Warrior-Mentor
11-28-2009, 11:05
Applied Moral Relativism
by DL Adams
In the dark halls of denial and confusion once known as the learning and planning centers of great public and private institutions across this great land, it is believed—altogether incorrectly—that Moral Relativism has no victims, only beneficiaries.
We have recently seen a jihadist in the US military commit heinous unspeakable crimes of murder and treason at Fort Hood, Texas. He was allowed to commit treason and murder because those in positions of authority allowed him to do it preferring to avoid the appearance of a negative opinion and concern about jihad (and necessarily the “religion of peace/Islam” from which jihad comes) and treason to protecting the lives and security of American service men and women. This is a disastrous failure on the part of many Americans in positions of grave responsibility. This horror must be laid entirely at the feet of the failed philosophy of Moral Relativism and its ugly sibling multiculturalism. Most horrific of all is the fact that this appalling crime at Fort Hood was so readily preventable.
Equivalence is the essence of Moral Relativism; Hasan at Fort Hood was allowed to do his evil business because his expressions of jihad intent and murderous feelings towards non-Muslims were simply “his opinion”, and nothing more. Even expressions of outright treason by Hasan evinced no definitive reaction from military authorities.
If we have no standards of belief, no accepted concepts of truth and value, then any new ideology that reaches our shores is considered by moral relativists to be as valid as the host culture and perhaps even superior simply because it is “different”.
Moral relativists have no basis upon which to make moral or ethical judgments and certainly cannot/must not express any opinions that might denigrate or criticize another’s ideology or belief system regardless of the moral or ethical quality of that system. Moral relativists, multiculturalists, and the politically correct are all “birds of a feather” deluding themselves and others that their openness and radical tolerance, even for those with outright offensive ideas, makes for a happier world. They are wrong; Hasan at Fort Hood is one of many proofs.
When all fundamental concepts of “value” and importance, and even the idea of the dichotomy that results from better/worse, good/rotten, intelligent/stupid, enlightened/ignorant are utterly abandoned, denied, and scorned what is left is moral and ethical equivalence. A society that has no idea what it stands for, what it believes in, what it means for citizens to be part of the society itself—is doomed. [COMMENT: Sun Tsu: "Know yourself."] A society without core ideas is a society destined to failure.
Such a society of radical tolerance has no moral core, no ethical foundation and is bereft of intellectual honesty even to the extreme of forgiving a traitor his treason as if such ideas are merely opinion and completely victimless. We know that this is not so. Moral relativism creates victims not co-prosperity. Our failure to acknowledge good/evil, loyalty/treason, right/wrong, best/rotten, allowed Hasan to commit his reprehensible crimes at Fort Hood.
We are a society adrift, it is clear, because we have disavowed the foundations upon which our society was built. The preventable mass murder at Fort Hood is but one illustration of the victim-creating debacle that is Moral Relativism. Of course, this obvious negation of the value of Moral Relativism hasn’t prevented us from adopting this failed concept as the basis upon which we interact with others, at home and abroad. Fort Hood is the culmination of Moral Relativism in our culture; it is a failed and repellent philosophy that must be abandoned.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines Moral Relativism as something that one accuses another of, rather than something to which one proudly admits. This alone identifies Moral Relativism as an inherent negative, and not something that most reasonable people admit to proudly or at all. Reasonable people know that some cultures are better than others, but haven’t the courage to say. Political correctness is the strong arm of the intellectual failure that is Moral Relativism and Multiculturalism.
And what if someone who speaks the truth is described in unfavorable terms? Who cares? The truth supersedes all of this hokum fake Utopian philosophy bunk. The truth requires no defense but itself.
Most often it is associated with an empirical thesis that there are deep and widespread moral disagreements and a metaethical thesis that the truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to some group of persons. Sometimes ‘Moral Relativism’ is connected with a normative position about how we ought to think about or act towards those with whom we morally disagree, most commonly that we should tolerate them.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the titan of moral clarity and Soviet prisoner of conscience and author of Gulag Archipelago, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, was a prescient man. He warned us about the coming failure of our society back in 1978 in an address at Harvard University (oh, how that institution has failed in its mission!).
The theme of Solzhenitsyn’s address was a warning to the West that a rejection of definitive truths is the foundation of a society’s decline and eventual destruction. He identified the abandonment of the concept of evil and the rise of “humanism” that today is Moral Relativism and post-modernism as the ugly egg from which failed cultures are born.
Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature; the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society. (Solzhenitsyn, address at Harvard, 1978, see citation below.)
Without a firm concept of societal identity and a definitive understanding of and belief in right and wrong, good and evil and similar dichotomies the West cannot succeed over time and will fall to more absolutist ideas due to a lack of moral willpower.
And yet — no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal. (Solzhenitsyn, Harvard address, 1978)
We saw with great pride a rush of enlistments after the jihad attacks of 9/11. We know that our heroes still reside in our country, but they are not the standard, they are not the main—they are standard bearers of the idea of self-sacrifice and service that requires a firm understanding of right and wrong and the courage to identify both and take requisite actions. The society from which these brave soldiers sprang has gone in a different direction than they. Our soldiers are our guide, not our politically correct leaders in broken institutions that refuse to defend themselves and us for fear of causing offense to someone real or imagined. Certainly, we have lost our moral willpower.
