This talk is about moral relativism and its relationship to social and political life.

First, I'm going to try to explain what relativism is.

Second, I'm going to make some remarks concerning what people are relativists about.

Third, I'll say a lot of things about relativism about morality,

i.e. moral relativism, including why we don't need it.

Finally, I'll wrap things up with a thought about why life is better without relativism.

So this is the outline. Relativism.

Relativism, roughly speaking, is the idea that there isn't an absolute truth that's the same for everyone, but instead something is true for one person but not necessarily for another.

So for example, someone might say, maybe it's true

for you that sex should be reserved for marriage, but it's not true for me. Or for another example,

someone might say, maybe it's true for you that there is no God, but for me there is a God.

Now right away, we have to be careful not to get tripped up by language.

Sometimes in contemporary English,

these are just a way of expressing the fact that people don't agree.

So someone might say something like this.

For the Greek philosopher Plato, humans have a soul that survives death,

but for the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, there is no soul at all.

And all that they would mean when they said such a thing

is this. Plato believes that humans have a soul that survives death, and Hobbs believes that

humans have no soul. Someone who said this would not actually be asserting that one thing was

really true for Hobbserting that one thing was

really true for Hobbs while another thing was really true

...