My Arguments Against Moral Relativism
- Jonathan Quek
- May 1
- 3 min read
Why I believe that morality is not relative.
Let me begin by asking a somewhat uncomfortable question, “is slavery wrong?” Now, if you have any human consciousness, you would stand up and proclaim: “Of course it is!”
It seems almost unthinkable to purport any argument FOR slavery. Every argument would cut against the grains of our current moral understanding. It would be wrong.
So why is it that up till the 1800s, slavery was not only legal but common practice throughout civilizations? And if I were to transport you into England in the 1750s, would you deem owning a slave as an act that is objectively wrong?
Moral relativists would say no. In fact, they would say that slavery today is not objectively wrong either, that it is instead subjectively wrong given our current social understanding, moral compass, and political agenda. They would argue that there are no absolute moral truths, that morality is merely an expression of our feelings. Just as slavery is now frowned upon and hence deemed ‘immoral’, it was once a widely accepted truism, and hence deemed ‘moral’.
Yet I disagree. At this point, it is important to define what it means for something to be ‘objectively true’ or ‘real’. For example, are the words on the screen that you are looking at real? If so, why? Is it because we can physically touch the screen and that we can see those words? What about love? It is not something that we can touch, yet I think no one would doubt that love is real.
But we can run a battery of tests to prove that this phone, the screen, and the words you are seeing are real; you cannot do the same for morality. Perhaps… but what if someone does not believe that any of existence is real at all? You can say: “Hey look at everything around you, you can feel it, you can see it, and there is science to back up the existence of all of it.” Yet the other person would simply say that he does not believe in the evidence at all, that the evidence is untrue. There isn’t one test we can run to disprove this claim.
Hence, it might just be the case that it is impossible to prove if anything is absolutely real. But what we can say — and this is for the most part exactly the same —is that there are effective truths. Effective truths are the basis of claims that we deem true as given. For example, we assume that the universe exists, and that what we experience is not some giant simulation. Only after this basis of truth is established can we go about laying other foundations of truth like evolutionary science, cosmology, etc.
So, coming back to the concept of morality. I believe that morality is effectively true. It is true on the basis on our collective intuition. We could also argue here that religion provides a basis for morality (I won’t get into that argument since I am painfully naive in that subject).
Isn’t our intuition subjective? Does it not change? Can it not change? To that, I say yes it can! In the same way, a man can lose his eyesight, does that mean that the table in front of him is no longer of a honey pine wooden color? But we can prove that the table in of a honey pine color, we can’t do the same for morality, right? We can only prove that the table is of that certain color if we assume vision through our narrow visible light spectrum. If we have vision at all, to begin with. What if we saw things like mosquitos, which are able to see parts of the infrared spectrum? Is the table still honey pine in color? Our perspectives can change just as our vision can, but does our truth change along with it?
In the same way the table being of a honey pine color is an effective truth there are also effective moral truths. Rape is wrong. Murder is wrong. These aren’t just current moral beliefs resulting from our feelings, these are abhorrent deeds that are as real as they are evil.
Of course, these are just some of my current thoughts. I would love to hear what you guys have to say about the arguments made and I encourage people to challenge me on my stance.
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