ETHICAL RELATIVISM, LEFT-WING POLITICS

...Our conceptions of right and wrong color not only how we conduct our daily lives but also how we think about politics...

...People on the left are making a mistake, I believe, if they condemn O'Connor's opponents for being moralistic, or for wanting public institutions to be informed by what they consider central moral principles —although it is reasonable to say that where Americans have deep moral disagreements, imposing the majority will entails serious risks and costs, and we should therefore be very sure of what we are doing before using coercion...

...The idea of "exploitation," for instance, is moralistic and judgmental...

...If two people hold different values, neither is more right than the other...

...it is when we are least involved with others that we feel most free...

...They explicitly referred to the controversy over slavery in the 19th century, saying that surely we would not have wanted to countenance the appointment of a Supreme Court justice who favored slavery...

...In short, we might do better to take on the right's moral arguments than to condemn it for being moralistic...

...II ON MANY ISSUES, "modern" thinking helps support liberal, progressive attitudes...

...Such outcomes, we may hope, are not the only possibilities: it may be possible to construct a view of life that is liberating in regard to minority life styles and individual sexual decisions but asserts an 485 ethical vision for economic life...

...But after work, we buy what we want, bring our purchases home, to the private place where we can do exactly what we wish...

...Usually liberals and socialists tend to conceive of the moralistic, "old-fashioned" view of ethical questions as a conservative force...

...Only purely voluntary cooperation would be intrinsically valuable and have an ethical basis...

...These economic assumptions as well as the analogous ones found in "modern" ethical thinking are very strong in American culture, and they probably reinforce each other...

...The tension between these two ways of thinking about ethical judgments is not just a tension between religion and secularity, although evangelical Protestants and traditional-minded Catholics do have some tendency to think in "old-fashioned" ways...

...Many, for instance, found abortion personally abhorrent but wouldn't pass judgment on others, or felt sure that abortion was wrong but didn't want it made illegal...

...In some ways, a welfare-state system unaccompanied by changes in the processes of production is a further step toward individual autonomy, rather than toward community, because it reduces our dependence on any person, group, or institution other than the state...

...Furthermore, on economic issues we should make common cause with people who think in "oldfashioned" ways, taking advantage of the critical potential in such thinking...

...This is the view that making ethical decisions and value judgments is a private, subjective activity, undertaken separately by each individual...

...that prices should be held at reasonable levels and workers paid a decent wage...

...it rests on "old-fashioned" moral principles such as justice, compassion, community, and the equal value of every human being...

...Most Americans are not moral philosophers, and so their assumptions about these issues are often unspoken or ambiguous...

...4) Any or all of these three assumptions can go along with a fourth, which is the most pervasive of all...

...When we support minimum-wage laws, we argue that even if some workers find it to their benefit to work for very low wages rather than be unemployed, we will not permit them to do so...

...Leftists wish for a more sweeping transformation of economic life, but they too rely on "old-fashioned" ethical assumptions...

...For instance, when we support legal abortions with the "prochoice" argument that women have an absolute right to dispose of what is within their bodies, we risk accepting assumptions that can easily be used to support individualistic and conservative economic views...

...Thus conservative, individualistic economic views can be justified as an extension of "modern" ethical thinking...

...This assumption is found in such statements as these: "I am in no position to make judgments on people...

...If the left were to accept such restricted terms for debate, it would seriously impair our ability to articulate any vision more radical than the welfare state...

...Only when we make a voluntary decision do we act in a genuinely moral fashion and deserve credit for our actions...

...Debates on public policy then take place in terms of the technical means by which the sum of individual wants can best be satisfied...

...Some of those who opposed her said that abortion was not just one issue but a critical, disqualifying one...

...These views all seem modern and tolerant...

...These choices, we tend to assume, are of equal validity: if you go to a movie and I watch television, we are not likely to argue with each other about who made the more virtuous choice...

...Often these views are felt to imply that our public policy should maximize possibilities for autonomous choice by minimizing legally imposed restrictions...

...The difference between "old-fashioned" and "modern" ethical assumptions is therefore not a difference between conservatives and liberals...

