Are there any absolute values?

I was reading a very good book and came across this article. I hope it will be helpful to someone who is dealing with someone that believes in relativism.

ARE THERE ANY ABSOLUTE VALUES?

Relativism is nothing new. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “No one ever steps into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever upon him.” This indicates the constant change that permeates our existence. But if everything is in flux (changing), then nothing stays the same. All is relative to the way things are at the moment. How can any value be absolute?
Since Heraclitus’ day, several other moral theories have challenged the absolute nature of moral imperatives. Some have said that there are no rigid laws. Kierkegaard said that all ethical commands are transcended by religious duties, just as Abraham had to go beyond all morality to sacrifice Isaac because of a “leap of faith.” A.J. Ayer said that all value statements were literally nonsense because they could not be verified by experience. Some have said that ethics are really only general principles that serve the purpose of structuring society. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill agreed that the general rules of society should be observed so that man can be happy, but they are not ultimately binding. Some, like Joseph Fletcher, think that all norms have to be evaluated by the individual in each situation.
Situation Ethics
Joseph Fletcher’s book, Situation Ethics, contained no new ideas when it first appeared in 1966, but it clarified the position and popularized it. He stated plainly that his presuppositions are pragmatism (the end justifies the means), relativism (only love is absolute; all other values are relative), positivism (moral principles are believed, not proven), and personalism (people are more important than things). Regarding the Bible, he says, “Either cheap melancholy or utter frustration will follow if we turn the Bible into a rules book, forgetting that an editorial collection of scattered sayings, such as the Sermon on the Mount, offers us at the most some paradigms or suggestions” (p. 77). In defense of pragmatism he asks, “If the end does not justify the means, what does?” (p. 120) He is at least consistent in that he goes on to recognize that ends also need to be justified. Love is the only end that justifies itself (p. 129). This raises the question, If love can justify itself, why can’t other goods be good in themselves? If they were, then they wouldn’t be means any longer, but ends in themselves.
Joseph Fletcher’s situation ethics are built on the idea that “our obligation is relative to the situation.”2 He says that love is the only absolute; all other moral commands are relative to this. The only way to judge right and wrong is to look at the results. What “works” or “satisfies” is right. Values, then, are made neither by God nor society, but by the individual, who must decide what is right for him in a given situation. When asked, “Is adultery wrong?” Fletcher says, “One can only respond, ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Give me a case. Describe a real situation.’”3 This, he believes, eliminates the cruelty of legalism by focusing on persons rather than precepts.

