Published December 30, 2024
Relativism has gotten morality. Kinda.
The moral relativism that Christians fretted about a generation ago is fading. The sort of people who made “don’t judge” into a mantra back in the nineties and noughties, and who loudly complained about any efforts to “impose morality” are now themselves very judgmental and eager to impose morality.
It is once again permitted, even fashionable, on the left to speak the language of morality—although, for those of us of a certain age, it is a bit jarring to see, say, a liberal young woman on TikTok insisting that a vote for Donald Trump was a profoundly immoral act. And, of course, wokeness, which escaped academia to afflict us all, is dedicated to judging and imposing morality on politics and culture.
Something like this was inevitable. We are moral beings. We need moral agreement for social cohesion and survival and moral justification to sustain our own self-regard. An ethos of moral relativism was never going to endure no matter how effective it was at tearing down established norms.
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Nathanael Blake, Ph.D. is a Fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His research interests include American political theory, Christian political thought, and the intersection of natural law and philosophical hermeneutics. His published scholarship has included work on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Russell Kirk and J.R.R. Tolkien.