...It is, finally, a worse mistake to say that abortion isn't a moral issue...

...If making value judgments is a private business, or such judgments have no objective validity, how are we to argue with each other about what values ought to inform public decisions...

...but we usually take the same policy positions as liberals on such issues as abortion and homosexual rights...

...People's values are their own business (or a private affair between the person and his or her God), and it would be a kind of invasion of privacy to disagree with others, pass judgment on them, or call upon them to explain and defend their choices...

...This approach is frequently expressed in statements like this: "I personally don't believe in abortion, but I can't pass judgment on other people because their situation may be different from mine...

...Secular ethical thought obviously contains both relativistic and absolutistic positions, and the same is true of Western religious traditions...

...Similarly, for someone to claim that snowmobiles squander resources that ought to be devoted to more pressing human needs would seem moralistic, authoritarian, unrealistic, and almost heretical: the market responds to the sum of individual, private, unaccountable desires, rather than to self-conscious collective decisions...

...Among those I interviewed, "old-fashioned" thinking frequently helped people think critically about American capitalism, but often at the cost of quite illiberal views on homosexuality, pornography, and abortion...

...Sandra O'Connor's confirmation hearings last summer point to this tension...

...A new organization, People for the American Way, formed to combat what it calls the Religious New Right, articulates these implications well: it "stands for pluralism, diversity, tolerance of differing opinions...

...Other people had escaped from the rigidities of old moral codes but had lost all ways of asserting transcendent, objective standards that would have helped them resist relativistic ideas and judge the values that are institutionalized in American economic life...

...In this context, we take a public principle so seriously that we are willing to outlaw private agreements, entered into voluntarily and beneficial to all concerned parties...

...We argue about particular ethical issues: nuclear weapons, Affirmative Action, homosexuality...

...In practice, then, it is hard to pass judgment on the actions of another person...

...2) We ought to apply general values to the situations we confront rather than blindly following 483 specific rules...

...It is also a mistake to say that abortion is a purely private matter...

...Most of the economic conservatives I interviewed took this position, favoring the rights of private enterprise, because they saw them as a form of freedom...

...But in fact the assumption that all moral decisions are relative and subjective, while it is progressive when applied to such issues as homosexual rights and abortion, reinforces conservative views about economic life...

...Probably few Americans are anarchistic enough to believe that things could or should be otherwise...

...Still, there are shared and pervasive assumptions...

...American Protestantism, in particular, has contained this tension from the outset...

...Everyone, of course, realizes that economic life necessarily involves constraint: most of us work with others, and under external control...

...There is, however, another side to the story...

...Therefore, liberals may be able to value private choice in many spheres of life and argue for liberal economic policies, without great inconsistency...

...While the assumptions I have just described seem dominant, there are still some people—often pejoratively called "moralistic" or "self-righteous"—who think they know some universally valid rules, and that they have the right to question others' ethical decisions...

...Often, however, the left fails to do that...

...3) Sometimes people speak in ways that seem to be based on a far more extreme assumption—the relativistic view that right and wrong can be established only in relation to the values held by a particular person or community and have no objective status beyond these limits...

...If we fail to think about these tensions, and to articulate a basis for our positions on issues such as abortion—a basis that is consistent with how we think about economic life—we may well reinforce values of private choice that we want to undermine...

...A less explicit but perhaps even more important influence of modernist ethics can be seen in the assumptions most Americans make when they think about the choices consumers make in the marketplace...

...1) People have to make their own, individual decisions, dictated by conscience, when confronting ethical issues...

...In interviews I have conducted researching the social implications of Christian faith in America today, I frequently encountered four assumptions that tended to go together and to be used in similar ways when the people I interviewed talked about political issues...

...How can we agree on purposes 484 beyond maximizing individual well-being, or decide what means are ethically legitimate (not just technically effective) for achieving these purposes...

...Conversely, old-fashioned, moralistic thinking has progressive potentials to which liberals and socialists need to pay more attention...

...Such decisions express our individual tastes and needs...

...They often assumed that there are ethical absolutes that ought to govern economic life: that profits should be limited...

