Anti-Climacus

RAMBLING: David on Cultural Relativism: absolutely right. I've been a moral realist for many years now, and I always find it kind of stupifying that most people aren't. C.S. Lewis wrote a fascinating book on (more or less) this topic, called The Abolition of Man, where he made at least two points that I think are worth considering when moral realists go up against relativists. First, as he spents about a quarter of the book demonstrating, morality is not relative: every culture worth mentioning prohibits murder, stealing, lying and impiety; and we would do well to note that anyone who wouldn't be willing to make these values universal in application (or see why it is critical that we make them universal, e.g. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights) is probably missing a vital component of their humanity.
But this, I think, is not a widely held position. Most people who support moral relativism are really trying to pull a bait-and-switch on moral realists: values are not universal, but we can still make value judgments that carry moral weight. The obvious question is how morality can mean anything without the weight it carries as a unalterable system of right and wrong; otherwise, does it not depend wholly on the caprice of human opinion? Why should we care, in that instance. Lewis pointed out that people who argue this actually want a moral regime not unlike the one moral realists deploy-- they just want to avoid the consequences that come of it, usually because they have allegiance to something else-- be it an ideology, a state or a political agenda-- before they have an allegiance to the equality of man.