Social Attitudes, News Headlines and Moral Relativism:
"Imagine, for example, that the report had contained a series of questions like this – all relating to the sort of stories we might see in our headlines.
Do you believe there there are some circumstances when a sexual relationship between an adult and an child is right?
Do you believe that there are some circumstances where children may justifiably torture other children?
Do you believe that it is an acceptable means of protest or conflict to blow yourself up in a crowded tube station?
And then the question were asked: “Do you believe right and wrong is a matter of personal choice?”"
He's put his finger on something I think is fundamentally correct: if I can express it in terms more familiar to me; our society's ideology says 'it all depends', but our guts in certain cases say 'die heretic-miscreant'. That is 'we' collectively believe some acts are absolutely wrong: paedophilia, child abuse, violent/lethal protest. I think Doug's idea that there is some redefinition of morality is intriguing. However, I think it is simply that we are 'built' for absolutes but we have an ideology which justifies the breaking of a certain set of outgoing cultural taboos. Come back in 40 years and it could feel different again. What Doug's getting at I think I agree with: that there is a redrawing of boundaries between 'wrong' and 'sometimes acceptable' if I can put it that way, and '(perfectly) normal' at the other end of a spectrum. I think that the term 'normal' is important here: the ideologies relating to moral and ethical choices are heavily informed by concepts of 'natural' and 'normal' on the one hand and 'if it harms none' on the other. Perhaps the real offence of paedophilia and abuse for many is actually that it harms and that informed consent cannot be gained from one party. Similarly with violent protest...
Thinking out loud, don't shoot, muse with ...
2 comments:
Taking the section he quotes as a starting point:
"Only six per cent think that people should faithfully follow their religious leaders; 89 per cent take the alternative view. These attitudes do not merely reflect a reluctance to be told what to do; most people simply do not believe that there are absolute standards. Sixty per cent agree that “there can never be absolutely clear guidelines of what is good and evil”; the same proportion agrees that “morality is a personal matter and society should not force everyone to follow one standard”"
The thing that strikes me is that these seem poorly phrased questions, and the analysis includes a number of non-sequitors. In the first bit the 'alternative view' is specified in the Survey as being 'following your own conscience'. so what the question is really asking is, if push comes to shove, do you feel you shoud follow your religious leaders over the dictates of your own conscience. Now many committed relatively conservative Protestants (like Luther, for example) would answer that we should follow our own conscience (having carefully interpreted scripture for ourselves) rather than our religious leaders. This tells us nothing about moral relativism.
I'd really like to know what the alternative options were for the other questions, but on the face of it, I might agree that "there can never be absolutely clear [human-even if derived from scripture] guidelines of what is good and evil [in every situation]", without necessarily thinking that there couldn't be clear enough guidelines for most people to tell good from evil in most situations.
Similarly I'd be inclined to agree that “society should not force everyone to follow one standard [except in areas where it is necessary to prevent societal collapse - I presume no-one seriously thinks that it's wrong for society to attempt to force me to restrain my homicidal impulses]”, even if I don't agree that “morality is a personal matter”, so if the other option was "someone in authority should impose morality on everyone by force" I'd probably go for the first. But according to the analysis offered here this makes me a moral relativist.
I suspect a lack of theological literacy is to blame here - in that the assumption is that moral absolutes can unproblematically be identified with 'what a religious leader says', or that if you believe in moral absolutes you must also believe it is correct to enforce them on others.
I think this is helpful Mark. I'm particularly helped by your pointing up the relationship between institutional-religious authority and how people position themselves in relation to that. Our problem with 'moral absolutes' is what I'm trying to point to as ideology.
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