Moral Relativism and the Natural Law
Adapted by the author for Sed Contra from the latest version of a lecture developed for chapters of the Thomistic Institute. Parts of this lecture were adapted from portions of two published essays: Francis J. Beckwith, “Moral Relativism: Arguments For and Against,” in The New Apologetics, ed. M. Melson (Word on Fire, 2022), and Francis J. Beckwith, “Catholicism and the Natural Law: A Response to Four Misunderstandings,” Religions, 12.6 (2021). Used with permission.
I begin with these two sets of propositions. The first set consists of some moral rules, with which everyone is familiar.
•Love your neighbor as yourself.
•Thou shall not commit adultery.
•Do not intentionally kill the innocent.
•Do not take what is not yours without permission.
•Parents ought to care for their infant children.
•Shun ignorance.
•Live at peace with your neighbors.
•One ought not to rape.
The second set consists of some immoral rules.
•Your guilt or innocence in a criminal trial depends entirely on your race and not on a judge or jury’s deliberation on legitimately obtained evidence.
•Anyone may be convicted of a crime based on the results of a coin toss.
•The maximum punishment for first degree murder is an all expense paid vacation to Las Vegas.
•Government contracts are to be distributed based on family connections and bribes and not on the quality of the bids.
•Original parenthood is to be decided by a special board of experts appointed by the governor and not on whether one sires or begets the child.
Now if you believe that the moral rules or the immoral rules, or perhaps others not mentioned, ought to be obeyed or disobeyed by everyone regardless of time, place, circumstance, or culture, then you are a moral objectivist. The term “objectivist” has a variety of different meanings, but here, it is simply the view that morality is something that is true and real apart from what you subjectively desire or what your culture teaches.
There are two arguments that are often employed to defend relativism. The first is based on empirical observation. The second is a type of social peace argument.
On the other hand, if you believe that morality depends exclusively on one’s time, place, or culture—that there is no universal objective morality that transcends society and circumstance—then you are a moral relativist. You do not deny that there are moral rules, but what you believe is that these rules are nothing more than your own society’s ethical code, which may be different, but no better or worse, than another society’s ethical code. In that case, you believe that morality is more like the rules of etiquette.
There are two arguments that are often employed to defend relativism. The first is based on empirical observation, and essentially states that there’s just too much diversity on moral issues both in and across cultures. The second is a type of social peace argument, whose advocates maintain that it is intolerant to believe that one’s moral views are universally true while others are wrong. I will call the first the argument from disagreement, and the second the argument from tolerance.
The Argument from Disagreement
It seems that everywhere you turn there’s disagreement on moral issues. In the United States alone, there is an array of questions over which sincere citizens hold contrary views: abortion, marriage, race relations, physician assisted suicide, religious liberty, and animal rights. Internationally, it’s no different. While some cultures practice polygamy and prohibit the killing and eating of cattle, other cultures practice monogamy and open up steak joints.
But not only is there disagreement geographically (across space) there is disagreement chronologically (across time). There were civilizations throughout history that thought it was perfectly permissible to enslave fellow human beings, torture heretics, or rape and pillage conquered nations. So given the wide diversity of moral opinions and practices across space and time, it’s easy to see why someone would be a moral relativist.
The argument from disagreement seems impressive at first glance, since it appears to be based on an undeniable fact: moral disagreement. But at second glance, it is not so impressive. There are at least four problems with the argument.
First, as a matter of simple logic, the fact of disagreement does not entail moral relativism, just as the fact of disagreement over the shape of the Earth does not entail that the Earth has no shape. The premise “there is moral disagreement across space and time” cannot establish the conclusion “there is no objective morality.”
After all, it is not at all farfetched to believe that some cultures and individuals have gotten morality wrong, which is something deep down we already believe. Who, for example, would say that what the Nazis did to the Jews is morally permissible because their culture said it was right? Or that racial segregation as once practiced in the southern United States was not immoral simply because the society at the time believed it was? The mere fact of disagreement in and of itself isn’t enough. For we can think of cases where it would not be unreasonable to say an individual or culture got it wrong.
