Our age is marked both by moral relativism and moral censure. By moral relativism, I mean the insight that different times and places have different moral standards, and that judgments may differ depending on the context. Moral censure, for its part, is a hyper-critical moral judgment of the behavior of others. On the face of it, the two seem incompatible: “It’s all relative” doesn’t seem to jibe with moral condemnation. Yet logic has never stopped human beings from holding mutually contradictory positions. In this case, it’s possible that, rather than being incompatible, one might be a function of the other. Moral relativism could be the seedbed of our heightened level of moral censure.
In her book The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century, French philosopher Chantal Delsol makes this observation:
It is striking to see how in contemporary France a whole generation has moved from historicism—every act is justified by its context—to Manicheanism—judgment is absolute and must not take context into account. In both cases, the freedom and complexity of the person as subject are denied. In the latter, the person is reduced to an act that presumably determines him entirely; in the former, the person is denied his act and his responsibility because he is governed by circumstance (Robin Dick, trans. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006, 178).
As Delsol outlines it, historicism tends to dissolve persons into subjective bundles of cultural influences and prejudices, the victims of mere “circumstance” who can hardly be held accountable for their actions. This is a well-worn truism of cultural and moral relativism. On the other hand, what she characterizes as an ascendent “Manicheanism” turns everyone into either “children of darkness” or “children of light”: one-dimensional, hardly human holders of simplistic moral positions, to be either praised to the heavens or cast down to the depths. Complexity is placed to one side. The Zeitgeist is no longer that of “It’s all relative” but is characterized by a new willingness to engage in blanket moral condemnation.
The change in the way sexual ethics has been debated in the past 50 years illustrates Delsol’s point. If we cast our minds back a few years, we may recall the point in the debate when progressives posed a rhetorical question: Does Jesus really care who we sleep with? The point being made was that some people seemed fixated on sexual ethics when Jesus had relatively little to say about it. However that may be, the debate has certainly changed, with some now claiming, from a different vantage point than traditionalists and with very different effect, that Jesus cares very much about who we are allowed to sleep with. Moral discernment, in this case, is seen as a matter of the overriding claims of justice. In this case and in others, a traditional moralism is now superseded by a newfangled hyper-ethical absolutism, still rooted in a deep skepticism about the sources of moral authority.
Oliver O’Donovan points toward a similar cultural shift in commenting on moral deliberation, in its forward-looking, opportunistic mode, and in its backward-looking, responsible mode. “In the course of a generation, our own has swung, or so it appears to one who has lived through the change, from reckless opportunism to regimented censoriousness” (The Disappearance of Ethics, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024, 48). In thinking about O’Donovan’s comment, we might consider situational ethics as an example of “reckless opportunism” and “cancel culture” as an instance of “regimented censoriousness.”
Almost 20 years earlier, O’Donovan had made a similar observation, though with a significant twist. “Modern man is distinguished by sudden eruptions of raw moral certainty, moments of moralistic and ideological judgment which permit no reflective or deliberative interrogation. These moments aside, modern man is distinguished by a resolute and inexhaustible self-doubt” (The Ways of Judgment, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006, 308). O’Donovan reminds us of our age’s lingering suspicion of its motives. At the same time, we are willing to be moralistic: that is, less concerned with the exercise of moral judgment, and more with the moral censure of others.
This moment is characterized by both moral relativism and moral opprobrium, and the relationship between the two is complex. O’Donovan’s observation in The Ways of Judgment suggests that the two phenomena exist, not in a strict temporal sequence, one replacing the other, but rather together at the same time. If so, they are Janus-like twins, facing in opposite directions but joined at the neck. Our times have not really ceased to be historicist in their vibe, marked by suspicion of ourselves and our culture in their subjectivity; but this very suspicion now grounds an intolerant appeal to moral absolutes and a willingness to rely on the use of power in achieving our goals.
If we believe that truth and goodness are functions of a historical process, driven by power, then the sooner we exert that power the better. This is observable in the politics of both right and left. In this regard, a popular Hegelianism has seeped into the ground water of our culture and polluted its sources. A deep-seated moral skepticism undercuts any appeal from our unfettered convictions, no matter what the cost to others. Our views need no authentication in fact, since an appeal to the facts is widely considered to be a mere power game. It’s this that fuels the obnoxious cynicism of the right and the fraught suspicion of the left. Social media supercharge and amplify the impact of our moral censoriousness. As Delsol observes, “All forms of Manichaeanism produce hate, and all the more when based on moral criteria” (179).
Pope John Paul II noted in 1991, in a very different context, the relationship between moral relativism and the willingness to coerce:
Totalitarianism arises out of a denial of truth in the objective sense. If there is no transcendent truth, in obedience to which man achieves his full identity, then there is no sure principal for guaranteeing just relations between people. Their self-interest as a class, group, or nation would inevitably set them in opposition to one another… then the force of power takes over, and each person tends to make full use of the means at his disposal in order to impose his own interests or his own opinion, with no regard for the rights of others (Centesimus Annus, 44.)
In those not-so-distant days immediately before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Pope was taking aim at established Marxist-Leninist regimes, but the relationship between moral relativism and the will to power persists, not only in their authoritarian successor states, but in our authoritarian-inflected context.
Delsol reinforces this impression by turning her magnifying glass on the modern West:
The totalitarian societies of the twentieth century revealed antiworlds, in which the life of man was deliberately smothered under the weight of a demiurgic will to change human nature. But contemporary Western societies, committed to the dismantling of common values, are shaping nonworlds. What makes the analogy work is a mixture of relativism and dogmatism. Truths are at once changing and rendered absolute: a paradoxical superimposition of the cynic and self-appointed righter of wrongs—someone who engages in constant derision, devaluing everything, but at the same time decrees what is good and what is true with inspired self-assurance. … Fortified by its pseudo-certainties, it amplifies them through repetition. … Relativism and fanaticism are the two dramatically contrary aspects of modernity gone astray. What we really stand in need of is both certainty and tolerance (87-88).
You might say that in this mixture of relativism and fanaticism we now have the worst of both worlds.
Delsol’s call for certainty and tolerance point us to confidence and compassion, to surety married to sympathy. We did not arrive at this excruciating cultural moment overnight, and we will not be quickly transported out of it. There is a reconstructive task before us. Churches, with their robust moral tradition and its emphasis on virtues, which militates against both cynicism and suspicion, have a role to play.
“As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another, and if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Col. 3:12-14). St. Paul’s words addressed to the Church will echo as its members take up their task as citizens. There is work to do, much of it painstaking and not obvious, in repairing the fabric of our common life.
The Rt. Rev. John Bauerschmidt, D.Phil. is Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee, having served parishes in Western Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Louisiana. He served in the Church of England from 1987 to 1991 while a student at Oxford. His writings span patristics, especially Augustine, the Caroline Divines, and the Oxford Movement. Bishop John is married to Caroline, and they are the parents of three adult children.
