This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

The following statement seems uncontroversial.

It's wrong to torture children.

It's not difficult to get people to sign up to such a proposition.

Yet, under the influence of various strains of postmodernism, many now also insist that morality

is relative.

And since morality is relative, such people often add, we should withhold criticism of those who don't share our values.

For example, we in the West may believe in various human rights, but that's just our value system.

It's not grounded in any form of

objectivity. Paul Bergosian is based at New York University.

Moll Relativist, he argues, are in the grip of a fundamental confusion.

Paul Bagozian, welcome to Flossi Bites.

Very good to be here.

We're focusing on moral relativism.

Could you just say what that is?

I'll try. I think people have had various different ideas by what they're going to mean by

relativism in general, more relativism in particular. I tend to think of it as people striving to occupy a position that is halfway between

moral absolutism on the one hand and moral nihilism or moral limitivism on the other,

where you drop all serious use of moral or normative vocabulary.

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