Do you believe that everything is absolute,everything is relative or everything is absolutly relative?

I’ll give it a shot. Ethical right or wrong can be measured against absolute or relative standards.

Christian fundamentalists in my experience have stated that right and wrong are deity derived, never change and are absolute. The bible is “as is” no reinterpretation allowed. The 10 commandments are absolute. Murder is always wrong regardless of circumstance.

Relativism argues, that this is simplistic and doesn’t answer our sense that the situation may change the right answer. We accept that killing in self defense is OK. War has been promoted, and even biblically commanded (Joshua).

One weakness in relativism is that it becomes easier to rationalize certain ethical positions, and that allowing the unwashed masses to “wing it” opens the door to potential nasty things.

Ethical stances are like religions, and the examples you cite, are similar to extremists. I believe we are poor judges of right and wrong, and that some situations require much maturity and forethought. We are easily corrupted, and you need look no further than the headlines for proof. Our principles are easily tossed out with our integrity for the next treat.

I’m just as fallible as the next person and I’m right and wrong on any number of things and far from perfect in every sense. If I had to state definitively that anything in the world was absolute, it would be death and taxes.

Things are only absolute when we need them to be, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that.

The only true absolutes are scientific constants, such as the speed of light and the total mass-energy contained in the universe. Even pi can fluctuate, which is why it is defined for a specific set of conditions.

In my opinion, everything else depends on the point of view of the observer, and is therefore relative. Often a person can be critical of another’s actions, only to find that they do exactly the same thing when they are placed in that set of circumstances. We should move away from the terms ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, because they always require a qualifying statement to express the point of view from which the judgement is made, and without this the terms are somewhat meaningless.

I believe that there is an absolute standard that things can be compared to.

Let’s say that you’re sweeping a floor. You get all the dirt that you can see, and you call it clean. But there’s still dirt under the couch, isn’t there? Doesn’t that mean that the room is still dirty?

Philisophically, moral relativism is considered complete garbage. Now the methodology for how you determine what the absolute rights and wrongs are are still widely debated, but there are fewer philosophers who believe in moral relativism than there are scientists who don’t believe in evolution.

@FireMadeFlesh, your assertion would only apply to the physical universe, not to abstract concepts. Think about mathematical concepts, they would exist without any point of reference for example. Concepts like morality would fall into the “abstract concept category.”

@Bluefreedom Indeed
I believe everything is relative, apart from the aforementioned death & taxes

I believe that some things are absolutive and some things are relative, thus I’m taking a relative approach. :P

For example, as @gorillapaws said, things like mathematical concepts would exist without any point of reference. Mathematical and scientific constants and such are absolute, but things like morality are relative. Now, there are tendencies toward certain moral rules that occur across cultures, but that doesn’t mean that I think they are absolute. For the most part, something defined as “wrong” is something that causes harm to another human, animal, or the environment. That is a trend across cultures, but it doesn’t describe every cultural moral rule.

Reality is what is. We can only perceive it to a certain extent.

We live in a relative world with sights on the absolute.

If we therefore are desiring and willing to allow our relativity to become absolute, we would be absolute to ourselves, meaning seeking operate as absolute as our knowledge allows us.

while being relative to others, meaning willing to accommodate others who may not have the perception of your absolute.

@gorillapaws I realise that there is a difference, but I said and meant everything. Abstract concepts are all relative, but we don’t usually bother with the qualifying statements that deal with the rare exceptions to the general absolute rule. If you could contrive a situation where you had to commit murder, but were able to choose the victim between a certain number of options, there would be a right and wrong choice even though murder in itself is wrong.

@gorillapaws that’s true from my understanding. Moral reletivisism can be stretched to the point of “what is right is relative – and based on my opinion this situation calls for X” – basically all people believe what they are doing is the right thing for them to do, and they may know that it is illegal or unwanted, but the risk of being caught does not over ride the desire to do whatever.

Writing up the rules as you go because you go with the flow is a recipe for moral bankruptcy – and the headlines are full of it.

I began thinking about this after reading about crime and punishment by Dostoevsky. The main character has a rationale for why he must murder.

In church I heard a well developed thesis about moral relativism – complete with vilification (which was unnecessary)

I can recall reading an excellent essay on the subject of moral relativism, but unfortunately cannot remember it’s title, author or other means to source it here. The main problem with moral relativism is that you have to accept things like the holocaust as being morally permissible under a Nazi culture, or the cultural revolution as permissible under a communist Chinese culture, or slavery as permissible under a Southern Colonial American Culture, etc. The whole notion of morality is pointless if it can’t make claims that these acts were wrong.

The article also went on to say that the idea behind moral relativism (respecting other cultures and not imposing ones own values on other people) is a good and healthy thing to keep in mind. But there’s a big distinction between respecting other people’s cultures when it comes to norms and other non-moral issues vs. actual moral principles (slavery, genocide, torture etc.).

I’m not saying that you can’t have an absolute moral system that determines when things are right and wrong depending on certain circumstances (such as utilitarianism). Utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number), is an absolute moral system, but whether or not it’s permissible to murder someone in cold blood may actually depend on circumstances so it’s relative in a sense (but it’s ultimately considered absolute because that that rule would always apply in every identical situation). It’s a bit complicated and hard to explain in such limited space, but that’s the quick n dirty version.

@FireMadeFlesh the law on non-contradiciton for example would exist without any frame of reference.

Head explodes

@gorillapaws Ah, I see what you’re getting at now. There are constants from other fields, such as the laws of logic, but on a metaphysical level we have no idea whether or not our logic is correct. It is just a human construct that we use as a tool to provide useful outcomes. There is no way of knowing whether or not our mathematical system is correct, we just know that it is useful and makes sense to our way of thinking. Another species with a brain wired differently may be able to use a different system just as effectively.
I’m struggling to think of a situation where the law of non-contradiction would not necessarily be correct, but as far as I know the advent of post-modernism caused every field but science to cease claiming knowledge or existence of absolute truth, which is why I referred to scientific examples.

@FireMadeFlesh “we have no idea whether or not our logic is correct”

Sure we do, it’s called a priori knowledge.