Religion & Law

I appreciate Robby's effort to clarify what then-Cardinal Ratzinger may have meant in his less-than-clear talk about "a dictatorship of relativism."  Robby:  "The point that Pope Benedict is trying to communicate, I believe, . . ."

Robby writes:  "[W]hen morality gets in the way, many are tempted to say (sincerely enough, even if often inconsistently) that morality lacks any objective basis."  True enough.  But it is also true that when a morality with which one disagrees gets in the way of  what one is convinced to be the moral truth about some matter, many are tempted to accuse that morality and its proponents of being "relativist".  As in:  The growing acceptance, and even affirmation, of same-sex relationships in liberal democracies is depressing evidence of a growing relativist moral sensibility.

John Mackie was not a relativist.  And I doubt it clarifies much by calling him as a "subjectivist".  Mackie is best understood as someone who is, like the (relatively) young (and highly respected) philosopher Richard Joyce, a moral fictionalist.  See Joyce's The Myth of Morality (Cambridge, 2002).  What *is* clarifying is to point out that the kind of morality that in the view of both Mackie and Joyce is a fiction is not the only kind of morality there is--and not even the best kind.  As I understand it, and whatever the intent of its proponents, moral fictionalism does not pose a serious challenge to a eudaimonistic morality, and both Aristotle's and Thomas's moralities are eudaimonistic.  Presumably even moral fictionalists are committed to their own well-being; they want their lives to go well; they want to flourish rather than to wither.  The serious disagreement between Pope Benedict and Robby (and Catholic traditionalists generally) on the one side, and some Catholic moral-theological dissidents on the other, with respect to the issue of same-sex sexual conduct, is a disagreement about the requirements of human well-being.  This is a disagreement between two groups neither of whom is relativist (or subjectivist), both of whom are fiercely anti-relativist.