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF DENYING ABSOLUTES

As reasonable as these proposals sound, there is a fundamental inconsistency to a denial of absolutes: in order to deny absolutes, one must imply that there are absolutes in the process of the denial. To deny absolutes, you have to make an absolute denial. It’s just like saying, “Never say never.” You just did. Or, “It’s always wrong to say always.” You have to say it to say it. How can you be absolutely sure that there are no absolutes?
Besides, if relativity were true, then there must be something to which all things are relative, but which is not relative itself. In other words, something has to be absolute before we can see that everything else is relative to it. That is the nature of relations: they exist between two or more things. Nothing can be relative by itself, and if everything else is relative, then no other relations are real. There has to be something which does not change by which we can measure the change in everything else. Even Einstein recognized this and posited absolute Spirit as something to which all else is related. John Dewey in his progressivism made progress an absolute and Heraclitus had an absolute Logos that measured his “river” of flux.
AFFIRMING ABSOLUTE VALUES
Just showing that relativism is wrong does not prove that Christian values are right. The relativist says, “So there are some absolute values? Name one.” C.S. Lewis named several in his writings. He showed that many things are universally recognized as wrong, such as cruelty to children, rape, murder without cause, etc. He also noted (in the appendix to Abolition of Man) that values do not change greatly from one culture to another, but are very similar. But our challenge is to name just one.
Some thinkers have tried to reduce all moral principles to one central absolute. Immanuel Kant came up with a “categorical imperative,” which ought to be followed in all circumstances. It can be discovered by asking, for each decision, “Would I want this action to be a universal practice for all men?” If you answer no, then don’t do it. Would you want all men to lie to you? Then don’t lie. Would you want all men to murder? Then don’t murder. Do only those things that you would want all men to be able to do.
The Heart of the Matter
If you want to get to the heart of the matter and find out what someone really believes about values, find out what his expectations are. A person can easily say that people are of no greater value than things, but he will balk if you treat him like a cigarette butt and step on him. He still expects to be treated as a person with value, even if he denies that worth with his words. Even someone who claims that there are no values still values the right to his opinion and expects you to do the same. This fact helps us greatly in affirming absolute values because it makes values actually undeniable. Whenever someone denies absolute values, they expect to be treated as a person of absolute value.
Martin Buber said that the most important moral principle is to treat people as persons, not things. He said that we can go through life seeing everything else as an “It” or we can recognize that some things have a similarity to ourselves and should be called “Thou.” To Buber, it is the “I-Thou” relationships that bring meaning to life and are the basis for all values. People should be treated as ends in themselves, not as means to an end. People should be loved, not used.
It is not hard to see that both Buber and Kant agree in principle with Jesus about the single most important value. Jesus said, “However you want people to treat you, so treat them.” When asked what the most important Law of the Old Testament was, Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.” What is Kant’s categorical imperative but a restatement of Christ’s Golden Rule? And what is the greatest commandment if not an imperative to maintain “I-Thou” relationships with all persons, especially the Ultimate Thou? On this one principle, all other ethical norms are established: the Christian ethic of love.
I and Thou
Martin Buber (1878–1965), the famed Jewish existentialist, explored the realm of relationships in a book entitled I and Thou. He uses the familiar term for “you,” which expresses intimacy. Noting that we experience life on three levels, he says, “Extended, the lines of relationships intersect in the eternal you” (p. 123). Defining love, he writes, “Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling—the equality of all lovers, from the smallest to the greatest and from the blissfully secure whose life is circumscribed by the life of one beloved human being to him that is nailed his life long to the cross of the world, capable of what is immense and bold enough to risk it: to love man” [Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), pp. 66–67].
Love is an absolute value that is universally recognized. Even Bertrand Russell, famous for his essay Why I Am Not a Christian, said, “What the world needs is Christian love or compassion.” Humanistic psychologist Erich Fromm said that all psychological problems come from a lack of love. Confucius had the same idea, but he stated it negatively: Do not do unto others what you do not want them to do to you. Who would argue against love?
At the heart of Kant’s test question is the issue, “How do I want people to treat me?” Surely we all desire to be loved. If we want to be loved, then we ought to love others. Not to love others is to deny their personhood, for we love persons as such. In fact, isn’t that why we expect to be loved—because we are persons and persons should be loved? If we ought to be loved, then all persons ought to be loved. To conclude anything else would be inconsistent and arbitrary. Love is an absolute moral value that is universally accepted and expected by all people.

Norman L. Geisler and Ronald M. Brooks, When Skeptics Ask (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1990), 274–278.

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Faith is not knowing what the future holds, but knowing who holds the future.

Are there any absolute values?

