is very appealing but it isn't a form of relativism because it is actually a validating custom as such is saying you know custom does have a value and it's that's the way we look for the solutions and these solutions have emerged from people's interaction over generations and that's why we should respect them this is something that Burke said in his reflections on the French Revolution and really he was speaking about a very objective moral truth you know that that the answers to moral to social questions are not invented but discovered and they discovered over time through the people's interaction but of course different people perhaps don't discover them and maybe have bad customs yeah when when when for example and and and noticing these differences among peoples as I guess as old as history because Herodotus famously noted differences and some of the African tribes and and in Eurasia so how do you how do you then treat different customs if you recognize them to be some somewhat morally this is what the Enlightenment wanted to do was to to find that position outside specific customs from which they could all be judged and that's and the universal doctrine of human rights was supposed to be that position and my view is that perhaps it is as long as the rights are treated in this purely negative way that the American founders treated them as Kant treated them and and really as a quietness treated them but when when the doctrine of human rights starts escalating without any ground then all you're doing is imposing a new elite morality on people who can't possibly accept it but I there are problems as we know in most of us feel that there are aspects of many of the Muslim societies that that we are becoming familiar with these days which we can't accept you know forced marriage honor killing even perhaps the constant concealing of women you know we to ask that that that is repugnant but you know there is a question many people's minds if you then just impose the Enlightenment liberal morality on these communities are you doing them a service or not you know there is a real real competitive conflict of values but of course some of our customs they probably also think a repugnant yeah so then what are we to do well the answer was that you know to send them back home but you can't say that you have to say no we've got to live together as communities and they are right to be repelled by you know pornography and all the things that they're repelled by in our communities and we are right to be repelled by by their treatment of women and an accommodation over time might improve both of us right at on the same topic in England is the acceptance of certain forms of Sharia law within the British legal system is that sort of a natural outgrowth of our wanting to treat their understanding of justice as similar or as equal to ours and somehow compatible even in the same same nation no because our our nation is founded upon the rule of law and and this law has always been secular and it's what the law is is settled by Parliament and by the courts in obedience to Parliament so to say that there should be a Sharia law adjudicated in parallel is effectively to deny that there is a unified nation the Ottoman Empire lasted in this way quite for a long time saying that you know that family affairs are adjudicated by Sharia if it's the if the family is Sunni Muslim or by the canon law of the Catholic Church if their Maronite and so on and the orthodox jurisdiction of constantinople for the those or whatever things I think guess for the Greek Catholic and so on and they did they managed it but they managed it only because there were no nations it was an empire without borders we have the view that the ultimate source of authority is the nation-states defined by its borders and within those borders the law the secular law as determined by Parliament is the final authority is that's not just an arbitrary thing for us that is the foundation of our obedience and if a community grows up within those borders not accepting that then it doesn't belong within those borders that's and there's no other solution so by endorsing parallel legal systems then they are in fact rejecting the relations state you it doesn't follow from the fact that our obedience is to the rule of law that the law can just be anything there are there are internal constraints not only the constraints of democratic election to Parliament but the constraints of constitutions and of procedures embedded within the law and the problem with Carl Schmitt one of the many problems with attachment was that he had yes but he had this kind of extremism of the time you know of those terrible years between the wars where he just wanted to you know to put a guillotine through everything said there's a certain sage it stops you know and he said who is he is leader who has the voice in in the clock the final voice in a crisis that's that for him the crisis is what settles who is who is in authority and we English always had had the opposite view in a crisis that's when you should look for for the authority that has come about in peacetime you know cut it's not the crisis that settles though is in authority but the normal peaceful dealings between people when there is no crisis and the whole purpose of politics is to avoid crises and on the whole we English do avoid them very well is why we'd seemed so complacent and and I think you know I think that's the same is true here you know that that if you look back on people like Kelson and so on and the austro-hungarian tradition although it's very different from the English it is talking about the normal way of dealing of things and not the crisis you as I understand it the the Enlightenment conception of well there's no one enlightening session but the Enlightenment conception of the American Constitution embodies but it tries to to put set the state up as the the the the thing which settles disputes now the thing the thing which maintains the ongoing peaceable communion of people and represents their interests in the world as