Second, the relativist must assume a premise more controversial than his argument’s conclusion: whenever there is disagreement on any issue, there is no universal objective truth of the matter. But this is self-refuting. After all, could not one just say, “I disagree with the proposition that whenever there is disagreement on any issue, there is no universal objective truth on the matter”? But this means that we can reject the proposition on its own grounds. (It is sort of like someone saying, “My brother is an only child” or “Don’t believe anything I say.”)
Third, moral disagreement is overrated. As an example, consider the issue of abortion. Now, it’s true that pro-lifers and their critics disagree on abortion’s morality, but they don’t disagree on the moral principle that it is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent person. This may sound strange. But once you think about it, it makes sense.
Defenders of abortion argue that the fetus, although genetically a human being, is not an actual person but merely a potential person. What they mean by this is that because the unborn human during most or all of its gestation lacks certain characteristics—such as the ability to reason, have a life plan and self-concept, etc.—it does not have moral status. Pro-lifers, on the other hand, typically argue that being a person is not the same as functioning as a person, and that what the unborn lacks as a result of its immaturity only means that it is a person with potential and not just a potential person. In other words, the unborn has moral status because of what it is not because of what it does. Thus, pro-lifers and their opponents don’t disagree on whether it’s wrong to intentionally kill an innocent person; they disagree on the question of what a person is.
Other abortion defenders, such as the late Judith Jarvis Thomson, will grant that the fetus is a person with a right to life, but deny that it is innocent, essentially arguing that without the pregnant woman’s explicit consent, the fetus is a trespasser that compromises her bodily integrity. (Here “innocence” doesn’t mean “without a guilty mind”; it means “a cause of harm” that may be justly repelled, just as one may shoot an assailant who mistakenly thinks you are a threat to his well-being.) Thomson uses several illustrations to make her point.
For example, imagine you were kidnapped and hooked up to a world class violinist so that he can use your kidneys for nine months, which will cure him of his illness. Even though the violinist is a person with a right to life, you still have a right to unplug yourself from the violinist before the nine months are up, even though it will result in his death.
Nobody says we should be in favor of treating people unfairly or unjustly. The disagreement is over the question of how society should achieve the proper ends of fairness and justice, not on the level of moral principle.
Thomson’s argument seems powerful to many people because she appeals to moral intuitions about autonomy and bodily integrity that even people who disagree with her on abortion would generally accept. Although both types of arguments for abortion are flawed—as I and others have argued in our published writings—we should recognize that each is employed by its advocates because they already agree with pro-lifers that it is morally wrong to intentionally kill the innocent.
This kind of analysis can be applied to other issues as well. If you think about our public debates over marriage, physician assisted suicide, critical race theory, and other questions, the differing factions appeal to the exact same moral goods and principles to justify their positions: fairness, justice, relief of suffering, love, and protection of the vulnerable. Where they disagree is over the proper application of those goods and principles and the right way to answer questions about the nature of the reality to which they’re being applied.
In other words, there are deeper non-moral philosophical questions that are really doing the work. Consider critical race theory (CRT), which provides one set of answers to questions like: What is systemic racism? How should we best eradicate it? Regardless of whether you think CRT does or doesn’t provide the right answers, nobody says we should be in favor of treating people unfairly or unjustly. The disagreement is over the question of how society should achieve the proper ends of fairness and justice. The disagreement is not on the level of moral principle.
This is why the the Catholic Church teaches in its Catechism that even though objective morality is known by all, it is “not perceived by everyone clearly and immediately. In the present situation, sinful man needs grace and revelation, so moral and religious truths may be known by everyone with facility, with firm certainty, and with no admixture of error.” And so even though the Church itself defends the idea that people have a natural awareness of a natural moral law, it also has to account for the fact of disagreement. In my judgment, it is a great virtue of natural law theory that it provides such an account.
This is often forgotten, even by some defenders of St. Thomas Aquinas’s view of the natural law. In the Summa Theologiae, in the section called “The Treatise on Law,” Thomas provides all sorts of reasons why people either don’t live consistently with the moral law or why they don’t seem to be conspicuously aware of it in every occasion. These reasons include bad moral formation, cultural conditioning, false beliefs about reality, unruly passions, etc. Although the natural law cannot be fully suppressed, it can be distorted or misapplied in a variety of ways.