philstilwell	# February 16, 2010, 8:43 am \| Post: 2
Group: Member Posts: 238 Status:	Many have argued for the existence of moral absolutes by asserting that any claim that there are no absolutes is incoherent. I’d like to examine this claim. Section One: The impossibility of denying absolutes. Here is one formulation of a denial that there are absolutes. It is an absolute that there are no absolutes. Now, here’s the claim by those who reject this as logical. No one can claim that there are no absolutes, for by doing so, one must invoke an absolute. Here is the more rigorous form of this argument. p1: Making an absolute claim requires at least one absolute. p2: Claiming that there are no absolutes is an absolute claim. p3: There cannot be both absolutes and no absolutes. Therefore, the claim as an absolute that there are no absolutes cannot be true. Because the assertion of absolutes is often made by theists in an attempt to validate their faith, let’s first look to the Bible to elucidate this issue. Example 1: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9-14 If we are to belief the Biblical account of creation, the Earth had a beginning. It is obvious then that the phrase “there is nothing new under the sun” must have been uttered a first time. Here is how this argument looks when paralleled to the argument above. p1: Making a claim for the first time requires at least one thing is new. p2: The initial claim that there is nothing new under the sun is something new. p3: There cannot be both something new and nothing new. Therefore, the initial claim that nothing is new under the sun could not have been true. If the one claiming that no one can say there are no absolutes is a Bible-believer, this passage from Ecclesiastes undermines their position. But let’s examine other aspects. Consider the following statement that is more approximate to the human experience. Example 2: The only thing that has not changed is the fact that everything changes. The following is the syllogistic form. p1: If a fact does not change, there is at least one thing that does not change. p2: There exists the unchanging fact that everything changes. p3: There cannot be both everything changed and one thing unchanged. Therefore, claiming that, the only thing that has not changed is the fact that everything changes, cannot be true. When examining the logic of the statement, it appears that it is logically incoherent. However, does the statement contain content, or is it nonsensical? Humans can grasp that, what seems to be an incoherency within the statement, does not necessarily change the truth value of the embedded statement “nothing fails to change”. The recognition of this embedding is a clue to why the full statement is merely an apparent contradiction. We will revisit this notion of linguistic embedding at a later point. Here is one more statement to consider. Example 3: I am certain that I am certain of nothing. Here is the syllogistic form that appears to invalidate the statement. p1: If there is certainty about anything, there is at least one thing upon which there is certainty. p2: Phil claims that he is certain he is certain of nothing. p3: There cannot be both one certainty and no certainty. Therefore, Phil’s claim that, he is certain he is certain of nothing, cannot be true. This appears to be a valid syllogism. However, we can all envision ourselves after a head injury, for example, having no certainty about anything, and being certain that we do not. Has logic failed? No. It has been illegitimately confounded by embedding one statement within another. It is a type of equivocation. There must be an acknowledgment of both the embedded phrase and the complex phrase, and the understanding that there must be actually 2 separate assessments of truth value. The mere fact that we can embed in this manner does not mean that we can legitimately assess the entire statement as a single linguistic equation. The embedded statements can and are extracted from the larger context to be first assess of their truth value prior to an assessment of the truth value of the entire phrase. It is like assessing the phrase *(5+(43)) = 17*. Unless (43) is evaluated first, the statement fails. Now lets revisit a formulation of our original statement. It is an absolute that there are no absolutes. The embedded phrase is “there are no absolutes”. Since the complex phrase requires 2 assessments, we can therefore employ parentheses to elucidate this. (It is an absolute that (there are no absolutes).) Properly assessed in 2 steps, this statement yields no contradictions and conveys just as much meaning as saying “I am certain I have certainty of nothing.” Section Two: The unreferenced use of adjectival terms. Now that we have teased out the reason behind the merely apparent paradox in compound statements, I’d like to address something even closer to the root the the problem surrounding the attempts to argue for “absolutes”. Before admitting an entity into our ontic, we ask “Does X exist?” This X is a variable that must eventually resolve to an instance of a noun. The X cannot be adjectival. For example, if I were to suggest that “louds” existed in the world, you might be puzzled. There are 2 things to note. The word “loud” is an adjective, and requires a referent. The word “loud” is applicable only in the domain of sounds. A word less clearly adjectival, yet needing a referent is “extreme”. We often say something is “an extreme”. We leave the referent behind as something tacitly understood, but at no time does the referent leave the context. Here is a short list of other similar words: gradient, best, relative and extreme. None of these words have ontological significance beyond their modifying of existing entities. And just as the word “loud” is limited to the domain of sounds, they may have their own domains within they are confined. With these 2 concepts in mind for adjectival terms, let’s revisit our original problematic phrase. It is an absolute that there are no absolutes. We now know that this phrase is ill-formed since it does not specify the referents. And the referents for the 2 occurrences of “absolute” could in fact be different. In fact, as this phrase is commonly employed, the referents are indeed different. Let’s reformulate the statement. It is an absolute propositional truth that there are no absolute moral facts. We have resolved 2 issues here. The word “absolute” now has explicit referents, and the domains of “propositions” an “morality” have been specified. So, in spite of the fact that there