This evening I'm going to talk about the question of moral relativism and talk a little bit about how are sort of the way in which we think about political disagreement is sometimes thought to be a kind of way to defend or affirm moral relativism,

but I wanna make a case that's actually not the case.

So before I could get into the arguments

for moral relativism, I wanna make a couple of distinctions.

You should all have a sheet that has two sides to it.

You know, when we talk about ethics or morality,

I see this sometimes in my students at Baylor,

and I've seen it throughout the years

just teaching at different institutions.

And sometimes people confuse moral claims with preference claims.

So when I say, for example, it is wrong to torture children for fun, which is a moral claim,

it's really not a response to it to say something like, yeah, but I like to torture children for fun.

That is, when we make preference claims, we're simply announcing to other people what we like or dislike.

But oftentimes moral claims have a different sort of,

what is it, tug in our hearts in comparison to preference claims. In fact, oftentimes,

if you think about it, the sort of claims of morality are sometimes contrary to our preference claims. So the two examples I have

here on the notes, I like vanilla ice cream better than chocolate ice cream. It's a

it would be weird to say no that's wrong, right? Because preference can simply announce to people

what is in fact something that people like.

Now, people could actually like things that are bad.

There's no doubt about that.

But when somebody makes a claim like, for example,

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