On Moral Relativism and Any Use of a Human Being

One of the classic problems of ethics is the question of whether moral relativism is a desirable ethical stance or a problematic one. Most people have probably heard the terms used as a derogatory--as a descriptor of a failure to set or adhere to rigorous moral standards; however, the idea ought not be dismissed out of hand, because the alternative is the adherence to the idea that there is one universal ethical code that must be applied to everyone's behavior in all circumstances. That idea is untenable on its face, and we acknowledge it every day in the fact that we make exceptions for a wide variety of circumstances: age (we don't hold a five-year-old to the same standard of behavior that we hold a 25-year-old to), mental capacity (we have different consequences for the mentally ill than we do for the mentally sound), emotional state (we would think it cruel of a teacher not to extend a deadline for a student whose parent had just died), and the specific situational conditions extant at the time of the action (killing someone in self-defense is not considered immoral and is not treated as a crime).

Things get a little trickier when it comes to judging cultural differences; nevertheless, it seems obvious that we do not judge as "wrong" all things that are different from what we do. Native Americans are permitted, for instance, to possess eagle feathers and to use peyote in cultural rituals; neither of those is legal among other American cultural groups. Even the fact that morality changes over time would indicate that considering "moral relativism" to be a pejorative term misrepresents the reality of human experience. History, in fact, can be seen as one long progression toward more tolerance, and behaviors that were once considered ruinously immoral are now commonplace. Jennifer James, anthropologist, stated in a lecture at which I was present at the International Baccalaureate North American Regional meeting in 2006 that "... you could shoot people of Chinese descent. They had no rights at all. They made contracts so that if they were killed, their bones would be sent back to Canton. Shipping lading notices list tons of bones." A hundred years later, our moral filter has been significantly reshaped, and such behavior now would be considered as wrong as it once was considered right.

On the other hand, it seems equally logical to assert that there must be some limits to accepting behavior as moral. People could not co-exist if we tried to enact a global moral system in which relativism served as the over-riding and guiding principle so that people were expected to accept every act as moral in all circumstances. Obviously murder cannot be justified as "good" behavior on the grounds that morality is relative. The same is true of many other behaviors that cause physical or emotional harm--theft, assault, verbal abuse, deceit, hypocrisy, and on and on.

There are, it would seem, some universally right and wrong behaviors, and there are some behaviors which a truly moral person respects as moral, whether that person would be willing to engage in them or not. Morality is, to some degree, relative. Given that we do acknowledge, both in our institutions and in our everyday dealings with each other, that relativism is a necessary element of enacting moral decisions, and also that moral relativism run amok to the point that we consider all behaviors in all situations to be equally acceptable would result in a complete inability to regulate behavior, then we are left to struggle with a Goldilocks dilemma: between the extremes of too tolerant and not tolerant enough, how much tolerance is just right? There is no single answer to this question; it must be adjudged anew in every situation. We're bound to get it wrong on a regular basis, as Mr. Obama apparently has in his selection of Rick Warren to give the benediction at tomorrow's historic inaugural ceremony.

The 43rd inauguration will be historic. No one argues anything else. Whether a given individual voted for Obama or not, whether he or she sees his upcoming presidency, as I do, as an occasion for hope and a release from a long darkness, or whether he or she sees the Obama presidency as an occasion for skepticism and dread, everyone recognizes that the inauguration of a black man as President of the United States represents an historical milestone that marks in a concrete way the distance we've traveled on a moral plane since the founding of the country. Certainly Mr. Obama is aware of the historical and moral significance of the event, and certainly he understands that because the country--and the world--are looking at the day as an emblem of hope and as the literal beginning of a better way to live, people will see every choice he makes as symbolic of what President-Elect Obama himself believes to be that better way to live. The fact that every choice of participant for tomorrow's ceremony embodies historical symbolism, in other words, simply cannot be overlooked or downplayed. Each person who has a role tomorrow has a place in history. By including Rick Warren in a prominent role, Mr. Obama has raised Rick Warren to historic prominence, and he has identified him as a person who should be seen as embodying that better way to live.

