Moral Relativism vs Moral Absolutism... Both or neither?

What are morals?

"associated with or characterised by right behaviour" also "associated with or concerning conduct or moral principles" (good or bad); from Latin mos (genitive moris) "one's disposition".

We could conclude that morality concerns one's disposition to what is good and bad behaviour. However, is man to decide what is good and what is bad? It is my perspective that man is not capable of deciding right and wrong but capable of finding out how good differs from evil.

 

It could be argued, and it certainly has been argued before, that the bible is a law book. The Zohar explains that when Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a light spectrum was generated which goes from the highest frequency of light (Ultraviolet) to the lowest frequency (Infrared). Ultraviolet light being good and infrared light being absence of light or evil. In Hebrew, good and evil is ‘Tov & Ra’. RA means Ratzon Atzmi, which signifies selfish desire. The ultimate master which enslaves us all is our own desire to receive for ourselves. Therefore, RA or selfish desire is just absence of light.

The metaphor of Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge of good and evil shows us that whenever we judge events or things as being good or bad, we fall from Eden, meaning that we think we decide what things are good and what things are bad by applying a morality of our own, therefore believing we are God-like. Whenever we do that, we lose the chance of learning from everything that comes to our lives, as we have judged already the nature of the thing as being good or bad for us. When we do that, what appeared as an opportunity to reveal hidden light becomes just another meaningless event which is now just simply a part of the environment. Perhaps we do not have the power to establish morality, but we do have the power to ‘reveal light’ in everything we come across.

But then, if we should not judge things as good and bad, how are we to assess anything in order to give it light and allow a transformation in us? At the core of the talk about the relationship between law and morality, there seems to be a dichotomy of moral absolutism versus moral relativism. Like all dichotomies, none of the poles are absolute and none are dispensable, but both seem to contain a little bit of truth. At the beginning of writing this blog, I assumed relativism to be completely false and a dangerous ideology because in order to be able to assess what is right and what is wrong, one needs to have a firm and absolute scale of values. Absolutes need to exist, in fact, they even exist in the mind of the relativist as he claims that ‘everything is relative’ in an absolute manner. This logical contradiction at the core of relativism shows that scales of values are intrinsic in nature, there is no escaping them.

The dilemma between absolute and relative morality is essential and certainly a difficult one to analyse: is there such a thing as a morality by which sentient beings can guide their behaviour?   

And the answer that I propose is yet again ambiguous: yes and no. After a few months of thinking about this division between absolute and relative I realised that it is a trap as long as it comes from outside oneself. I find that Osho Rajneesh describes in an interesting way this ambiguity. It could be argued that he proposes a kind of relativism, but it is not at all the destructive moral relativism that we can see in our “modern” societies which, in my opinion, could be better described with the term “amoralism”.

The philosopher writes:

All that you think is good or bad is nothing but a conditioning. But this conditioning can go on managing your whole life. The society has entered in you and controls you from there, from within. It has become your inner voice. And because it has become your inner voice, you cannot hear your REAL inner voice. So my suggestion is: throw all the conditioning OUT, cathart it, be free from it. That’s what I mean when I say don’t be a Christian, a Hindu, a Jaina, a Buddhist. Just be. And be alert. In that alertness you will always know what is right and what is wrong. And the right and the wrong is not a fixed thing – something may be right in the morning and may be wrong in the evening, and something may be wrong in the evening and may be right in the night. Circumstances change. An alert man, a conscious man, has no fixed ideas. He has spontaneous responses but no fixed ideas. Because of fixed ideas you never act spontaneously. Your action is always a kind of reaction – not action really. When you act out of spontaneity, with no idea, with no prejudice, then there is real action. And action has passion in it, intensity in it. And it is original and it is first-hand. And action makes your life creative and action makes your life continuously a celebration. Because each act becomes an expression of your being.  (This Very Body the Buddha, p.54)

What I read from Osho’s explanation is that morality cannot be attached to certain actions in particular but that they need context and overall, they need the individual to be the “owner” of his action, not the slave of his desire.

In a very enlightening essay, a man who calls himself Aquinas writes:

What is moral is what is true. Truth is truth. It is what has happened. There can be no shadings of truth, no relative orderings of less or more truth. It simply is. To the degree that truth can be known, knowing what is moral action becomes completely unambiguous. We have been educated to believe in a lie that morality can be determined and handed down in laws of man. This has led to an idea that what is good is simply what feels good. That is hedonism. This way of thinking excludes reason, and therefore prevents us from connecting with what is true. This is an artifact of the domination culture, and the extent of our acceptance of that is the extent that we subjugate ourselves and move further away from liberty and closer to slavery. (Aquinas on Liberty)

Here, the point is that when what is morally good is equated with what someone outside oneself says is morally good, the individual loses the ability to hear that inner voice which connects us with the real forces of nature, and then “society enters us”. Society can enter us in various forms; through legislation, customs, or even through language, as Lacan calls it "the big Other". Morality is not found in the action itself, nor in the consequence of the action, nor on the person behind the action. Morality is ever changing and 'still' at once. It cannot be written, nor handed down, it has to be found within oneself. 

The consequence of believing morality can be established from the outside produces the adverse effect. Either absolute or complete relative moralities, in which the individual himself does not have to work it out, transform societies into Hedonistic temples in which the average man is reduced “to the level of beasts that cannot employ their natural rational endowments, but only their carnal lusts”. But shouldn’t morality bring us closer back to the garden of Eden, a symbol of absolute freedom? As Socrates puts it in Phaedo: ‘the body is the prison of the soul’. And in a way, the body here can also represent selfish desire, pure reaction without wisdom. It is a prison in so far as it dominates and enslaves us, however, this need not mean that the actual body is ‘bad’. As I have been trying to establish here, nothing is good or bad as long as we are not dominated by selfish desire in order to do it.