Relativism Quotes - Page 3

• Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent.

  Peter Kreeft

  Absolutism, Want, Morality

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• I know of no civilization that tolerates or justifies violence, terrorism, or injustice. There is no civilization that justifies the killing of innocent people. Those who are invoking cultural relativism are really using that as an excuse for violating human rights and to put a cultural mask on the face of what they're doing.

  Shirin Ebadi

  Rights, Civilization, People

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, progressive.org. September 1, 2004.

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• I hate relativism. I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats. Surely, surely, no one but a relativist would drive a fiberglass powerboat.

  Jerry Fodor

  Hate, I Hate

  "Modularity of Mind". Book by Jerry Fodor, 1983.

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• Insularity is the foundation of ethnocentrism and intolerance; when you only know of those like yourself, it is easy to imagine that you are alone in the world or alone in being good and right in the world. Exposure to diversity, on the contrary, is the basis for relativism and tolerance; when you are forced to face and accept the Other as real, unavoidable, and ultimately valuable, you cannot help but see yourself and your 'truths' in a new - and trouble - way.

  David Eller

  Real, Diversity, Tolerance

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• I suffer the anthropological malady diagnosed by Le  vi- Strauss inTristes tropiques: I find it much more difficult to suspend value judgments about the society in which I normally reside than I do abroad. It takes physical and cultural distance to gain moral detachment and political noncommitment. Relativism implies a solid measure of indifference.

  Pierre L. van den Berghe

  Distance, Political, Suffering

  'From the Popocatepetl to the Limpopo', collected in Bennett Berger (ed) Authors of their Own Lives (1990).

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• Indeed, some secularists are so worried about Christianity, they think Christians are about as dangerous as Muslim terrorists. They get really worried when we don't invest our lives in this-worldly concerns. They look on us as unpredictable free agents. When we reject their relativism and make absolutist spiritual claims, they look at us as nervously as they would a terrorist with a suicide bomb strapped to his back. Of course, Christians are not into coercion in any form. But it is very hard to persuade secularists of that.

  Mark Dever

  Christian, Suicide, Spiritual

  Source: matthiasmedia.com

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• But all morality is of necessity shaped by context. I'm not talking relativism, no. To ignore the context of a decision is in fact immoral.

  Anne Rice

  Talking, Decision, Facts

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• For nearly a century, the moral relativism of science has given faith-based religion--that great engine of ignorance and bigotry--a nearly uncontested claim to being the only universal framework for moral wisdom. As a result, the most powerful societies on early spend their time debating issues like gay marriage when they should be focused on problems like nuclear proliferation, genocide, energy security, climate change, poverty, and failing schools.

  Sam Harris

  Powerful, School, Ignorance

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• In college, [Christian students] are assaulted by secular relativism, and if we don't prepare them, they will be like lambs led to slaughter.

  Charles Colson

  Christian, College, Lambs

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• Intellectuals resist faith longer because they can: where ordinary people are helpless before the light, intellectuals are clever enough to spin webs of darkness around their minds and hide in them. That's why only Ph.D.s believe any of the 100 most absurd ideas in the world such as Absolute Relativism, or the Objective Truth of Subjectivism, of the Meaningfulness of Meaninglessness and the Meaninglessness of Meaning, which is the best definition of Deconstructionism I know.

  Peter Kreeft

  Clever, Believe, Light

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• Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

  Walter Benjamin

  Book, Writing, People

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• What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that's very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God's sake, says that you can't have one law for everybody... that's stupid.

  Salman Rushdie

  Stupid, Thinking, Law

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• A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

  Conrad Black

  War, Taken, Quests

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• I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves.

  Peter Kreeft

  Giving, Catholic, Absolutism

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• What we are told of the inhabitants of Brazil, that they never die but of old age, is attributed to the tranquility and serenity of their climate; I rather attribute it to the tranquility and serenity of their souls, which are free from all passion, thought, or any absorbing and unpleasant labors. Those people spend their lives in an admirable simplicity and ignorance, without letters, without law, without king, without any manner of religion.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Kings, Ignorance, Passion

  Michel de Montaigne (1946). “The essays”

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• My version of relativism is pluralistic and attributes functions to morality that in combination with human nature place limits on what could count as a true morality. Unlike many other relativists, I do not hold that people are subject to a morality because they all belong to a certain group. That is, I don't hold that being a member of a group makes one's subject to some set of generally accepted norms. What is true is that others around us teach us morality and moral language, so they inevitably influence us.

  David Wong

  People, Morality, Language

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, seems to betray an underlying paradox. Differentpoints of view make sense, but only if there is a common co-ordinate system on which to plot them; yet the existence of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability.

  Donald Davidson

  Views, Plot, Common

  Donald Davidson (2001). “Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation: Philosophical Essays”, p.184, Oxford University Press

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• Conceptual relativism is a heady and exotic doctrine, or would be if we could make good sense of it. The trouble is, as so often in philosophy, it is hard to improve intelligibility while retaining the excitement.

  Donald Davidson

  Philosophy, Doctrine, Would Be

  Donald Davidson (2001). “Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation: Philosophical Essays”, p.183, Oxford University Press

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• There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. Thereis therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.

  Donald Davidson

  Giving Up, Ideas, Philosopher

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• Can an idea a notion as abstract as Relativism produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism.

  Jacques Barzun

  Philosophy, Ideas, Working Alone

  Jacques Barzun (1989). “The Culture We Deserve”, p.89, Wesleyan University Press

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• The most beautiful ape is ugly when compared to a human. The wisest human will seem like an ape when compared to a god with respect to wisdom, beauty, and everything else.

  Heraclitus

  Beautiful, Wisdom, Respect

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• The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.

  Lev Grossman

  Stars, Real, Ideas

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• we have made an extraordinary transition. From moral absolutes to moral relativism. ... Moral problems become medical ones and yesterday's sinners become today's patients.

  Ellen Goodman

  Yesterday, Transition, Today

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• Above all, creators remain drawn to the age-old paradoxes that philosophy grapples with [and]...that art occasionally resolves...the problem of the one and the many; unity and variety; determinism and freedom; mechanism and vitalism; good and evil; time and eternity; the plenum and the void; moral absolutism and relativism... These are the basic problems of human existence, and as far as we possibly can we arrange things to forget them.

  Frank Barron

  Art, Philosophy, Moral Absolutism

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• Why are people so concerned with relativism? If you look back in history, millions of people were killed because of someone's dogmatic views, but I do not remember anybody being killed due to the tolerance of difference, to relativism; ethically relativism does not seem to be such an awful thing, really.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Views, Differences, People

  Interview with Marcelo Dimentstein, Alberto Senderey, Andy Spokoiny and Shira Shnitzer, leatid.org. February 2009.

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