From a reader:

Mr. Goldberg,
I have no interest in defending the Swarthmore speach on its merits. After all, it was a commencement speach, not a philosophical essay. But as a philosopher, I am a bit troubled by your posting of an email that demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of the basic issue in play. I’m worried that your own response to the speech may be colored by the same misunderstanding.
The email you post refers to “relativistic twaddle,” but there is nothing at all relativistic about Bloom’s suggestion. Whatever you think of non-absolutism, it simply does not imply either relativism or subjectivism.
Relativism is the view that moral judgments are valid by virtue of their consistency with certain kinds of cultural norms (or perhaps, more radically, with one’s own prferences). Non-absolutism simply implies that if there are objective (non-relative) moral facts then they are not neatly capturable in simple rules of the form “don’t kill,” don’t steal,” etc. It does *not* deny that there are such objective moral facts – the issues are entirely distinct.
Indeed there is extremely good reason for us moral objectivists to deny simple absolutism. For starters, any plausible list of such rules will create the possibility for conflicts among those rules. In that case, one must violate one rule to satisfy another. And moreover, absolutism is, when seriously reflected on, severely counterintuitive. No matter what neat rule you give me prohibiting a specific kind of action, it takes only a little bit of imagination to come up with a context in which following that rule would seem morally repugnant. For this reason, most moral theorists rely on more general principles or treat moral rules as simply prima facie, or
ceteris paribus, rules. Alternatively, some particularists reject moral principles altogether, but they also claim that there are moral facts of the matter; it’s just that neat principles are not the way to access those facts. As a result, they are hardly relativists.
Of course there may be plenty of other reasons to dislike Bloom’s speach, but charges of “relativistic twaddle” are deeply confused. The distinction between non-absolutism and relativism is important in part because too often, I suspect, people are moved to embrace relativism because of the obvious flaws of absolutism. This move simply does not follow, and this is a good reason to make the distinction clear. Unfortunately, it is a distinction that is all too regularly ignored.