there is no spoon...

Preliminary thoughts:

Ethical relativism has gotten a bad wrap. Indeed stoned college students, on their latest Nietzsche binge, have ferociously preached their perspectivalism with the same logical rigor of the latest truth.com ad. In my defense of ethical relativism I wish to distance myself from said group. It will be my intention to come up with a well reasoned, and thought out argument for why ethical relativism is true. To do this I will have to argue that ethical relativism, in its most strict sense, does not fall subject to the same critiques of a more broad relativism. It will first be necessary, then, to distinguish between the two theories. Essentially, my first goal will be to reason that the argument for ethical relativism does not refute itself in the way that other forms of relativism do. This argument will rest on the distinction between a truth claim and an ethical claim. I will conclude that charging a truth claim as merely being perspectival is flimsy and offers little to no philosophical substance. On the other hand, to charge an ethical claim as being relative raises serious metaphysical and epistemological problems that cannot be ignored by philosophers of morality and ethics. The first section will thus hope to establish that one can be an ethical relativist without, to put it plainly, having to commit that “everything is perspectival.”