a whole which means it doesn't in itself dictate to them all the axioms which they will need for day-to-day living there is also a whole sphere of human life well in which morality and religion play their part but those those fears are not in themselves the sphere of the political so there's a separation of the political sphere from the from the moral and certainly from the religious that's obviously famously so in the American case it doesn't mean that the state doesn't in some oblique way depend on on those spheres that if people become completely demoralized and completely lose all religious sense then of course it could be that the state also suffers from it that it's no longer able really to rely upon on customs that it needed to rely upon in order to function and I think that might be true you humor is very important and also a satire of the opponent you know and it's very difficult because as I was saying earlier moral relativism has a tendency quickly to become a kind of absolutism of its own you know so that if you're making judgments or if you're revealing that you have some source of values which you regard as sacred or holy or outside this you know just personal choice then then people do start abusing you and that's that's undeniably true but in the long run you know you can stand up to that and things things change people people might abuse you for as a fascist whatever for for ten years but you know when the the results of their worldview are being felt all around around them they might come back to seeing you know she was right all along you know and that that that's I mean to a very small extent I've had this experience I I was when I started coming out as a conservative and ever around about 1980 it was to the immense shock of the academic establishment and there are lots of I had to sue people to you know to be reliable for things that are said in there was a BBC program with the sound of marching jackboots behind you know somebody commenting on my on something I've written that ever everything was done to make it look as though this was the big the thin end of the fascist wedge and for a long time I was very disheartened but you know and you can feel very very distressed but things have changed now and you know a great many people think that that possibly I wasn't just totally wrong about everything and the certain have habilitation rehabilitation comes about you know I there was I was it sort of kept out of the British Academy for instance by all the old left establishment fall home and Williams and Isaiah Berlin and all that crowd and then you know they they all died I have to say I was out of the country at the time had nothing to do with it they just died and the next week I was made a fellow of the British Academy you know so that was a sure sign that perhaps things do change you that certainly is true obviously it that we all have plenty of examples if like just basic human relations families are differently constituted and and yet can live side by side although you have you know still there might be a question of whether you have to be tolerant in order for this to happen and toleration means perhaps accepting that it isn't that you know your neighbor isn't living in the right way but nevertheless it's not for you you have no right to interfere and that's the very normal position to take I suspect in in Western societies and we don't go through life thinking that every question is to be settled by a moral absolute I mean we are negotiating creatures and that's especially true of us Europeans because our our systems of law emerge from negotiation they're not they're not dictated from on high by God and unlike the shire they they are they are the results of discussions over many hundreds of years even in the English case the thousand years so we're used to the idea that that we don't settle all our questions by moral absolutes but still we might need some of those absolutes in order to begin yeah it seems to me that maybe the maybe the worst outcome for a society that completely embraces moral relativism is just a reassertion of the idea that might is right and and sort of power politics you agree with that or is there a worse outcome that there is um this is a quite interesting point in the 1960s you know when the I wouldn't say the fall of man began then but nevertheless things did change in a radical way very popular at the time it was not just the the relativistic morality of the you know the student revolution but the philosophy that that that rewrote morality as our system of power this is obviously Foucault was the most important person in this and the the basic argument in fucose writings and they it's an argument which comes ultimately from Marx is that moral judgments have no intrinsic validity they they are a part of ideology which whose reality has to be understood in terms of the power relations that they vindicate or endorse to know what is being said by a moral judgment you must go behind it to discover the relations of power which are being concealed by it and made to look legitimate and once you think like that you think that you have an absolute right to overthrow those relations of power because they have no ground other than themselves and with them overthrow the morality that goes with them in fuko's four-volume is to are less sexuality which I'm sure some of you know you discover what this rule at work you know this overthrowing of every possible system of sexual morality as a mere legitimization of power relations which are in particular historical contexts and that's been very influential of course on adolescent on the sexual behavior of half educated adolescents not fully educated or completely uneducated but the the ones in between and Foucault of courses is a very important thinker in that he's sort of made the postmodern world through this kind of way of thinking you well I understand the problem because obviously it's being talked about everywhere and in particular the Hungarian situation and my view is that when one should not look for political