Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist
I disagree. Moral relativism is very much a thing. But it&#x27;s just a muddled matter.<p>To me, &quot;moral relativism&quot; just means the recognition that different societies had and have different moral ideas, and that even within a single society rules are murky and fluid, and often outright undefined.<p>Pretty much any moral rule you can name has been proudly broken. Eg, torture? Take Abu Ghraib for instance. Not only was it done, but it was done proudly, with selfies taken for remembering the &quot;good times&quot; later.<p>I find that on the long term the discussion tends to coalesce towards children. Well, in most wars out there children suffered from it. Even in WWII, you can bet that there was an American or Russian bomb that killed a German child, and you won&#x27;t find a lot of either feeling all that conflicted about their actions. The atomic bombs are a tad controversial, but still find plenty proponents of that the horrific slow deaths they inflicted on quite a few people (including children) were in the end for the greater good.<p>So far I think about the closest to an effective &quot;objective moral rule&quot; I&#x27;ve heard is that it&#x27;s immoral to torture children for fun. But when I think of it that&#x27;s almost a tautology -- It works out to &quot;It&#x27;s immoral to cause harm without a good reason&quot;, more or less.<p>Or, if the objection here is that a given individual finds their own code as rigid and unyielding, I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s really true either. Amazing horrors are committed by soldiers in wars even well outside of their own direct duty, and moral compromises of all sorts have been made for the sake of diplomacy.