FIRST THINGS: On the Square » It’s Not All Relative

re: Robert T. Miller writes, "As I wrote in this space last week (see here and here), many Catholic thinkers tend to dismiss as “relativists” anyone who disagrees radically with them on some moral or political matter. This, I argued, is a mistake, for there very many ways of disagreeing with Catholic moral teaching, each importantly different from the others, and of these very few amount to relativism in any plausible sense of that term. In particular, almost none amount, in Bishop Crepaldi’s words, to a “dogma [that] a priori rejects rational argumentation” on normative questions. /My correspondence has since been voluminous and (except for that from professional philosophers, who have largely agreed with me) usually furious. I want therefore to address some of the more common points my correspondents raise...[snip]...No one is a relativist in morals just because he’s uninformed about material facts or untrained in logic. Indeed, the very fact that someone is prepared to make arguments—even bad arguments—shows that he does not reject rational argumentation but rather embraces it. Whatever the intellectual faults of people guilty of shoddy reasoning, they do not include a wholesale rejection of rational argumentation. Notice, incidentally, how my correspondents who raised this point are falling into the very error I was inveighing against on the blog: By confusing people who reason badly with people who reject reasoning completely, they are mistaking a non-relativist position for a relativist one..."...