Moral Relativism: Does it Matter?

I have just returned from the AALS (American Association of Law Schools) meeting in Washington
where I was a member of a panel considering the state of legal theory at the beginning of a new
century . I gave my standard stump speech (called "Theory Minimalism"), which always makes
the same three points: 1) if by theory you mean the attaining of a perspective unattached to
any local or partisan concerns but providing a vantage point from which local and partisan
and concerns can be clarified and ordered, the theory quest will always fail because no such
perspective is or could be available; 2) the unavailability of that supra-contextual is in no
way disabling because in its absence you will not be adrift and groundless; rather you will be

grounded in and by the same everyday practices--complete with authoritative exemplars,

understood goals, canons of evidence, shared histories--that gave you a habitation before you
began your fruitless quest for a theory; and 3) nothing follows from 1) and 2); knowing that
resources of everyday life are all you have and knowing too that such resources are historical
and therefore revisable will neither help you to identify them nor teach you to rely on them with
a certain skeptical reserve; the lesson of 1) and 2) goes nowhere; if grand theories provide no
guidance (because they are so general as to be empty), the realization that grand theories provide
no guidance doesn't provide any guidance either. End of story, end of theory as an interesting
topic. I like this argument because no one else does. Those on the right don't like it because they
have a stake in believing that without the foundations of fixed and absolute verities, the world will
go to hell in a hand basket. Those on the left don't like it because they have a stake in believing
that in a world where truths are always being revised and authorities dislodged, we can sweep old
structures away and begin from scratch to build the just society. This means that I am never in
danger of persuading everyone or even many; and that means that I'll never have to give up the
argument because there will always be those who don't get it and complain (as did two members
of the audience) either that I have undermined certainty and stability, or that I haven't.

Be relativism I mean that the only way we can discover and test moral truth is by making use of the resources available to us in our time and place. This does not exclude the possibility that some moral beliefs so derived may be true, i. e., reflect an objective moral order. It does mean that we cannot be sure which beliefs, if any, qualify in this regard. This leads to a pragmatism in which we seek those beliefs that are most convincing and that offer the best hope of attaining the best possible life for ourselves and others in a just society.

Moral Relativism:Does it Matter?

Kenneth Cauthen