Physicists tell us that time seems to freeze when we enter the event horizon around a black hole.  Our current president has been frozen in the event horizon around the black hole of moral relativism for decades of conventional time.  People think he has shifted to the left since becoming president.  No, he hasn’t.  He is right where he has always been.

The other party has its own difficulties with relativism.  Mr. Biden, however, presents a particularly conspicuous and persistent case of what we might call the relativistic paradox:  Although relativists seem to say that there is no moral law, they insist on the moral rightness of their relativism.

In 1991, then a senator, opposing the Clarence Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court, Mr. Biden worried in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post that the nominee might believe in “a static set of unchanging [moral] principles,” rather than an “evolving body of ideals.”  His statement was relativistic, because it denied that there is a thing as an unchanging moral principle.  But the statement also exhibited the relativistic paradox, because at the same time it insisted that there is.  For consider:  What did Mr. Biden mean by suggesting that moral ideals “evolve”?  I don’t think he meant that they undergo meaningless and arbitrary change; after all, he approved of this so-called evolution.  What he meant was that moral ideals are getting better.  But to suggest that they are changing for the better presupposes a standard of moral comparison, a yardstick of better and worse, which doesn’t change.  So even in order to say that our moral ideals have no fixed content, Mr. Biden needs at least one moral principle which does have fixed content – the principle by which he approves change in the other ones.

He also worried that the nominee might view the natural law as a “specific moral code regulating individual behavior” rather than something that “protects moral freedom, even in areas of moral choice.”  But to suggest that instead of laying down a moral code, the natural law protects moral choice, is to say that it is a moral code, for it does limit moral choice.  It declares exactly one restriction, which it considers all-important.  This restriction is, “Thou shalt not restrict choice.”  Once again we encounter the relativistic paradox.

And now the plot thickens.  We have just seen that if you say that I must not restrict moral choice, then my moral choice has been restricted, for I am not allowed to choose to restrict moral choice.  But it is logically impossible to put just one moral choice off limits.  To say that the only choice that we are not allowed to make is to restrict moral choice is just double talk.  Consider rape, for instance.  You may either permit rape or forbid it.  Either way, you are restricting someone’s choice.  Some relativists try to escape this dilemma by saying that the rapist wants to restrict the woman’s choice, but the woman doesn’t want to restrict anyone’s choice.  Nonsense.  If you permit rape, you are restricting the woman’s choice, because her choice would have been not to be raped.  If you forbid rape, you are restricting the rapist’s choice, because his choice would have been to rape her.  How do we decide which of the two choices is sacrosanct and which one isn’t?  The only way to do so is to fall back on a moral principle which tells us that rape is wrong and resisting rape isn’t.  So you aren’t merely putting one choice off limits, that is, the choice to restrict moral choice.  You are also – in this case, rightly -- putting another choice off limits – in this case, the choice to rape.  And so it goes.

Not only is it logically impossible to put just one choice off limits, but we also find that when Mr. Biden suggests that he wants to put only one choice off limits, he doesn’t mean it.  Leaping from the 1990s to the present, in which he is still stuck in the same event horizon, we find that Mr. Biden, now president, is the most ardently pro-abortion person ever to hold that office.  Mr. Biden chooses to restrict the choice of individuals, medical personnel, and organizations to refuse subsidizing or cooperating in choices which they consider gravely immoral.  Instead he insists that they choose his way, which is to subsidize and cooperate in them.

And so we advance toward the truth of the matter.  The relativistic talk of protecting choices in general never really protects choices in general, because that cannot be done.  You can protect some choices, but it is impossible to protect all choices; to protect some choices logically entails restricting others.  For example, to protect the decision “I choose that someone else will subsidize my act” is to restrict the decisions of other people who choose not to subsidize my act, and vice versa.  So on close examination, what the moral relativist really does is forbid the choices he doesn’t like, and permit or command the choices he does like.

So what?  Doesn’t all morality do that?  Doesn’t all morality encourage good choices and restrict bad ones?  Yes, but there is a difference.  The moral relativist doesn’t do it in the good, old-fashioned, honest way, by explaining why the choices he restricts are morally bad and why the choices he encourages are morally good.  Instead he pretends that he is not restricting anything at all – that he is following the policy of protecting choices in general – which, as we have seen, is impossible.  In other words, he enforces his morality by pretending (a) that he isn’t enforcing it, and (b) that it isn’t a morality.  So moral relativism isn’t just a false and bad philosophy; it is a crooked and deceptive philosophy.

