So I pointed to Matt Yglesias’ brief for moral relativism last Friday and I promised to explain why he’s wrong. Here’s the problem with getting into a big back and forth about it: The “is there a capital T truth?” debate is a bottomless well. Even the best argument would seem like a sophomoric bull session. Still, I said I’d take the bait so I will, but I’ll try to stay out of the weeds.

Matt writes:

I don’t want this to be misunderstood, but I’m a moral relativist. Or, rather, I reject moral realism, the view that “moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right. Moreover, they hold, at least some moral claims actually are true.” This is a much-debated philosophical issue, but in punditland, it’s just a term of abuse. Ergo, Fred Siegel writing in Blueprint about the least-significant challenge currently facing America — college professors who are too left-wing for Siegel’s taste:
If, as Michel Foucault told the Berkeley faculty in 1983, “There is no universal criterion which permits us to say, this category of power relations are bad and those are good,” then there is no way to prefer a liberal society to fascism, communism, or Islamism.Tragically, I don’t have time for a full-throated defense of my meta-ethical views at the moment. But this kind of claim, oft-made, is clearly false. Is there a universal criterion by which I judge whether I like chocolate ice cream better than vanilla ice cream? Presumably not. Is there, therefore no way to prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla ice cream? Obiously, no; people are walking around with preferences about this as we speak, and it’s fine. Similarly, letting the ontological chips fall where they may, the purported objective superiority of liberal societies to Islamism doesn’t play an actual role in Siegel’s preference for liberal societies.

He goes on, but let’s start here. The standard comenback for the “there’s no absolute truth” sort of thing is to say, if you think there’s no such thing as truth you still believe it is true that there is no truth. Therefore you do believe in the absolute truth that there is no such thing as truth.

There are more persuasive games to be played in order demonstrate that there is truth out there (think science, math, Irish whiskey). But Matt isn’t saying (I assume) that there isn’t any such thing as truth, he’s saying he doesn’t believe in moral truth.

And this is where I’m inclined to punt. If Matt really doesn’t believe there is any such thing as objective moral truth I sincerely doubt he can be persuaded by me, or anybody else. He’s made a leap of faith.

But it’s worth pointing out some of the implications of what he’s saying. First, it’s a bit repugnant to use chocolate and vanilla ice cream as illustrations of how there are no fundamental moral truths. Ice cream preferences are exactly that: preferences, and low order ones at that. By equating fundamental moral imperatives with mundane personal tastes, he trivializes the most important human questions. Is abhorrence for genocide ultimately no different than distaste for rocky road ice cream?

Another point which might be worth mentioning is that while Matt ostensibly rejects the notion that there is an objective, external, thing called “good” or “evil” he clearly accepts “better” and “worse” as real things outside his own private worldview. It’s always seemed a dodge to me to deny objective moral reality, while at the same time clinging to notions of better and worse. What do better and worse point to if not the good and the bad? I do not know how absolute hotness “feels.” But I know when something is hotter than something else: Hot soup versus ice cream, for example. Hotter and colder, it seems to me, are analogous to better and worse. We may not be able to define their absolute expressions — and given the thorny issue of infinity, they may be unknowable. But the categories exist outside of us. Matt believes in the categories of better and worse — or more preferable and less preferable — he simply rejects the idea they’re rooted in nature beyond some calculus. This is why his extended straw argument about how we judge things misses the point (I didn’t reprint it above). He thinks the belief in objective moral truth requires that you need to make an objective evaluation of all the relevant facts to determine the “rightness” of a situation. I don’t see why. If you have a moral sense of better and worse you don’t need to have perfect knowledge of a situation. Matt might agree, but he simply rejects these categories exist in nature. I don’t.

Lastly, I don’t want to call Matt a liar. But I really don’t believe him. I just have a hard time believing that all of his throughly progressive ideals about race, homosexuality, torture, civil liberties and the like boil down to mere calculated preferrences which may be more complex than his preference for vanilla over chocolate, but ultimately are indistinguishable morally. I’m sure he’s being honest, but I’d bet he’s also being inconsistent.