![]() If you or your culture think gay sex is wrong, relativism says gay sex is wrong for you. They’re not permitted because someone thinks they are they’re just permitted, for everyone, everywhere. It says that for everyone, whatever their beliefs, or their culture’s beliefs, both gay and straight sex are morally permitted. For many acts in the private sphere, liberals say, each of two choices, either to do something or not to, is morally allowed.īut this is a universal, not a relativist, claim. If you’re in intolerable pain, ending your life is permitted, as is helping someone in pain to end theirs. A liberal view says gay sex isn’t wrong – it’s morally permitted, as is straight sex and, in fact, any sex that all participants consent to. In the 1960s it was common to speak of a new “permissive” morality, and that’s a good description. But although a liberal view rejects these prohibitions and doesn’t regard these private acts as morally wrong, that doesn’t make it relativist. Suicide, too, may be regarded as a sin, so even voluntary euthanasia should be banned. Traditional private morality contains prohibitions about, for example, sex: it may say gay sex is wrong, as is any sex outside of heterosexual marriage. A liberal view that rejects those duties therefore lacks the needed foundation for public duties: the relativism at liberal morality’s core infects the whole. A sound public morality, they may argue, must be grounded in a private morality, in duties just about the self. But a progressive morality rejects those traditional standards, finding nothing morally wrong in most consensual private acts.Ĭonservatives may say this makes a progressive view relativist about private behaviour, and that this is both objectionable in itself and undermines any claims progressives make about public acts. It sets standards for private life, ones that separate moral from immoral ways of acting when you’re on your own, or when you’re engaging with others in ways they agree to. A traditional morality of the kind Barr defends makes many claims about behaviour that doesn’t affect other people, except, say, your family or intimates.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |