Tuesday, September 01, 2009

In defence of moral absolutes

Richard Bastien

Forget the modern orthodoxy, there are real moral absolutes worth defending.
Throughout the 19th century, theories abounded in the English-speaking world about the relativism of human knowledge and, therefore, the difficulty in establishing moral standards. John Stuart Mill, notably, reduced the idea of morality to a form of subjective ideal. In the early 20th century, Einstein’s theory of relativity, for all the wrong reasons, gave a semblance of justification to the idea that there were no such things as absolutes. This led to an increasing acceptance of the notion that all cultures and moral ideas are conditional and that none can pretend to be any “better” than any other.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/in_defence_of_moral_absolutes2/

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