Now you may object that the much-mocked Mr. Biden is an easy target.  Perhaps he is not crooked and dishonest, but just a little stupid.  Perhaps he is not so much deceiving others as deceiving himself, trying to making some sort of peace with his uneasy Catholic conscience.  I think this may very well be true.  But this kind of stupidity is not accidental; it is motivated, and the motivation is bad.   If I lie to myself to make peace with my conscience, it is nonetheless a lie, and it may still be criticized for what it is.

Source:

Joseph R. Biden, Jr., “Law and Natural Law: Questions for Judge Thomas.”  The Washington Post, 8 September 1991, Sunday, Final Edition.

Related:

What Kind of Progress Does Progressivism Want?

Cable Bills and Birth Control Pills

Gentle readers,

I am pleased to tell you that three new interviews have just been posted to the Talks page:

The Truth about Happiness Pieced Together from Lies.  Interviewer Karina Macosko of Academic Influence (video).  This interview aimed mostly at students.

Why Is More Never Enough?  Interviewer Jed Macosko of Academic Influence (video).  This interview aimed mostly at others.

How and How Not to Be Happy.  Interviewer Marianna Orlandi of the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture (audio).

A student who witnessed the incident tells me this anecdote about another course he is taking.

One of his classmates was finding it difficult to accept his professor’s line that people are whatever they “identify” as being.  The classmate asked, “So if someone decides he’s a refrigerator, then he’s a refrigerator?”

A “woke” student retorted, "It wouldn't be like that.  He would have been a refrigerator from birth."

By now everyone knows what canceling is.  Even so, there is a tendency to play it down.  Many people who went to college back in the day can’t really believe the strength of university cancel culture.  They don’t doubt that canceling happens, but they think it must be the exception rather than the norm.

I can understand the skepticism of a lot of non-academic people.  “It wasn’t like that when I went to school.  How could things have changed so quickly?”  Actually, even if it wasn’t quite so bad then, it may have been worse than they thought; it’s hard for students to recognize left-wing professorial bias when almost all of their professors are biased the same way.  Still, people have eyes.  Afterward, when cancel culture invades the places where they work, then they may take notice.

It’s a little harder to understand why even scholars in the midst of university cancel culture often make light of it.

Naturally, left-wing academics do that.  One bad motive and two naïve ones seem to operate.  The bad motive is to deny the strength of cancel culture because you are one of the perpetrators, and smearing people who say that there is such a thing is one of your techniques.  The two naïve motives are more interesting.

One naïve motive arises from a feeling of safety.  I’ve heard left-wing colleagues say, “What cancel culture?  I speak my mind, and nobody has tried to cancel me.”  Of course not, because they are speaking left-wing minds.  Cancel culture operates only on people who step off the reservation.

The second naïve motive arises from obliviousness to what one’s own milieu is really like.  Fish don’t know they are wet; left-wing academics don’t always know how far left they are.  Although they may have traveled the world, ideologically they are provincial.  I have colleagues who think they are moderates merely because they are at the midpoint of the left-wing spectrum.

To people like that, a climate in which non-left-wing opinion is suppressed doesn’t even seem suppressive.  They are hardly aware that other sorts of opinions exist, except in freakshows, and they may even view non-university culture as a whole as a kind of freakshow.

The really surprising thing, however, isn’t why non-academics would doubt the strength of cancel culture, or why leftist academics would whitewash it, but why even some conservative academics play it down.  (Are there any conservative academics?  Yes, although their numbers are shrinking.)

One reason seems to be that conservative academics internalize the norms of the surrounding academic culture.  That’s what people do; we are social beings.  Though academics view themselves as independent, actually they tend to be even more susceptible to peer pressure than most other sorts of people.  The result?  Some conservative academics don’t express their views at all.  Some do, but apologetically – “I’m not one of those kinds of conservative.”  Some habitually express their views in ways that don’t challenge the left, always accepting the way that leftists frame the questions.

People who do these things well enough may be left alone because the institution finds them useful for cover.  They may feel unthreatened because they don’t understand their own status, and they are not being threatened at this moment.  And so they too say, “Nobody has tried to cancel me.”

Give it time.