Facing such a danger, with such historical values in your past, at such a high level of realization of freedom and apparently of devotion to freedom, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself? (Solzhenitsyn, Harvard address, 1978)
by DL Adams
In the dark halls of denial and confusion once known as the learning and planning centers of great public and private institutions across this great land, it is believed—altogether incorrectly—that Moral Relativism has no victims, only beneficiaries.
We have recently seen a jihadist in the US military commit heinous unspeakable crimes of murder and treason at Fort Hood, Texas. He was allowed to commit treason and murder because those in positions of authority allowed him to do it preferring to avoid the appearance of a negative opinion and concern about jihad (and necessarily the “religion of peace/Islam” from which jihad comes) and treason to protecting the lives and security of American service men and women. This is a disastrous failure on the part of many Americans in positions of grave responsibility. This horror must be laid entirely at the feet of the failed philosophy of Moral Relativism and its ugly sibling multiculturalism. Most horrific of all is the fact that this appalling crime at Fort Hood was so readily preventable.
Equivalence is the essence of Moral Relativism; Hasan at Fort Hood was allowed to do his evil business because his expressions of jihad intent and murderous feelings towards non-Muslims were simply “his opinion”, and nothing more. Even expressions of outright treason by Hasan evinced no definitive reaction from military authorities.
If we have no standards of belief, no accepted concepts of truth and value, then any new ideology that reaches our shores is considered by moral relativists to be as valid as the host culture and perhaps even superior simply because it is “different”.
Moral relativists have no basis upon which to make moral or ethical judgments and certainly cannot/must not express any opinions that might denigrate or criticize another’s ideology or belief system regardless of the moral or ethical quality of that system. Moral relativists, multiculturalists, and the politically correct are all “birds of a feather” deluding themselves and others that their openness and radical tolerance, even for those with outright offensive ideas, makes for a happier world. They are wrong; Hasan at Fort Hood is one of many proofs.
When all fundamental concepts of “value” and importance, and even the idea of the dichotomy that results from better/worse, good/rotten, intelligent/stupid, enlightened/ignorant are utterly abandoned, denied, and scorned what is left is moral and ethical equivalence. A society that has no idea what it stands for, what it believes in, what it means for citizens to be part of the society itself—is doomed. [COMMENT: Sun Tsu: "Know yourself."] A society without core ideas is a society destined to failure.
Such a society of radical tolerance has no moral core, no ethical foundation and is bereft of intellectual honesty even to the extreme of forgiving a traitor his treason as if such ideas are merely opinion and completely victimless. We know that this is not so. Moral relativism creates victims not co-prosperity. Our failure to acknowledge good/evil, loyalty/treason, right/wrong, best/rotten, allowed Hasan to commit his reprehensible crimes at Fort Hood.
We are a society adrift, it is clear, because we have disavowed the foundations upon which our society was built. The preventable mass murder at Fort Hood is but one illustration of the victim-creating debacle that is Moral Relativism. Of course, this obvious negation of the value of Moral Relativism hasn’t prevented us from adopting this failed concept as the basis upon which we interact with others, at home and abroad. Fort Hood is the culmination of Moral Relativism in our culture; it is a failed and repellent philosophy that must be abandoned.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines Moral Relativism as something that one accuses another of, rather than something to which one proudly admits. This alone identifies Moral Relativism as an inherent negative, and not something that most reasonable people admit to proudly or at all. Reasonable people know that some cultures are better than others, but haven’t the courage to say. Political correctness is the strong arm of the intellectual failure that is Moral Relativism and Multiculturalism.
And what if someone who speaks the truth is described in unfavorable terms? Who cares? The truth supersedes all of this hokum fake Utopian philosophy bunk. The truth requires no defense but itself.
Most often it is associated with an empirical thesis that there are deep and widespread moral disagreements and a metaethical thesis that the truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to some group of persons. Sometimes ‘Moral Relativism’ is connected with a normative position about how we ought to think about or act towards those with whom we morally disagree, most commonly that we should tolerate them.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the titan of moral clarity and Soviet prisoner of conscience and author of Gulag Archipelago, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, was a prescient man. He warned us about the coming failure of our society back in 1978 in an address at Harvard University (oh, how that institution has failed in its mission!).
The theme of Solzhenitsyn’s address was a warning to the West that a rejection of definitive truths is the foundation of a society’s decline and eventual destruction. He identified the abandonment of the concept of evil and the rise of “humanism” that today is Moral Relativism and post-modernism as the ugly egg from which failed cultures are born.
Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature; the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society. (Solzhenitsyn, address at Harvard, 1978, see citation below.)
Without a firm concept of societal identity and a definitive understanding of and belief in right and wrong, good and evil and similar dichotomies the West cannot succeed over time and will fall to more absolutist ideas due to a lack of moral willpower.
And yet — no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal. (Solzhenitsyn, Harvard address, 1978)
We saw with great pride a rush of enlistments after the jihad attacks of 9/11. We know that our heroes still reside in our country, but they are not the standard, they are not the main—they are standard bearers of the idea of self-sacrifice and service that requires a firm understanding of right and wrong and the courage to identify both and take requisite actions. The society from which these brave soldiers sprang has gone in a different direction than they. Our soldiers are our guide, not our politically correct leaders in broken institutions that refuse to defend themselves and us for fear of causing offense to someone real or imagined. Certainly, we have lost our moral willpower.
Facing such a danger, with such historical values in your past, at such a high level of realization of freedom and apparently of devotion to freedom, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself? (Solzhenitsyn, Harvard address, 1978)