Stumble it!A Generation of Damned Relativists
posted in Philosophy, Society by themaiden |Honestly, it is the first round of freshman, mostly, college papers I’ve seen in years. The subject is relativism. Of the papers I’ve seen so far, easily one in ten argue…
No.
Much too generous.
Start over.
Of the papers I’ve seen so far easily one in ten contains assertions in support of ethical relativism. Some of them contain quite strong assertions in favor of it. What is even more bizarre is that most of these defenders of relativism defend individual relativism, not cultural, and most tow the same basic line– that we can’t decide who is right or wrong so we just act how we feel like and, effectively, settle things by force.
I’d love to quote some of these papers but that would be wrong. I’m not even going to identify the school or the class title or the section number… or even the damned state. But ya know what? If I did quote from these papers, these damned relativists would be telling me that I shouldn’t have done so– telling me that my decision was wrong.!
Arghhh…..
I’d love to walk into that class and tell them that I’d posted every single paper online, complete with sarcasm, ridicule and whatever other snark I can manage. It isn’t that I’d actually like to do it. I’d just like to tell them that I’d done it and then listen to the whines of “that’s just not right” and “that’s wrong, man” and “you violated this or that principle or something”. Then I’d explain that if in fact they are relativists– individual relativists– as they argued in their papers then I am justified in posting their papers online. I am justified for no other reason than simply that I felt like it was the right thing to do.
I’m sure the complaints would quickly shift from individual relativism, which most argued for, to cultural relativism as they start to appeal to university policy or state law. I could then point out that most of them rejected cultural relativism as strongly as they embraced individual relativism. “People should do what they want even if the culture disagrees because I don’t stuff in my culture so cultural relativism is wrong” or some such teen angst fueled rot.
So, to all the relativists I’ll likely never get to confront directly, “Imagine that you are walking down the street late at night, someone grabs you and rapes you brutally. Can you honestly say that that rapist is justified in committing that rape just because that rapist is physically capable of doing so?” Is that really what it is about? “Oh, yeah, I don’t like the rape and all but you know people have the right to believe what they want and do what they want and stuff and we can’t judge anybody cause we all have our own opinions and they aren’t the same and hopefully, you know, somebody would stop the rape but like nobody has to unless they want to but if they felt strongly about it they would.”
Jesus Fucking Christ! I don’t have a glass-half-full attitude toward life, the universe and everything in general, and I am even less optimistic about humanity, but this crap is making me suicidal.
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