What makes you say that?
The fact (implication? postulate?) that some “rights” are more inviolable than others, both as a result of the legal difficulty of retracting some rights compared to others (a simple majority cannot retract Freedom of Speech, f’rinstance), and as a result of the implied primacy of some rights as compare to others (it would be more difficult to retract the 1st amendment than the 26th amendment if for no other reason than because the 1st amendment rights are more ingrained in the American culture, in the “collective conscience” or whatever have you, than the 26th amendment rights).
Yes, they are ingrained in the culture—one of the hearts of relativistic analysis.
erislover: Since the debate is about what principles are integrated into the American constitution, we have to make claims about what’s integrated into American culture. Telling us that we can’t basically means that we can’t have a debate.
Basically, your criticism would also apply to a statement like, “Objectivism is ingrained into the culture of Christianity”–the fact that the claim here is inherently relativist has no bearing on whether or not Christianity is objectivist. It still has no bearing even if I am a Christian.
But expanding this question: I have no idea whether you intended to do this, but you actually tangentially raised a good point–“we hold these truths to be self-evident” is a very ambiguous phrase in the context of this debate. You could focus on the “we hold” or on the “self-evident”. The first would tend towards the US as relativist, the second towards the US as objectivist.
(BTW, what does “objectivism” here have to do with the “objectivism” that’s associated with Ayn Rand?)
-Ulterior
I’m not forbidding you from doing it, I’m pointing out that morality from a cultural perspecive—with culture as causation—is the heart of the most popular conception of moral relativity.
You could say that. But Christianity is not founded an seeking majority opinions on social organization. A key difference, IMO.
Nothing as far as I can tell. We should stick with absolutism.
If a culture (or society or legal system, whatever) has resistance to change built into its structure, similarly to how American culture has an inherent resistance to change resulting from the fact that the Constitution cannot be altered by a simple majority vote, then I submit that this distinctly tips the balance away from pure relativism and towards objectivism, if for no other reason than because “the way things are” is assumed to be inherently (objectively) superior to “the way things aren’t.”
Nothing, I hope… 
My apologies, I never meant to come off as “self-congratulatory.” And while the OP might not make for an airtight deductive logical statement I think I do understand what you were going for.
The logic would still not be airtight in that “most” does not preclude a moral code that is not based on religion. This however is a minor quibble as your point really had more to do with moral relativism being necessary in any compromise between religious moral codes. And if there’s one thing they hammer into when you learn about the founding of our nation, it would be the spirit of compromise which made it possible.
There are many reasons why the founding fathers would have wanted to stay as far as possible from endorsing any one religion. An important one would be the need for legitimacy in the eyes of those who were to be governed by it. By singling out any one religious moral code many more would have been alienated.
It was important that it was clear that the power the federal government would have would be derived from the people, not religious authority (and the attendant religious institution). They left the nation the power to govern itself as its own national conscience dictated and allowed for that conscience to change.
Is our government founded in moral relativism? Perhaps, but not the self-paralysing kind. Democracy has given the means to reach compromises between differing moral mindsets, so long as the constitution is not violated any agreement is better than none. It hasn’t always worked (ie. the Civil War), but its better than having a seemingly arbitrary religious monolith for a government.
This is clearly a judgment call, but my cup is half-full on this one. At least the U.S. Constitution forsees the need for change and allows it to occur in given circumstances, it’s more open to change than in other countries. For example, if we consider the UK a functional democracy, then it is inherently more resistant to change, since in my understanding it has no written constitution at all, only accumulated case law, which can be changed only in irregular ways.
Not at all. A little snarky, maybe, but would we be here if we weren’t all a little snarky?
Agreed, and I understand how my logic fails in deductive formality. In the spirit of understanding logic better, I was wondering if you or others could use the existence of non-religious moral codes to show how, in this case, the flawed logic leads to a incompatible conclusions.
Agreed again, and maybe this is why the idea interested me in the first place. The framers (many of whom were devout men) realized that in this case, it was more important to acknowledge their similarities and common value than any special strictures their belief systems imposed on them. (As an aside, I believe that Thomas Jefferson is thought to have been a deist. I’m not a religious scholar, but I think that means he wasn’t even a christian in practice.)
In contrast, current conservatives and Christian fundamentalists seem intent not only on denying similarities (between themselves and, say, Muslims) but on insisting that their moral code is the only right one and everyone ought to live by it.
I’m the first to admit that the diversity of moral opinions is unbelievable broader today than it was in the framers’ time, but I still find the contrast between their compromise and the judgments and promulgations today to be instructive.
Hmmm… most of my PoliSci profs were of the opinion that the UK “constitution” was much more flexible and amenable to change precisely because it was entirely based on statute and case law. Up in Canada the idea of an enshrined Charter of Rights & Freedoms was opposed by a lot of people on the theory that it diverged too much from the British flexibility model. In the UK still, and in Canada until 1982, you could alter a “right” (there were statutory bills of rights, but no entrenched charter) simply by act of Parliament.
The idea is that public opinion would prevent any seriously major breach of general liberal-democratic principles by Parliament.
