Who Am I to Judge? Politics and the Problem of Moral Relativism | Prof. Michael Gorman

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on February 16, 2022 at Regent University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Michael Gorman is professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America. He has doctorates in philosophy and theology. He has authored over thirty academic papers and a book entitled Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His main interests are metaphysics, human nature, and ethics.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:04.0	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:12.0	This talk is about moral relativism and its relationship to social and political life.
0:24.6	First, I'm going to explain what relativism is. Second, I'm going to make some remarks concerning what people are relativists about.
0:30.6	Third, I'll say a lot of things about relativism about morality, moral relativism, including why we don't need it.
0:40.3	Finally, I'll wrap things up with a thought about why life is better without relativism.
0:47.3	Relativism, roughly speaking, is the idea that there is no absolute truth that's the same for everyone,
0:58.0	but instead something is true for one person, but not necessarily for another.
1:05.0	The opposite of relativism might be called absolutism if you can remove from that word the political connotations of tyranny
1:14.3	or just the nasty sound of being way too dogmatic. An example of relativism might be if someone said,
1:23.2	maybe it's true for you that sex should be reserved for marriage, but it's not true for me.
1:29.3	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.
1:38.2	Now, right away, we have to be careful not to get tripped up by language.
1:42.8	Sometimes, in contemporary English, expressions like that are just a way
1:48.4	of expressing the fact that people don't agree. So someone might say something like this. For the Greek
1:58.1	philosopher Plato, humans have a soul that survives death, but for the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, there is no soul at all.
2:07.6	And all that they would mean, if they said that, was the following. Plato believes that humans have a soul that survives death, and Hobbs believes that humans have no soul.
2:20.1	Someone who said this would not actually be asserting that one thing was true for Hobbs and another thing was true for Plato.
2:29.0	They could say that whole thing about Hobbs and Plato while agreeing with Plato or while agreeing with Hobbs.
2:37.5	So right at the outset, I just want to say we have to be on the lookout.
2:43.0	We need to make sure when we're really talking about relativism and when we are using words that sound like a discussion of relativism, but are really just a way of talking about the boring old fact that people sometimes disagree.
2:59.6	Now, actually, relativism rejects the idea that people disagree. If I say it's true for me that God exists, and you say it's true for me that God exists and you say it's true for you that
	...

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