Since the Reverend Warren is an anti-gay-marriage activist who has created a furor by comparing gay marriage to pedophilia, incest, and bigamy, this vision is troubling.

Some people disagree with my assessment of the situation, however, and justify Mr. Obama's choice on the grounds that it represents Obama's spirit of inclusiveness. I have come across numerous claims, including from Obama himself, that Obama's pick of Rick Warren has nothing to do with his anti-gay proselytizing; rather, supporters argue, it is a sign that Obama means to keep his word about his intention to unify the country in that the selection of a far-right conservative Evangelist is a mark of tolerance and inclusion. I see two problems with that argument: 1) it ignores entirely the indelible symbolism of the occasion, including the fact that the inclusion of a religious figure reflects directly on the personal religious commitment of the President-Elect, and 2) it suggests that there is no problem of tolerance, and so relies, for its justification, on the assumption that tolerance should extend to tolerating those who engage in hate speech as a means of influencing tens of thousands of people.

Warren's defenders claim that Warren has not engaged in hate speech, that he doesn't hate gay people, but rather only wishes to preserve the "traditional" definition of marriage. I disagree. Though it does seem to be true that Warren has not said in so many words that homosexuals are all pedophiles (at least I haven't been able to find any record of any such remarks) it is nevertheless true that Warren did explicitly equate gay marriage with incestuous marriage, pedophilic marriage, and bigamy. In an online Time Magazine article yesterday, Amy Sullivan describes Warren's anti-gay attitudes thus:

After the election, Warren sowed more confusion about his support for Prop. 8.
First he compared homosexuality to incest, pedophilia and polygamy, and then he
tried to walk back from those comments by insisting that the real reason he
backed the initiative was to protect the free-speech rights of pastors to decry
homosexuality. It was an argument made by some other Prop. 8 proponents during
the campaign, but it is a phony one.

You can listen to the original interview with Belief.net in which Warren made his remarks about his objections to gay marriage here. Warren also says that there is a 5,000 year tradition of marriage being between one man and one woman and that that tradition exists in every religion. To my mind, his factual inaccuracy further undermines his credibility.

I am not sure where the line is between attitudes and behavior we should tolerate and those we should not, but bigotry is, for me, unquestionably on the wrong side of that line.

Let's say, for a moment, that I am wrong, and that in refusing to tolerate bigotry, I am myself in fact guilty of unjustified intolerance. This is, in fact, the other prominent pro-Warren argument. I cannot argue against that accusation: Rick Warren can be fairly accused of being intolerant of homosexuals; Barack Obama can be fairly accused of supporting that intolerant attitude by being tolerant of Rick Warren, and those who oppose Mr. Obama's tolerance of Mr. Warren's intolerance can certainly and fairly be accused of being intolerant of both Mr. Obama's tolerance and of Mr. Warren's intolerance, the resulting Gordian knot of tolerance and intolerance might not be loosed even by Alexander the Great.

Tolerance, of course, will be required if we are to make progress as a nation and as a species. Obama himself said, in a highly-regarded speech in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008:

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to
continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just,
more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run
for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we
cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless
we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we
hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from
the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better
future for of children and our grandchildren.

In choosing Rick Warren, Mr. Obama has, so far as I am concerned, violated the promise of those words. I suspect that he would disagree with me; he would say that means of creating a more just, equal, free and caring America will be the forging of bonds with those who disagree with us. While I can appreciate Mr. Obama's commitment to tolerance, to reaching out to all sorts of people with whom he, and other social liberals, disagree--even those with whom they disagree passionately, and while I even agree with him that talking with the "enemy" is a vastly superior means of making progress than fighting with him is, I do not believe that the inauguration was the appropriate moment at which to do it.

