Making An Effort To Understand
David Wong illustrates moral relativism with some telling examples.
This revolves basically around William Barrett’s contention that moral and political conflicts often revolve around “rival goods”:
“For the choice in…human [moral conflicts] is almost never between a good and an evil, where both are plainly marked as such and the choice therefore made in all the certitude of reason; rather it is between rival goods, where one is bound to do some evil either way, and where the ultimate outcome and even—or most of all—our own motives are unclear to us. The terror of confronting oneself in such a situation is so great that most people panic and try to take cover under any universal rules that will apply, if only to save them from the task of choosing themselves.”
What I refer to as “conflicting goods”. Here though [from my frame of mind] both “good” and “evil” are rooted existentially in dasein…and not in anything approaching a Kantian deontological obligation.
Then the position taken by the sociopath: What’s in it for me? That becoming the only consideration.
The crucial assumption here being that both sides can raise points that the other side’s arguments can’t make go away. Thus those who support the right of private citizens to arm themselves argue there may be any number of contexts in which having a gun might save your life. While those opposed note there may be any number contexts in which, in the heat of passion, having a gun results in the unnecessary death of others.
Here there are endless sets of circumstance in which it would seem to be more reasonable to have or to not have a gun.
And what of those who own guns used for hunting. Same thing. The hunters have their arguments predicated on their assumptions and the animal rights folks have another set of arguments predicated on their own assumptions. So, what is the optimal argument that cancels out all of the objections?
In other words…
This, in my view, embodies what I call the “psychology of objectivism”. In other words, the objectivists may well actually be less concerned – subconsciously perhaps? – with the arguments they make and more emphatic that there is an argument that one can make to settle it. That it is their own argument which allows them to sustain what those like me construe to be the psychological illusion that there is indeed a “real me” able to be in sync with the right thing to do.
It’s more about the feeling of certainty itself than whatever it is one claims to feel certain about. It’s the certainty that provides the anchor for “I”. And it is this anchor that some then attach to God and religion to sustain this certainty on into the afterlife in turn.