Making An Effort To Understand
David Wong illustrates moral relativism with some telling examples.
Here though, accepting this assessment of objectivism, I make a distinction between two types of objectivist thinkers. The first get their thinking from and through others. They are indoctrinated as children to view morality in a particular way and they basically take this with them to the grave. Usually in conjunction with one or another religious dogma, or one or another political ideology.
The key factor being this: that they spend little or no time actually questioning what others have provided for them in the way of living a virtuous life. With religion, this often begins at early age. With ideology it can begin later in life. But, once having anchored “I” to the objectivist font, it’s almost never really questioned in depth.
Others though [for whatever personal reasons] do challenge what they are told by authority figures. They wonder if they can, in fact, “think it all through” and come up with a moral assessment “on their own”. You find these folks all the time in places like this. They concoct these truly elaborate “philosophies of life”. Intellectual contraptions bursting at the seams with all manner of deontological assumptions. Some rooted in God and religion, others in more secular components. But everything gets all tied together in their own rendition of the “Ontological/Teleological Analysis.”
Here however there is a further distinction that can be made. Some objectivists argue that not only is there a clear cut right and a clear cut wrong with regard to conflicting goods, but that right and wrong here are universally applicable to/in all contexts. Thus abortion is always immoral – historically, culturally, experientially.
Others however argue that while there is either the right or the wrong thing to do, it depends on a rational understanding of any particular set of circumstances. Thus here abortion may be objectively moral, while there it is not.
Which then becomes more improbable to demonstrate?