Anti-Climacus

LINK: Joe Carter turns things around nicely:

"Too often we assume that because we are on the right side of the absolute/relative moral divide that we are exempt from having to understand why the “blue state secularists” believe as they do. We don’t have to accept relativism as legitimate, but dismissing it as intellectually disreputable (as I regrettably tend to do) will not help us win hearts or change minds. Instead, we must make the necessary effort to dig deep and find the root of their relativism. Such a task won't be easy and will certainly require more than a dismissive, reductive analysis. Since all Red state absolutists don’t have the same reason for believing in moral absolutes, we shouldn't expect Blue state secularists to all share the same reasons for believing in moral relativism."

I'm certainly as guilty of this as anyone, though I'd like to believe I have a reasonable defense for taking that position--I tend to think that anyone*, pushed sufficiently, has some moral lines they will not cross for any reason, and some they're prepared to cross for a sufficiently good reason. I think it's mostly been a failure on the part of moral realists to focus on the extreme cases and the absolutes of moral law and not articulate a really good decision-making mechanism which is consistent across cases.

*There are some exceptions, of course, and it has to be the task of the moral realist to eventually convince these people, but it seems to me that there's a much larger audience who have adopted the forms but not the beliefs of relativism, and this group could be swayed with a better-argued moral realism.