Fourth, the argument from disagreement leads to absurd consequences. If moral relativism is correct—that there is no universal objective morality—then it is not wrong everywhere and always to rape another person, intentionally kill the innocent, torture children for fun, judge Mother Teresa as no better than Hitler, and abandon one’s infant offspring to the elements if one finds them inconvenient. If, in fact, you want to embrace moral relativism, you have to accept these counterintuitive consequences. (To say that a consequence is counterintuitive is to say that it strikes you immediately as wrong.)
It also means that there can be neither moral progress nor moral reformers. Moral reformers are people who have engaged in public activism to eliminate certain types of injustices, like the eradication of infanticide or chattel slavery. Oftentimes, these reformers face strong resistance from their society. But if moral relativism is true, there really can’t be moral reformers or moral reformation. There is only change. If you are a cultural relativist, if you believe that morality is relative to culture and we’re obligated to follow what our culture teaches, that would mean that the reformers are actually wrong until they get enough people to agree with them. In other words, you can’t have moral progress—you can’t be getting better—unless you’re moving in the right direction to a good end.
The Argument from Tolerance
Some people argue that because it is intolerant to believe that one’s moral views are right and others’ wrong, it follows that moral relativism— the view that there is no one universal objective morality—best establishes tolerance.
There are several reasons to reject this argument. The first is that the moral relativist seems to be affirming at least one absolute moral principle, namely, tolerance. To claim that everyone ought to be tolerant is, in fact, to affirm a universal objective moral principle. But in that case, the relativist is no longer a relativist.
Secondly, why believe that relativism leads to tolerance? We could easily imagine an intolerant relativist, who affirms something like this, “Although I believe all morality is culturally relative, I prefer my culture’s morality to all others, and thus, I want my nation to invade and conquer other nations and take their resources and enslave their peoples.” There’s literally nothing about relativism that tells us that this is an immoral view. If anything, relativism prevents us from making such a judgment!
Finally, the practice of tolerance seems valuable because it establishes certain goods, such as living at peace with others and better understanding those with whom one disagrees. But these goods seem to be functioning as if they were part of some universal objective morality, which is inconsistent with relativism. If anything, then, tolerance seems to be more at home in a world view that accepts moral objectivism and rejects moral relativism.
The Natural Law
So where does all this tie in to the natural law? As should be evident in the way I’ve critiqued relativism, I’ve made a kind of backwards case for the natural law. I started with the moral and immoral rules we seem to already know. This demonstrates that our minds already operate such a way that we presuppose what Aquinas called the primary precepts of the natural law. Then I walked you through the two leading arguments for relativism so that you can see how difficult it is to fully suppress what University of Texas philosopher J. Budziszewski says: “we can’t not know.”
Compare, for example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail with the character of Socrates in The Crito. Although they are separated by twenty-five hundred years, they sit within the same moral tradition. They’re appealing to some of the same kinds of moral intuitions. They are both willing to be punished for what they believe are the deliverances of the moral law. King, defending his civil disobedience in protest of an unjust law, doesn’t try to escape from jail. He takes his punishment. Socrates, defending his pursuit of wisdom in the face of political resistance, accepts the verdict of the Athenian jury and takes the hemlock.
It bears repeating that the natural law also accounts for our deep disagreements. Think about something like truth telling. If you look cross-culturally, people will almost universally say it’s wrong to lie. But they are nevertheless going to disagree on specific cases of when it is permissible to not tell the truth. You know it’s wrong to lie to your professor. But is it wrong to lie to the Nazi that comes to your door while you’re hiding Jews in your basement in 1939? But those sorts of exceptions—if there are any—depend on other moral goods, such as the belief that life-saving is more fundamental than truth telling or that certain individuals in certain circumstances—like Nazis seeking to engage in murder—are not entitled to the truth.
To be sure, people will disagree on whether that’s the right way to balance those sorts of goods. But what’s important to recognize is that they’re in the same conversation, using the same moral vocabulary, and appealing to the same moral principles.
To conclude, moral relativists have their hearts in the right place. They rightly recognize differences of moral beliefs and practices between individuals and across cultures, while at the same time, wanting to advance the cause of tolerance and understanding. But as we’ve seen, despite their good motives, the view they hold—moral relativism—has many significant flaws.
Prof. Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies, and Associate Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy at Baylor University, where he has served on the faculty since 2003. Among his over twenty books is Taking Rites Seriously: Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2015), winner of the American Academy of Religion’s 2016 Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion.