So who am I to judge?

Politics and Moral Relativism.

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, moral

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.

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, this is 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 is this. Plato

believes that humans have a soul that survives death, and Hobbs believes the humans have no soul.

Someone who said this would not actually be asserting that one thing was really true for Hobbs,

while another thing was really true for Plato.

They could say that thing, that big quote that I gave, they could say it while believing that

Plato was right or believing that Hobbs was right. So right at the outset, we need to make sure

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