solutions to this the problem the problem that we've been discussing today where we're talking about something that goes to the heart of personal life and personal relations we're it's as though the the the the the Enlightenment has finally come home to us you know and what it means to us and we many people feel you know that there's an urgent need a worldwide need to find some other foundation for the moral life than religion no I I'm skeptical that there really can be that other foundation but certainly it can't be politics one of the problems with communism is that it did try to provide an alternative foundation not just for political order but for the moral life and to recruit everybody to a kind of militarized equality which people have rejected and because they've seen that it it disenchanted human society completely left people demoralized and in in opposition to each other about everything and harmony can can come about however not through politics you can only come about because people recognize the the value of their own life and the value of the life of those around them and that's something that has to be created through their own efforts in America a book called the closing of the American mind the author talks about some of the effects of what you had mentioned the pessimism and the skepticism the the dismissal of truth claims that came out of the 1960s and he talked about in the context of the university such that students don't inquire after knowledge or seek after truth anymore and and he made a rather outrageous statement that he saw that as being somehow a worse situation than even maybe religious wars that were happening in Europe it do you think that's a little far-fetched or is he trying to get at something that that you know possibly embracing that that sort of moral relativism and it eroding the foundations of justice or as laws we talked about previously in the case of Britain it has some somehow a deadly effect on civilization in the long run yes well there is a tendency of people in universities to to think that what's going on in the university is what really matters and that was the case of bloom when he taught when he was talking about the closing of the American mind he really meant the fact that he couldn't talk to his students anymore and outside the universities there are all kinds of natural normal Americans still existing going about their business going to church services you know America has remained I'm not devoted a devout Christian society through all these things at least if you're outside the cities and also if you're outside the universities a basically decent Society so so um so the fact is that it wasn't as bad as he thought it was just bad for him but he had a point because what he was saying was that that the relativism had made it impossible for him to teach the the curriculum as though it had any objective Authority that was really what upset him you know you couldn't say to to the student look you know here is Shakespeare and just look and here is Steinbeck you know just look sure honey you've got to see that that first thing is he's not just better but but touching on the human reality in a deeper way and the students will say - you're fit your view you know I've got my Bob Dylan you know and which is you know a million times better than what they have now and you know that there is a problem if you can't discuss if you can't teach the old curriculum in the humanities because of this relativism what you're going to teach students right and increasingly people teach pseudo-sciences instead you know the the deconstructionist analysis of Steinbeck or or instead of teaching aesthetics neuro esthetics you know not knowing quite what that is they said you know it's Beethoven plus brain scans well is after all moral relativism that big of a problem if it only amounts to maybe differences of opinions and occasional renegotiating of the political structure is it is it really that big of a problem I would say that that we have to be much more careful of our institutions than moral relativists tend to be our values as rear opions come about through long-standing institutions here as the gentleman said at the back you know communism destroyed the institutional superstructure but it needs to be rebuilt and the the example of bloom and the closing of the American mind I think is significant because it has become difficult to maintain the dignity of the University in the times in which we live churches have find it extremely difficult to maintain their teaching when when anything goes and in a traditional marriage upon which the reproduction of society depends as we all know is under threat throughout the Western world as you know some supposedly arbitrary agreement between two adults to share each other's well can't said a contract for the mutual use of the sexual organs you know it can serve you can't was obviously quite repelled by marriage as you can imagine but but that's the view that he's prevailing and of course it leaves children out of consideration once you've left children out of consideration things have come to an end right they haven't yet though I've got to don't leave us on there like such a pessimistic yeah so yeah there is hope yeah well thank you all for coming tonight and please join me in thanking why this week you

Channel: commonsensesociety

Views: 185,211

Rating: 4.9128008 out of 5

Keywords: Common Sense Society, West, relativism, philosophy, religion, morality, liberalism, Rogers Scruton, Marion Smith, secularism, european union, politics

Id: l5BXyvMU80Q

Length: 61min 56sec (3716 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 04 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Skydivinggenius]

Moral relativism = nihilism

[u/baconwrappedreddit]

They keep going back and forth between “truth” and “morals” in a way that makes them seem like the same thing but different people can agree on what is true, but have different reactions based on their morals. Is there a philosophically standardized connection between the two?