John in Omaha, Nebraska, listening on KVSS.
John, you are on with Karlo Broussard.
Good evening, gentlemen, thank you for taking my call.
The other day, I have a son who is in college, and he was arguing with me that there is justification
for moral relativism and that he didn’t believe that there were any moral absolutes.
And I was just searching for some information, how to refute his discussion.
Sure.
Well, if you’re looking for some resources, John, just right off the bat, I would encourage—a
shameless plug here—what Cy was just introducing: my talk, my audio CD, “Your Truth, My Truth,”
along with the study guide; and in the study guide, I give you several ways that you can
critique both intellectual relativism and moral relativism.
And then there’s also a great book out there, John, and the title of the book is “Feet
Firmly Planted in Mid-Air.”
That’s “Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air,” by Francis Beckwith and Gregory
Koukl.
It’s a great book, that, you know, it’s an exhaustive treatment of relativism and
teaching you how to respond to it in all its various different forms.
But I think, John, fundamentally, what you have to do is try to share with your son examples
that he would intuitively already acknowledge to be a moral absolute.
So you could use the example of what Hitler did in Nazi Germany in exterminating the Jews,
you could use the example of slavery; this is one way, you can appeal to his moral intuition
and say, “Hey look—” John, you know, you can say, “Look, son, if you really believe
that moral truths, what is good, what is bad, is only relative to what an individual happens
to think, well then we couldn’t accuse Hitler of wrongdoing.
We couldn’t accuse our government of these previous slavery laws of wrongdoing.”
Fundamentally, if moral truth is not absolute, but only relative, well then we couldn’t
accuse anybody of ANY wrongdoing.
Why?
Because the individual would be the final arbiter of what is good and what is bad.
So ultimately, John, you can show your son that moral relativism undermines morality
completely, and that’s something that’s so absurd, I think even he will come to see
that, “Well, I might be a moral relativist in my thinking, but in practice I’m not
a moral relativist.”
Because, John, you can just turn the tables on your son and say, “Well, okay son, hypothetically,
how would you feel if, you know, I would lock you up and put you in a room and starve you
to death?”
Right?
I mean, that’s an absurd example, but fundamentally, if moral relativism were true, and you perceived
that to be correct and right for you, well then, you couldn’t be accused of wrongdoing,
right?
So you wanna take the logic of moral relativism, and apply it to other examples where you know
he’ll intuitively acknowledge to be so absurd that he must give up moral relativism.
So that’s one way, among many, that you could go about critiquing it: by showing it
undermines morality completely, making it impossible to accuse another of wrongdoing.
What do you think of that, John?
That sounds good.
You know, I was trying to approach it from an intellectual aspect.
He’s in college, you know, and he still attends mass, he’s a believer, but I’m
trying to approach this intellectually, rather than just trying to say, “Well God says
so, and that’s the reason why.”
And John, I couldn’t agree more.
I think it’s very important that we show them that this is something we don’t need
the Bible to know.
Does the Bible give us absolute moral truths?
Yes.
Praised be Jesus Christ for that, because a lot of times we have an admixture of error.
But these are things that we can come to know by the natural light of human reason, and
once again, if you get the resources that I mentioned at the outset of our conversation,
John, you’ll see that there is a very, very strong intellectual basis for the objectivity
of moral truth.
So thanks for your call, John.