Some Like it Absolute

There is a rumour afoot both within the campuses of the Academy and beyond them that are no more any Absolutes. Any acceptance of absolute claims necessarily leads, it is further rumoured, to such terrible modes of thought and behaviour as dogmatism, intolerance, exclusivism, and arrogance. In order that we may better understand precisely what this rumour is about, let us question its propagators, and try to find out just what it is that they are trying to tell us.

(A) Are they making a 'universal' statement that nobody in the world believes anymore in Absolutes? Obviously, they cannot mean this. Not only do certain sections of the Islamic world continue to stand resolutely by a specific set of absolute beliefs, there are (a) parts of the world which still hold on to some version of Communism; (b) nations which are witnessing religious revivals which are based on definite absolute claims; and (c) groups of activists as diverse as ecologists, environmentalists, evangelical atheists, feminists, pro-abortionists, and developmental workers, whose respective stances are rooted in absolute views about the nature of humanity and its place in the world.

(B) So let us try again : are they making not a 'descriptive' but a 'normative' claim, that is, are they saying that nobody in the world should believe anymore in Absolutes? If this is indeed what their position is, three responses to it are possible.

(i) The propagators are putting forward the claim, X such that X : Nobody should put forward any Absolute views. Now either X is intended as an absolute claim or it is not. If it is not intended as such, then there is no reason why everyone should accept it, but if it is, the propagators have subverted their own position (by putting forward at least one Absolute view, namely X), and can be compared to the proverbial woodcutter sawing off the very branch that she is sitting on.

(ii) Secondly, much depends on what exactly is to be included under the category of Absolutes. Shall we give up Newton's law of gravitation, and a host of other laws in the physical and mathematical sciences, merely because they are postulated as covering, universally and absolutely, all spatio-temporal events?

(iii) 'Geo-politically' speaking, it is highly possible that these propagators belong to countries that have accepted the notion of 'separation of Church and State', and are founded on some version of 'secular nationalism'. Consequently, there is, once again, at least one claim Y, Y : 'Religion' and 'politics' must be kept separate, which they put forward as an absolute truth for all human beings.

There does not exist, then, sufficient reason to believe the wide-spread rumour that (a) there are no human beings, descriptively speaking, who believe in Absolutes, and (b) there should be no human beings, normatively speaking, who shall believe in Absolutes in the future. Let me now make the discussion more specific by bringing up the question of moral principles, for it is usually the question of 'morality' that rouses people's passions and induces them to draw swords on the Absolute Vs Non-Absolute debate. One of the most popular views in this connection seems to be what is called 'ethical relativism'. This can take several forms, but, generally speaking, its proponents argue that (i) there are no absolute moral truths, so that moral statements are not objectively true or false, and (ii) these statements can be said to be 'true' only relative to the personal tastes of the individual or, at other times, only relative to socially accepted and established norms.

In contrast to such views, I shall here describe a much more 'old-fashioned' view called 'ethical Absolutism', which states that are objective moral facts, so that when we say that a certain act is morally wrong we are not simply expressing our personal whimsical inclinations but declaring that it is wrong for all human beings. An analogy from the history of science may help here. There was a time when (almost all) people thought that the sun went round the earth, today we know that it is the earth that goes round the sun. What has changed in this transformation is our beliefs about the sun, but the sun itself remained 'unmoved' even when people thought that it was in motion. In other words, the change was in us, not in the sun. An ethical Absolutist argues that the same holds for moral truths : there are certain activities which are always morally wrong, though it may have been the case that there was a period during which they were accepted as right (and are still accepted as such in some parts of the world today).

Moreover, the ethical Absolutist complains that the ethical relativist has not really proved her point that there are no absolute moral truths, she has simply assumed what she is supposed to prove. The mere fact that people belonging to different traditions and cultures have lived, and continue to live, according to divergent sets of moral codes does not in itself prove (i) that all of them are true, or (ii) that all of them are false, or (iii) that the notions of truth and falsity do not apply to moral principles. Pick up any text-book on economic theory, historical method, cosmology, educational psychology, criminology, or psychoanalysis, and be prepared to be assaulted by a plethora of competing and contrasting views. The mere existence of such divergent opinions in these disciplines does not lead us to conclude that there is no correct position to hold, or to declare all of them as being equally 'true' or equally 'false'. Why should it be different in the case of the diverse moral principles that human beings have lived, and live, by? Why should we not believe instead that some of these are right and the others are wrong, though we may not know precisely which of these are indeed right and which are wrong? (The standard reply to this question, of course, is that moral principles are 'subjective', but this is, in fact, the position that I am questioning here.)

Indeed, an ethical Absolutist goes further, and claims that there are certain practices which are morally wrong in every socio-cultural context, and that if some groups actually promote them this does not show that it is 'true for them' but only that they have missed the truth on this matter. Four such practices are : (a) slavery, (b) ethnic cleansing or religious genocide, (c) discrimination on the basis of gender, and (d) destroying the environment indiscriminately. An ethical Absolutist will argue that an ethical relativist who believes that these four are indeed immoral will be hard-pressed to explain why other people around her too should hold them to be immoral. For example, if she were living in a country where gender discrimination is prevalent, she would be able to do nothing but to shut up and 'curse her fate', for this discrimination is 'wrong' only relative to her personal taste, but others who think that it is 'right' are entitled to their own tastes too. (Indeed, ethical relativism can be used as a sophisticated tool to justify the status quo. If the British administrators, whatever may have been their other faults, had taken up such a relativism, the Hindu practice of Sati may not have been banned.)

A concluding note. One reason why many people are put off by the position which I have described here is because of a suspicion that it will necessarily lead to some form exclusivist dogmatism. Historically speaking, there is much to justify this suspicion : ethical Absolutists have had a notorious reputation of being intolerant towards people who they thought were in the wrong, morally speaking. However, such a dogmatic stance is not a necessary concomitant of the view that I am putting forward here. An ethical Absolutist can claim both (a) there are absolute moral truths, and (b) we do not know specifically what these truths are, so that we can often be mistaken in thinking precisely which things are morally right and which are morally wrong. When we realise our mistakes, however, what we must do is not to give up the notion that such absolute truths exist, but renew our attempts to search for them. Moreover, ethical Absolutism recognises and accepts that we are prejudiced and fallible beings, and believes that we must engage in discussion with people holding divergent moral principles in a mutual search for such moral facts.