Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

No doubt, regular readers of this blog would greet the proclamation in the title of this post with shouts of joy. What a thrill it would be to learn that our best and brightest philosophers – those to whom we entrust the education of our young – had done away with definitively the idea that reason cannot ground moral judgments. Well, I have good news for you: According to Robert Miller’s recent post at First Things: On the Square, relativism is dead – at least in the academy! It’s just that too many Catholic thinkers haven’t yet gotten the memo. Miller, in the post linked to above, takes to task one such Catholic thinker: Bishop Giampaolo Crepaldi, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, who recently issued a screed against relativism. In Miller’s opinion, such unseemly talk about the pressing threat of relativism amounts to tilting at windmills. Relativism, in Miller’s opinion, was dead 50 years ago. It was shot down definitively by the analytic philosophers. To be more philosophically precise, it was emotivism that was definitively undermined, and (the tone of Miller’s blog posts might imply) no one who knows anything about anything has ever looked back. Of course, leave it to the Catholic thinkers – including presumably the Pope, who famously declared war against the “dictatorship of relativism” – not to know anything about anything!

Miller’s point, ultimately, is that Catholic thinkers need to be more precise. It is not relativism that threatens society, in his opinion, but various forms of moral/ethical theory that seek to ground moral action in something less universal than what traditional Catholic moral theory would do. Thus, we should speak out against utilitarianism, consequentialism – or even emotivism, if it were still alive and kicking – but not relativism. Moral relativism, as intimated above, is the idea that we cannot reason about what is morally good. Emotivists, utilitarians and consequentialists all assume the contrary. They all, in fact, construct some rational theory about the moral good. They are thus not relativists. For definitions of all these positions, consult Miller’s posts (in addition to the above link, see also here).

Of course, I exaggerated a bit in the first paragraph. I have little doubt that Miller is not faulting the education in moral philosophy and theology that such eminent prelates as Crepaldi and the Holy Father acquired. He realizes no doubt that among the “first things” (no pun intended) these men would have learned in the seminary was the difference between utilitarianism, consequentialism, and all other sorts of theories about moral action that have come down the pike. Miller’s call is simply for greater technical clarity.

Given all of this, I would nevertheless submit that Miller overstates the case. There is a deeper contradiction between Catholic moral theory and all of these modern positions that would enable one to label them as ultimately “relativist” from the Catholic perspective. It comes down to the matter of ultimate premises: for Catholic moral theory, good action accords at bottom with God’s eternal Reason and is thus universalizable and discoverable. All of the other positions that Miller lists stop short of this idea when it comes to ultimate premises. These positions all hold that there is an element of irrationality to moral discourse, at bottom. Thus, the good cannot ultimately be reasoned about. The idea of universalizable, discoverable, reasonable goodness can be exposed as a fraud, from the perspective of these modern theories, but it cannot be affirmed by reason. Thus, proponents of these various positions all suffer from relativism at the deepest level of their positions.

Besides, contra Miller, emotivism is not dead in the academy. In support of this claim, I would simply refer you to the work of the eminent Catholic moral philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre argues in part, in his seminal work After Virtue, that even analytic philosophers – who supposedly did away with emotivism – can’t shake the sense that, ultimately, all of our moral claims come down to personal preference. Analytic philosophers may indeed make arguments in support of their positions, but their arguments come down to, in the end (according to MacIntyre), appeals to emotion. Thus they are implicitly emotivists. It should be added that emotivism is the closest thing to explicitly stated relativism that has ever been propounded in the universities. Emotivists might, in fact, reason about where our sense of the good comes from. In this regard, they are not relativists. But when it comes to identifying the good, they are quite relativistic, locating it in our subjective preferences and not in a participation in eternal Reason.

And, in the end, none of this is to say anything about relativism in the culture at-large, to which our prelates direct their exhortations. People may in fact, as Miller asserts, argue in bars about the moral good and so assume by their actions that relativism is untrue. But, if asked to justify a moral claim, they would ultimately make appeal to some deep irrationality. So, please, Holy Father, continue to fight against the shifting winds of relativism – you have our full support!