There is a popular debate* on social media these days between morale absolutism and moral relativism. The idea is that you either believe there is such a thing as objective morality or if you think it’s relative to a culture. There’s the extreme example of people saying, “Hitler thought he was doing good,” to point out the fact that morals are relative to the person or people who hold them; on the opposite side are people pointing to absolute morality, saying that just because it’s culturally acceptable doesn’t make it right. Moral relativists make a good point when they say that rules and laws are only what society agrees upon, while moral absolutists will retort with the fact that slavery was always wrong even though it’s been a practice for thousands of years (and exists to this very day). So, which is correct?
Well, both sides make good points, but they both miss out on one important aspect: trade-offs. The reality is that trade-offs exist in the world, and we have to choose between them. You can’t have a perfect set of morals that everyone agrees to because ethics are based on values, and people value different things to different degrees. The most famous difference in values exist in politics, where there is always a tradeoff between freedom and safety. Strangely, the positions flip depending on the issue. For example, the political left will side with freedom when it comes to sexuality and abortion, while the political right will be for the safety of people from disease and sex not leading to procreation or the unborn child from being killed for convenience. On the other hand, the political right will be for freedom of association and markets, while the political left will want the safety of forcing people to do business with them in ways that they deem appropriate. These scenarios show how both moral absolutism and moral relativism are incomplete, as you have to pick some rules over others even if you agree to each individually, and you have to have some objectivity or you can’t have rules at all that aren’t completely arbitrary (example: not initiating physical harm on innocent people is an absolute rule).
The idea of what I’ll call moral trade-off-ism is that you have to make judgment calls even if you can agree to rules what happens when the rules conflict with each other. Like if you said, “Don’t kill anyone,” that seems like an easy enough rule until someone runs into a situation where someone is mass murdering and trying to subdue the assailant might result in you and other people getting killed. In that situation, killing the attacker is the best solution. These scenarios are why things like pacifism create absolute standards that just don’t hold up in reality unless you are either sheltered (i.e., other people do the killing for you, allowing you to sleep at night) or suicidal (i.e., you would let someone kill you rather than defend yourself).
So, what do you do given this information? Well, first, you should acknowledge the fact that you can only have rules that everyone agrees to—we see the problem with rules that no one agrees to historically with prohibition where people just start committing crimes en masse while they’re committing one crime they think is unjust. Even recently, we now have the two political parties’ supporters encouraging each other to ignore any law they don’t like. That’s not moral relativism—because you can still hold your own ethics regardless of what the laws are—that’s just accepting the reality of living in society. On the other hand, you can acknowledge that some things are objectively bad if they violate the three near-universal (fun fact: they are only near-universal because they conflict and require trade-offs, which is what we’re talking about here!) ethics: fairness, reciprocity, and minimal harm. What I mean by that is if a law hurts people, it would generally be considered bad; a law against hurting someone not hurting anyone is universally bad. An unfair law is seen as bad (see discriminatory laws historically), while any law that some can get away with enforcing on others while they themselves don’t follow it is also seen as bad.
Once you agree to those two realities, the final piece is to accept that people have competing values, ethics, and rules—and people will differ on which ones win because they have different priorities. If you value life the most, then you’ll see killing unborn children as murder; if you value your freedom, you would see getting raped and not being able to terminate the pregnancy as oppression. Two things can be true at once: killing an unborn child and getting pregnant from a rape are both bad things that we wish there were zero instances of. If there is an instance, though, one of those rules has to override the other. One side picks one, the other picks the other, and “centrists” split the difference (which is where the compromises of the first trimester and then viability came from—the latter being the basic reasoning that killing a human organism that could survive outside the womb instead of removing it in a way that wouldn’t kill it is a moral line that the overwhelming majority of people won’t cross). If you think that no one should be harmed under any circumstances, you will be against guns even for self-defense despite the fact that there will be thousands of robberies and deaths from a disarmed citizenry. If you think you have a right to defend yourself, then you accept that bad people will do bad things and people will die but it is far fewer than the millions of oppressed otherwise.
As usual, I’m not here to tell you which ethics are right or wrong—it’s what differentiates my book on finding meaning in life from the others that inject their own morality. I will only point out how things work and let you make the decision for yourself. Just know that debates like moral absolutism vs. moral relativism are often missing the most important point that would not only bridge the two positions (because they would both agree that some rules have more universal agreement than others) but make the conversation more productive while leaving both sides understanding and respecting the other position without demonizing it. In a society where we all have to live together and get along well enough, civilization could always use more people who are willing to see others’ points of view and try to find a way to bridge the gap to set rules that work for everyone instead of reverting to us-vs.-them arguments filled with insults and demonization.
*Note: As an example of how tribal this debate gets, I simply pointed out the idea of escalating reciprocity: as each person violates the other’s morals, the other person retaliates in kind with “interest” (i.e., a little bit more) only to lead to more escalating reciprocation until people are killing each other. The only way to stop it is to break the cycle, which is why the justice system creates objective third parties that evaluate an infraction and determine the appropriate, fair punishment. A moral absolutist accused me of making a moral relativism argument, which it is clearly not. As usual, you can’t have a nuanced opinion on social media without both sides coming after you.