The CDC says we may be getting closer to a something a little more like normal (whatever getting closer may mean).  You’d better keep your fingers crossed, because in the meantime, other authorities are warning that in view of the latest, latest, latest kind of Covid-19, we may not be ready even yet.  It seems that some people just can’t let go.

Of course there are ever-new variants on the variants, just as with flu.  Something that used to sound like raving has become more and more obvious to more and more citizens:  These people don’t want to protect.  They want to control.

In April, 2020, when the lockdown had already far exceeded those “two weeks to flatten the curve,” I wrote that coronavirus control measures were going to change us.  My crystal ball isn’t perfect – true prediction is impossible in human affairs – but give me a few points for correctly anticipating some of the things that were coming.

I only wish that two years ago I had given even more emphasis to the impulse to control.  The impulse is particularly prominent on the left, and one could almost wish that it weren’t, because stating the fact plainly sounds partisan.  That can’t be helped.  The fact to be stated plainly is that “progressives” are not extreme liberals, but incipient totalitarians, and “wokeists” are not extreme progressives, but more and more the bearers of its central tendency.

Though old-fashioned liberals often misconceived liberty, they believed in it, or thought they believed in it, or at least wanted to believe in it.  Progressives don’t, and their attitudes toward governance edge closer to totalitarianism every day.

With exceptions, conservative politicians have a different problem.  They don’t think systematically.  They are almost always blindsided.  Some of the things they want to “conserve” are in fact only slightly older, slightly less extreme versions of our present craziness.  They leave the framing of the issues to their opponents, and they are under pressure from some of the same interests.  Some of the few who do seem to understand their opponents are narcissistic egomaniacs.  I prefer narcissists to sociopaths, but still.

==============

Here is what I said two years ago:

“A great many people are asking how the coronavirus will change us, but that is not the right question.  The only way the virus can change us is to make us sick, God forbid.  Any other changes will come about not because of the virus itself but because of our response to it.  All in a rush, we are making the decisions that will change us right now.  The right question, then, is which ones we are making.

“For example:  Maybe not – but families fed up with ever-increasing cost and the ever-decreasing content of college education might demand massive reductions in expensive classroom instruction.  Since the school refuses to refund my kid’s tuition on grounds that he’s still getting the same educational value online, why not teach all courses that way?

“Maybe not – but persons whose sense of their faith is already iffy might slack off from the practice of worship and participation in the sacraments.  If even my pastor says I should just watch the service online during the epidemic, why couldn’t I do that every week?

“Maybe not – but panicky citizens might stop complaining about governmental interference with religious institutions.  Here and there a few small churches and synagogues have continued holding public worship services, perhaps reflecting that if ever people needed God, they need Him now.  Responding to those few, the mayor of New York City threatened not just to prevent these churches and synagogues from holding large public meetings during the epidemic, or prevent them until the epidemic is over from violating social distancing guidelines -- which would not have been unreasonable -- but to permanently shut them down.  He has no authority to do so, but that does not make it unimportant that he wanted to and thought that he did.  Will such bullying become a precedent?

“Maybe not – but fearful of widespread economic collapse, voters might be all too ready to exaggerate the power of government and to think that there is nothing special about a competitive economy free of constant, pervasive political intervention.  How the economy works is not widely taught, and many think “free market” is a synonym for “greed.”

“Maybe not – but the shift of power and initiative from the states to the central government, nothing new in itself, might accelerate.  To many people, the idea that the states might be laboratories capable of making their own decisions, perhaps even trying out new responses to the emergency, seems a useless abstraction.  When citizens are afraid, the urge to have the federal government control and direct everything is strong.

“Maybe not – but we might see the yearning to turn everything over to technocrats become even stronger than it already is.  How many times have you heard it said that politicians should get out of the way and let “the scientists” do their work?  But experts are political too, and even if they weren’t, what policies to make in view of competing economic and epidemiological models is a political decision.

“Maybe not – but global trade might become even less popular.  I count myself a free trader, but even most free traders can see danger in relying on overseas providers for goods crucial to national health and security – especially when the interests of the countries from which we get them may be opposed to our well-being.

“Maybe not – but the configuration of international politics might change, as the statements and declared intentions of the totalitarian rulers of China concerning the crisis fall further into disrepute.

“These are only could-bes and might-happens.  In another two years, things will look different.  But we should be thinking right now about what we are doing to shape them.”

Those next two years have come and gone.  When are we going to start doing that thinking?