(Page 2 of 21) - Young People, Relativism, and Natural Law authored by Alford, C..

to yourself.” This statement had nothing to do with sexual harassment. It was
the cowardly, bureaucratic way of telling students not to hit each other. Make the
statement vague and general enough, and who could object? At least that is
how the ethics committee seemed to think. To reiterate, this was not because
any committee member favored children hitting each other, but because each
believed he or she had no grounds to say otherwise, taking refuge in what was
not even good bureaucratic jargon, but was simply weird.

One might see the committee members as Alasdair MacIntyre (2000)

surely would, victims of the culture of advanced modernity, unable to understand
themselves as engaged in a cooperative attempt to discover, practice, and teach
the human good to the next generation. In its own way, our culture is as ignorant
of the natural law as that of the German robbers. Instead of idealizing theft, our
culture idealizes individual choice about everything. Or as Senator Joseph Biden
put it in suggesting that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas believed in
natural law (a suggestion for which there seems to be little evidence), “natural
law dictates morality to us, instead of leaving matters to individual choice.”

From a slightly different perspective, one might see the committee

members as slightly older versions of the undergraduates to whom Alan Bloom
refers in The Closing of the American Mind. There are, says Bloom, two things
that almost every undergraduate entering the University of Chicago believes: that
the truth is relative, and that everybody is equal. Furthermore, these two beliefs
are related: only if the truth is relative, one truth as good as another, does
equality among those with diverse beliefs make sense. That other grounds of
toleration might be found does not seem to enter the heads of Bloom’s
undergraduates, or so he tells us. Democracy is built on relativism. (Bloom 1988,
25)

Somewhere between these two critics seems to lie the answer to the

strange behavior of the ethics committee, the individualism of our culture giving
rise to relativism by default, as it might be called, in which solid citizens know the
difference between right and wrong, but doubt their right to teach their beliefs to
others, as democracy itself seems to rest on this doubt—that is, on relativism.
And not just democracy, but the ability of any moderately diverse group of
citizens to get along with each other in public. Absent an official relativism, it is a
straight line to the Taliban, or so many people seem to believe.

Is this because the committee members believed that their views were no

more than an unjustifiable personal preference, akin to preferring chocolate ice
cream over vanilla? No, most believed that it was right and good to teach
children not to hit each other. They were simply unable to articulate the grounds
of their belief in a language that might convince the mythical relativist, as though
this were the real problem, as though epistemology were the devil who bedevils
ethics. Not their own relativism, but their lack of confidence in their ability to
justify their moral beliefs and commitments in a common human language held
the committee members in thrall. No example of such a language, such as
natural law, existed for any of the committee members, not even the religious
leaders, who were profoundly (one might say overly) aware that they were
citizens of a secular culture.