are things in the world that can be assigned the modifier “absolute”, it does not follow that the word absolute applies to all things and in all domains. Let’s take aesthetic values as an example. Consider the following statements. Vanilla is a loud ice cream. This will not do. “Loud” is confined to the domain of sounds. Vanilla is a relative ice cream. Neither does this have meaning since “relative” has been used outside its legitimate domain. Vanilla is the absolutely best ice cream! Now this phrase has actually been spoken, perhaps millions of times. However, does that fact that it can be uttered and understood actually mean vanilla ice cream can be legitimately said to be an “absolutely best” flavor? No. We understand that with subjective values, there can be no real application of objective qualities. “Absolute” can only be legitimately applied in an objective context. It has no significance in a subjective context other than to express an emotional state. Here’s where claims of “absolute moral facts” run aground. It has not been established that morality is objective. It has not even been established that there is a moral domain distinct from emotions and subjective activities. In concluding this section, the fact that “absolute” can be used meaningfully in one particular domain does not legitimate it in other domains. In fact, to use the word in isolation without a referent demonstrates at minimum a lack of philosophical acumen, and at most may belie an a conscious desire to dishonestly equivocate between different ontological domains so as to illegitimately introduce unwarranted concepts such as “absolute” moral facts. Section Three: The speciousness of proposed “absolute” moral values. It is the contention of this writer that all moral systems are, without exception, traced back to an emotional substrate. This emotional substrate generates general values which then serve as a target for moral systems. The moral systems are not independent of this emotional substrate, but are, in fact, devices to validate the emotions. Those moral systems that most precisely map onto the emotions and subsequent conventionally held values of a particular society are those moral systems that take root and thrive. This emotional substrate is even clear evidenced in some of the more anemic definitions of “absolute moral values” as cited below. Love is an absolute moral value that is universally accepted and expected by all people. ^{Norman L. Geisler and Ronald M. Brooks, When Skeptics Ask (Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books, 1990), 274–278.} Converting love from an emotion to an absolute moral value will take more than ephemeral affirmations. It will require demonstrating that a moral domain does, in fact, exist, and explain how an emotion can be ontologically elevated from a subjective emotion into an objective moral value. Section Four: The aspirations of moral systems. The human psyche and the human condition are the parameters upon which moral systems vie for dominance. Dominance is determined by the ability of the moral system to map well to the emotional substrate set by those parameter. It is like a black and white checkered board that the inventors of various moral games attempt to dominate. The very same board can be used for checkers, or chess, or some other game that operates within the parameters in what can be perceived as a fair way. But even then there are arguments over the size of the board, the number of squares, and even whether a particular square is black or white. As moral systems appear in the world today, there is not even a hint at consensus on a wide range of moral issues. Yet some are claiming that because there exist moral systems in nearly every society that this is evidence for the notion that all such systems reflect some more objective moral domain. This is a non sequitur, and saliently so given the disparity in moral values among all the competing systems. One simplistic moral system that seems to protect the emotional sense of justice, alleviates fear, and validates feeling of altruism is the Golden Rule. Variations of the Golden Rule were offered earlier by Confucius around 500 BCE, by Isocrates about 375 BCE, and Mahabharara near 150 BCE. The simplicity of this single rule and its smooth mapping to common humans emotions have made it popular and useful throughout the centuries. It’s success, however, in no way warrants its ontological elevation to anything other than a successful heuristic in psychological and social contexts. It is far more warranted to parsimoniously conclude that all proposed moral systems reflect the emotional substrate of the societies upon which they thrive. We know emotions exist. Introducing a moral realm to justify absolute moral values is to conjure up an entire ontic that has neither warrant nor necessity. Why then do systems of morality prevail in most societies? Guilt and a sense of justice. The emotional salience of guilt makes us feel that particular actions must be “wrong” in a way that transcends the emotion of guilt. And the actions of others we want to condemn need validation from a moral code, so we find or invent one. The power of personal emotions is such that they construct ontological frameworks even faster than an impersonal scientific exploration of the material. Our own emotions delude us far more efficiently than any charlatan. It takes focused introspection to see them for what they really are, and to refrain from christening proposed entities and domains as real without sufficient warrant. And this is especially true for a proposed moral domain and the proposed moral facts within a particular moral system. I find no warrant for either an absolute moral domain, or absolute moral facts. I do, however, see the human psyche with its swirling emotions producing various “rules” of behavior that validate self and provide cohesion to society. These consequences, however, remain within the predictable effects of emotional drives. In conclusion, to say there are unqualified “absolutes” is egregiously in violation of basic rules of linguistics and philosophy. To claim there is an objective moral domain and that there are absolute moral values has no warrant, and it appears that all the evidence substantiates the parsimonious explanation; emotions form the substrate of all proposed moral systems. ----------------------- I weep often for those spending their mortal lives investing in a demonstrably mythical immortality as I once did. -phil
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