C. Fred Alford
Professor of Government
University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
## email not listed ##
Paper Presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association
Young People, Relativism and Natural Law: An Empirical Report
The origins of my research go back several years, when I was invited to be a
member of committee charged with developing a new ethics curriculum to be
taught in the county schools. On the committee were ministers, priests, rabbis,
several “concerned parents,” and me. We met in the conference room of the
local school board, which was moderately impressive, sitting in the same chairs
the school board members sat in. Other than the ghostly presence of the school
board, we were on our own.
We began with elementary school students. What should they be taught?
General principles were easy enough to agree on, such as “treat other students
with respect.” What got difficult was when we got down to practice, such as
“students shouldn’t hit each other.”
“Some cultures value the physical expression of difference,” said one
committee member.
“Who are we to say otherwise?” added another.
And so it went with this odd conversation. Odd not just because of the
extreme cultural relativism, but because not a single member of the ethics
committee thought children should hit each other. Quite the contrary; all were
against it. Not only that, by no one could name any actual culture in which
students hitting each other was deemed a good thing. It was the very possibility
that some culture, somewhere might value the physical expression of difference
that stymied most members of the committee.
The committee members had lost (presumably they never had) confidence
in their own ability to judge right from wrong, though this puts it a little too simply.
They themselves were in no doubt about whether children should hit each other.
All were against it. But most believed they had no grounds to say something so
clear and concrete. This included the minister, the priest, and the rabbi, all of
whom said that according to their religious beliefs it was of course wrong for
students to hit each other, but none wished to impose their religious beliefs on
others. In our modern world, morality has been defeated by epistemology, or is it
just sociology?
Partly from frustration, and partly for personal reasons, I resigned from the
committee at this point. Only several years later did I run into a member of the
ethics committee and learn what they had decided upon. “Keep your body parts
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