From my perspective, to speak at the most historic Presidential Inauguration since the first is an honor; to choose a person to speak is to honor that person. It's one thing to be willing to sit down and talk with the Reverend Warren, to determine not to alienate him completely, and to work, over time, to find common ground in the hope that we might one day close the gap between the widely separated moral world views that divide the fundamentalists and the social liberals in this country and which makes the passage of socially liberal policy contentious, and it is another thing altogether to elevate the Reverend Warren to a role that suggests that this is the man who represents the new President's moral and spiritual beliefs.

That is the fear that people who are really distressed by the choice of Rick Warren have. Those who accuse the nay-sayers of being intolerant and who decry the calls to have Rick Warren removed from the agenda as hypocrites miss the point. Those who have been mobilized to try to keep the Reverend Warren from talking have, I believe, been outraged by the wholly unexpected implication that Mr. Obama's fairly passive refusal to support Proposition 8 overtly masked a deeper prejudice that the choice of Rick Warren unmasked. Such a fear arises from the assumption that Mr. Obama's choices are personal, not political. That on such a day, the people he includes are people he values and trusts and admires. The argument that Mr. Obama's choice is a sign of his intention to include everyone under the umbrella of his administration rests on a different assumption, the assumption that Mr. Obama sees every day and every moment as a political opportunity, to be used to further his agenda. If that is the case, then the choice of Rick Warren makes sense.

I disagree with Mr. Obama's decision to include Rick Warren in the Inauguration regardless of which of those assumptions is true. In fact, I believe the latter possibility to be a good bit more probable than the former, but while the intention might have been good, I think it was an error of judgment--a failure either to understand the symbolic import of what he was doing, or, as Sullivan suggests in the Time article, a failure to understand the scope of the pain Warren has caused by his anti-gay activities. Nor do I think the error was effectively undone by what was evidently a belated decision to include Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly-gay Bishop of the Episcopal Church (or of any church, that I know about) in the festivities by having him give the invocation at a Pre-Inaugural event on Sunday. I think the choice to include Bishop Robinson does help to mitigate the mistake; it seems to suggest that Mr. Obama is aware that he made a tactical error in giving such a divisive figure so much credibility, and it seems to suggest that that error was made not because Mr. Obama himself shares Mr. Warren's anti-gay attitudes (although Mr. Obama's open opposition to gay marriage reflects much less social liberalism than I would prefer to see him demonstrate), but the fact that it was evidently an after-thought and the fact that Mr. Robinson has not paid an equal honor to that paid to Mr. Warren means that the scales are still somewhat out of balance. I would prefer Mr. Obama to display more active support for gay rights, but I would also much prefer that he were not so politically motivated and committed that he would be willing to use Mr. Warren and Mr. Robinson as means to a political end. There are occasions on which politics are necessarily the force shaping decisions; there are occasions on which genuine belief ought to rule the day. Inauguration Day ought to be the latter.

This is the first decision that the President-Elect Obama has made with which I strongly disagree. It is not a decision with powerful immediate consequences; I have to agree with my husband who says that he'd rather have Mr. Obama get this wrong and get Guantanamo right. This is not a decision which makes me wish I had not voted for Mr. Obama, nor is it a decision which undermines the fact that I am profoundly grateful to be looking at at least four years of a President whose intelligence, vision, philosophical sensitivity, and sheer depth of personality are dramatically superior to those of the outgoing one. I listen to Mr. Obama talk, as he did in last Friday's "Weekly Address," about the significance of the Inauguration as a peaceful transfer of power such as happens in only a few places in the world and throughout history, and I am still thrilled by the real prospect that the next few years will be utterly unlike the eight past.

Note: Others have written on this subject before me, with a focus more on criticizing the choice than on considering its ramifications, which I have tried to do here. If you are interested in pursuing the subject further, I can recommend the following sources:

The Human Rights Campaign Letter to Barack Obama

Time Magazine: "The Two Faces of Rick Warren"

NPR Audio File: "Rick Warren's Inaugural Participation Stirs Heated Debate"

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