...All our major institutions, of course, presuppose that we act according to specific rules, that we are not relativistic in practice, coerce people (if necessary) to do what is required of them, and hold people accountable for their decisions...

...But we also make assumptions about the nature of judgments about right and wrong, and especially about whether ethical standards are absolute or relative, objective or subjective, a public or a private matter...

...In the first place, relativistic and subjectivistic assumptions tend to impoverish public life by inhibiting people from applying ethical values to the question of how collective—and particularly economic —life should be organized...

...Among those I interviewed, it gave strong support to values of tolerance and diversity...

...In order to decide if their actions are ethically right, we have to pay attention to the needs, capacities, and circumstances of particular individuals...

...this impulse has given Protestantism its socially dynamic but often missionarizing and coercive tone...

...Among the people I interviewed, those with relatively old-fashioned styles of ethical thinking often seemed to be less vulnerable to the influences of relativistic economic assumptions...

...On the one hand, Protestants have often felt called upon to make the world correspond better to God's will...

...Furthermore, if one thinks that ideally people should have complete autonomy in their decisions and do not owe each other any accounting for them, one can easily conclude that there should be few mandatory public constraints on what people do in the economic domain...

...that some things (health care and housing, for instance) should be provided on a nonprofit basis...

...Whenever people describe other people's actions or public policies as "morally wrong" or say that we need to "take a stand" on some issue, they are implicitly making assumptions contrary to the "modern" ones just described...

...Their parallel is especially interesting because much of the movement to abolish slavery, like the antiabortion movement, was religiously motivated...

...So it would be better to articulate a persuasive moral argument, based on widely shared principles, to the effect that abortions are often justified...

...Such views are certainly not a socialist program, but they indicate that people have a vision of social justice, want to subordinate the workings of the market to collectively agreed-upon ethical principles, and are willing to sacrifice some individual autonomy in economic matters...

...I have interviewed many evangelicals who draw on this idea and take as relativistic a position as any secularist, in spite of their theological conservatism...

...or "you can live your life any way you want—that's your decision...

...Many felt government regulation of economic life to be a restriction on individual freedom, and some even argued for charity over welfare-state programs as a way to let sharing be a genuinely ethical choice...

...people thinking this way were liberal on some issues but conservative on others...

...Protestants, on the other hand, have been strongly influenced by the idea that each person is accountable only to God and to his or her conscience, and can receive guidance in matters of faith and ethics directly from God...

...The issues about ethics I have here discussed can be deeply troubling for the left...

...Similarly, many expressed reluctance to pass judgment on homosexuals...

...Can we even see collective institutions as more than unfortunate makeshifts...

...For socialists, the problems are more severe, because we usually want economic life to be a public arena, organized by self-conscious collective decisions...

...there are restrictions on practical choices, spelled out in the criminal code, but in the realm of opinions and activities that don't violate the law, we are to pass no judgments on one another...

...After all, socialism is in many ways quite a moralistic view of life...

...Whereas the first view I described asserts only that we have to follow the light our conscience gives us, and not that there are no objectively right and wrong actions, this view asserts both...

...To the extent that we think in this way, we apply our ethical ideals only to private life and our one-to-one relationships with others, and not to the public domain...

...When we hear people say that value judgments "are just a matter of opinion," or are subjective (in contrast to facts, taken to be objective), we are hearing relativistic assumptions...

...But on "modern" ethical assumptions, these features of collective life could not be justified except on the crassest practical basis, as a necessary if unfortunate means of attaining our ends as individuals...

...They go against the more old-fashioned view that God gave us specific, absolute rules to live by that are known to the community...

...Of course, nobody means such statements literally...

...it's not my right to say how others should live...

...Religious freedom and civil liberties in general benefit from the influence of "modern" ethical assumptions...

...No human authority can reliably guide us as individuals, and sometimes we may have to disobey even the most legitimate authorities...

...Actually, I doubt that many of us really believe this: if we were making a personal decision about whether to have an abortion, most of us would probably at least think about ethical issues...

...our legitimacy in making this argument may be undermined if we argue that abortion is a purely private matter...