(Profile Books, £10.99)
Profile's "Big Ideas" series has hit the nail on the head with this book. Moral relativism is one of the dominant ideas in the liberal west. Essentially, it argues that there are no such things as universal moral truths; and that what is "right" and "wrong" can only be understood in a particular social or individual context. It's a theory that exerts a tremendous pressure (both good and baleful) on modern life. Yet, outside academia, it's not much debated. It's almost as if moral relativism (let's call it "MR" for short) has become excluded from its own remit and turned into a lonely but unarguable moral absolute.
As Steven Lukes points out, one of MR's crucial fault-lines is that, by its very nature, it contains the seed of its own destruction. All you have to do is say, "but moral relativism is a purely local, cultural phenomenon with no more absolute authority than, say, moral absolutism" and it vanishes in a puff of logic. Yet there is no prospect of MR being rolled back any time soon—at least not in the western liberal mind. And there are plenty of reasons why that is a good thing. MR stops us looking down on the other fellow. It prevents us talking of "savages" and should, at least, give missionaries of every stripe some pause before they foist, at gun or hell-point, their own values on others. It stops us pillorying homosexuals or burning the temples of the heterodox. It should, overall, make us kinder, gentler people.
But it also leads to a world in which the only unassailable moral good is health-and-safety, as well as to indecision and, often, catastrophe. Scratch a social worker who has left a chaotic and incompetent family to its own harmful devices, and you'll probably find a committed moral relativist afraid of "imposing values" at odds with "other cultural norms." Worse, pit a culture devoted to MR against one which has no such scruples and there's trouble ahead. The violent division between radical Islam and the west is not so much a battle between gods as between religious absolutism and agnostic relativism. A culture which knows it is right has little time for one which believes that there is no one "right," merely a range of cultural moralities, all with an equal claim to respect.
Under such circumstances, MR is the moral equivalent of pacifism. Pacifism, while admirable, will always fall to violent attacks. If I do not fight back when another man tries to kill me, I will surely die. And there's no comfort in the old argument that "they can't kill us all." As history has shown again and again, they don't have to kill us all. They only have to kill enough of us to take political control.
Lukes takes tremendous, perhaps excessive, pains to examine every possible derivation of MR. The all-star cast is out in force: Aristotle, Chomsky, Diderot, Durkheim, Engels, Feyerabend, Habermas, Hobbes, Hume, Kuhn, Lévi-Strauss, Mill, Nietzsche, Rorty. So much so, in fact, that Lukes's own position is often strangled at birth by the meticulous weight of citation.
Personally, I'd favour two primary lineages for MR. The first is those 20th century anthropological revisionists who deployed relativism to counter the example of their Victorian antecedents—the gentlemen-amateurs who went "out there" to poke fun at the outlandish darkies before knocking them into (properly betrousered, God-fearing) shape. The other, which Lukes doesn't debate, is modernity itself, and in particular modernity's bastardly descent from Romanticism. For modernity's driving ethic is individualism. And if the individual is paramount, and the fulfilment of individual potential the highest good, then relativism surely follows. Just as my job is to fulfil Me, yours is to fulfil You, and neither of us can denounce the other's morality.
Globally, the current elephant in the room is America, land of the Great "I Am." America's posture of internal relativism—that everyone has the right to live the American dream to the best of their abilities and desires—is underpinned by a powerful external absolutism, which has led to to such curiously counter-relativistic activities as the imposition of freedom and democracy abroad by overwhelming violent force. Lukes, to his credit, approaches this problem head-on, setting Samuel Huntington's assertion that "Western belief in the universality of western culture suffers three problems: it is false, it is immoral and it is dangerous" against the persuasive argument that "the idea that values come in stable, integrated, mutually exclusive configurations called 'cultures' is seriously mistaken… and is both retrograde and dangerous as a guide to political action."
But I am not. And Lukes probably wouldn't do it anyway. Moral Relativism provides a comprehensive tool-kit for the general reader to address the idea itself and its consequences and, though it's not a rapid bedside read, it is most certainly an opportunity to get a wrench on some of the more intractable ethical and political plumbing of our times.
