Poor, Edmund W wrote:

Second, I just did a Google search for "moral relativism" and the first hit was www.moralrelativism.com which says:

I just followed the link and got moralrelativism.com coming soon! This page is parked FREE at GoDaddy.com! and a lot of adds for domain names.

It appears that what you meant was www.moral-relativism.com The hyphen makes a big difference. :-)

The site is not a neutral one. It is maintained by All About GOD Ministries, Inc. (GOD capitalized by them.) One must keep that in mind in everything that is read there.

<< Moral Relativism is the theory that morality, or standards of right and wrong, are culturally based and therefore become a matter of individual choice. You decide what's right for you, and I'll decide what's right for me. Moral relativism says, "It's true for me, if I believe it."

Moral relativism may be culturally based OR it may be a matter of individual choice. This does not mean that the latter follows from the former. Such a view is a non-sequitur. A Confucian morality is culturally based, but has nothing to do with individual choice. The idea of "you decide what's right for you, and I'll decide what's right for me," sounds more like an enunciation of a Libertarian ideal than moral relativism.

Moral Relativism has gradually become the prevailing moral philosophy of western society, a culture once governed largely by the Judeo-Christian concept of morality. While those early standards continue to form the basis for civil law, people by and large are embracing the notion that right and wrong are not absolute values, but are to be decided by the individual and can change from one situation or circumstance to the next. Essentially, moral relativism says that anything goes, because life is ultimately without meaning. >>

Note:

• "Moral Relativism has gradually become the prevailing moral philosophy

of western society"

• "...right and wrong are not absolute values, but are to be decided by

the individual"

I can accept the first highlighted comment as probably factual in a neutral sort of way. The second one is the same sort of logical non-sequitur as in the earlier paragraph. The premise is acceptable bu does not necessarily lead to that conclusion. The last sentence in the paragraph is really the existentialist's dilemma. As Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor puts it, "Everything is permitted."

Jimbo and Larry's NPOV policy does not say that right and wrong are to be decided by the individual. It says (and this is a crucial distinction) that when matters of fact are in dispute, the Wikipedia won't endorse one side as correct. It also says that Wikipedia won't endorse one philosophical or religious viewpoint as correct. Same with moral or ethical judgments.

Wikipedia doesn't say whether there is or is not an absolute standard. It is even neutral on that! The NPOV is not an endorsement of moral relativism, nor a condemnation of it. It's a policy decision not to /assert/ any conclusions, but it never says that such conclusions are impossible to draw.

That's all fine, but most of the arguments surrounding NPOV are not about whether such a philosophy should be accepted, but about whether a certain point in a debate falls within the definition of NPOV. I find the support for NPOV among Wikipedians to be very strong. Our definitions of the term tend to be morally relativistic. ;-)

Ec