Relativism is dead: long live relativism

Friday August 26, 2011

Relativism was first killed more than 2,000 years ago. But it keeps coming back. Dennis Hayes explains why this vampire never dies and in 2011 is as great a threat as ever.

I am an incorrigible eavesdropper. As the Head of a Centre for Educational Research I believe that eavesdropping is a major but much neglected research method. Wetherspoon’s magnificent Victorian bank turned pub, The Standing Order in Derby, has an excellent library of old books in a good place for reading and eavesdropping.

Last time I was there I was browsing through a copy of Matthew Arnold’s Selected Essays that had been used as a beer mat, when I overheard a middle-aged woman berating her two female friends, after three bottles of rosé wine, of her right to her ‘opinion’ even if they did not agree. From the tap room to the university common room, relativism is rife.

You hear the same from students all the time, the easy acceptance of opinions however diametrically opposed they are: Christian versus Muslim, any religion versus atheism; evolutionist versus creationist; supporters of abortion rights versus anti-abortionists; believers in objective science versus postmodernists. What does it matter? It’s all acceptable. The only offence is to oppose the acceptance of all opinions.

Some academics seem wholly committed to relativism. They are often enthusiastic about views they do not agree with. Expressing your opinions is what counts.

Relativism is also an implicit philosophy of university managements. It absolves them of making any judgements. All that matters is accepting all opinions and not challenging any. The universities are not ivory towers. They feed a woolly-minded relativism into all the professions, worst of all into teaching where relativism can grip future generations. This undifferentiated opining is presumably what people mean when they refer to ‘what postmodernism has taught us.’

It is easy to have some sympathy with Roger Scruton’s acerbic observation that ‘moral relativism is the first refuge of a scoundrel.’ There is no authority to relativists other than the authority of the personal view point. You can see how this has initial appeal to managers, to public service leaders and teachers as it seems to give them immediate, unargued and unchallenged moral authority.

Most of the relativism we meet in everyday life is moral relativism rather than epistemological relativism. In universities you meet both and the moral scoundrels can take refuge in an implied epistemological defence of their non judgmentalism or, as it is better called, ‘moral weakness.’

In Plato’s Theaetetus (171a-d) there is a demolition of Protagogras’ relativism that should be memorised by anyone who is committed to objective truth. It goes like this. Protagoras, in his book The Truth, argues that others are correct in what they believe just as he is. Socrates then points out that everyone believes what Protagoras believes to be false and he must, by his own argument, agree that what they believe is true, therefore ‘since it is disputed by everyone, the Truth of Protagoras is not true for anyone at all, not even for himself?’

This is the basis of many ‘Quick Refutations of Relativism.’ For example, if someone argues ‘Everything is a matter of personal opinion’ you can ask in Socratic manner: ‘Is that true or a matter of opinion?’ If it is true then it is false and if it is just opinion it is false. Either way it is false.

There is much academic debate about whether these refutations work. The best that the defenders of relativism can come up with is the extreme solipsistic position that the views of the relativist are true, but only for him. This is, of course, just another way of saying they are false, or the views of a madman.

The more these arguments are understood and used the less intellectual force they will have, but relativism survives despite its incoherence. It is appealing in different ways at different times. Scruton may be right and relativism may once have been the province of the moral scoundrel but few of today’s ubiquitous relativists are scoundrels. In fact they are rather nice; too nice to be scoundrels. They are the people who do not want to give offence. They coat real moral differences in cotton wool and never let them come into conflict even for the purposes of debate.

When I was proposing debates in schools a senior teacher advisor from a local authority said ‘Surely you don’t mean debate in the old fashioned sense where some argue for and some against a proposition?’ What he meant was debate. That is what debate is. What he proposed instead was various forms of self-expression which would enable all the children speak and adults to applaud them as if they were performing monkeys. Debate has been replaced by the relativists with opinion-giving as a form of therapy.

But you can’t debate and argue about different values then other ways of expressing moral disagreement will eventually be found. They will necessarily be irrational and sometimes violent. Today’s soft relativists may be eventually killing us with their kindness.

Dennis Hayes is the director of Academics For Academic Freedom