This can have implications for either side of the debate, though. On the one hand, as loinburger argues, it can mean that the principles enshrined are enshrined in a much more solid and unyielding way. However, on your side, nogginhead, the specific value that’s emphasized in the US Constitution is one which guarantees an inviolable sphere of freedom of action–that is to say, of moral relativism.
Again, it’s all about the balance between the two.
-Ulterior
Most of them were deists. People get thrown off when the hear one of them use the word “god” and they assume they’re Christians.
The problem is that the question we’re missing is how much difference can be tolerated.
Civilized human being’s morals occupy only a small part of the grand spectrum of theoretically possible moralities. Within that, you have fundamentalism of all stripes, extreme relativism, anarchism, etc. And within that, you have a much smaller sliver that represents the actual moralities present in Philadelphia 1776. And it was only within that spectrum that they compromised.
As Neurotik pointed out, there are some ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with Democracy: opposition to free speech is one that’s way outside the spectrum.
loinburger, of course there is resistance to change. What would a law be without resistance to change? And yes, there are some decisions a group will consider to be more important than others. Relativism isn’t paralysis.
That’s about the size of it. For better of for worse (since that’s a different thread) there are never any drawn-out debates on the interpretation of constitutional chapters or clauses. Public pressure over the poll tax was partially responsible for Thatcher’s downfall; ever since then, governments have fallen over themselves to be the pollster’s best friend. Public opinion is, IMHO, a surprisingly powerful check in the UK, and when it fails the controversy is enormous (as may be the case with Iraq at the moment).
The U.S. was indeed founded on moral values held in common by the F.F. – but we collect those values under the generic term “liberty”. Loosely summed, their ideal for what America should be like quite closely resembles the Wiccan Rede – not that they advocated Wicca, of course, but that the two value systems coincide in what they consider supreme moral values. Most of the Christian and deist F.F. saw the Golden Rule or something quite similar as paramount in interpersonal relations, with a “hands off” attitude towards others’ behavior.
The attempts of the “traditional values” people to legislate their moral code are instinctually repulsive to many Americans simply because they fail to take the moral values outlined in the first paragraph into account, in an effort to regulate the behavior of others into what they consider to be ideal morality.
They might be the whims of a dictator, for example. If Joe issues a decree on Monday and retracts it on Tuesday, then the Joe-Makes-the-Laws legal system wouldn’t be very resistant to change.
If Joe Scmoe makes all of the laws and can change them by decree as he sees fit, then the legal system is less objective than the American legal system, since the legal standards are more prone to fluctuation or even radical alteration. Similarly, if all laws are passed (or retracted) by a simple majority, then the legal system is less objective than the American legal system, but it is still more objective than the Joe-Makes-the-Laws system.
The only truly relativist legal system would be one in which there were no standards, i.e. pure anarchy. All other legal systems are objective to some degree or another, depending on how resistant the systems’ legal standards are to change – as soon as you introduce standards you necessarily introduce objectivity as well.
Well, here is absolutism. In principle, there is no consulting going on, no need to check with others whether something is right or not.
What? Why? Are you saying moral relativists have no morals?
—If Joe Scmoe makes all of the laws and can change them by decree as he sees fit, then the legal system is less objective than the American legal system, since the legal standards are more prone to fluctuation or even radical alteration.—
But couldn’t you just as easily say that this system is far more objective than ANYTHING else? I mean, objectively, the laws are always whatever Scmoe wants them to be, because he has the authority, and that’s that.
It’s absolutism in the sense that one person is invested with all of the power of state, but it’s relative in that an absolute (perfect, complete) moral system is not being applied – on the contrary, the moral system’s standards are extremely non-objective given their inconstant nature (the standards being applied on Monday might be completely different from the standards being applied on Tuesday).
No, I’m saying that a pure relativist wouldn’t believe in moral standards, i.e. what is right action for me may not be right action for you and vice versa. It wouldn’t make sense for a pure relativist to believe in enforced morality (laws), since laws denote standards and standards denote objectivity.
Didn’t we already have this argument three months ago? 
Yes, it seems to be an easy topic to repeat!
Relative to what? In this case there are no other standards to apply, the dictator’s rule is the rule by which to measure, it is the authority to which one appeals. The relative stability of that rule is irrelevant. A democracy is always relative to the voters (a republic to the politicians).
That’s correct-ish. There are, of course, moral standards a relativist would hold (how else could one ever make any decision?). It is simply that there is no final authority to appeal to for making them… much like a constitution without any unchangeable laws.
Relative to the previously applied standards and the yet-to-be-applied standards – if the legal standard being applied Monday is substantively different from the legal standard being applied on Tuesday, then both standards are absolute within their respective scopes in the sense that there are no opposing standards, but they’re relative in the sense that the standards are wholly dependent upon the (in this case highly variable) whims of one dictator. A more objective standard would have dependencies that are themselves more objective, e.g. logic, culture, majority-rule, etc.
I ought to have used a term like “interrelated moral standards,” since a relativist could (and probably would) still have intrarelated (is that a word? Whatever, it is now) moral standards.