A strategy to deal with moral relativism in students

In certain political and religious circles, the notion of moral relativism — that there is no objective “right” or wrong, only individual opinions — is not just anathema, not merely abhorrent. It is the very root of decadence and the collapse of civilization.

“What’s right for you may not be right for me,” relativists might argue, or “Who are we to judge others’ actions?”

The concept doesn’t have much support in the world of philosophy, either, but philosophers tend to be more … philosophical when approaching it.

But for those who teach ethics at the college level, a dedicated “student relativist” can present difficulties in the classroom, whether it’s initiating a debate over whether there should be a debate over ethics or attempting to undermine the very foundations of thousands of years of human philosophical debate.

And that can be disruptive, says Brian Talbot, an instructor of philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder. He recalls one young woman in a philosophy of law class who all but declared the class a waste of time. The law, she said, should be whatever a lawmaker thinks it should be.

“There are hundreds of years of thought on the law and what the law should be,” Talbot says, “and this student wanted to switch to a debate over whether we should even be having a debate.”

In many situations, “relativism” makes perfect sense, such as “the moral status of pulling someone’s tooth,” as Talbot notes: Did the patient consent? Is the tooth really rotten? Is the tooth-puller actually a dentist, as he or she claims to be?

But when philosophy and ethics teachers encounter more fundamental “student relativists” — there is no good or bad, only opinion — how should they deal with the situation? Such students, after all, can “really throw a class off and sidetrack the discussions.”

In “Student Relativism: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” published in the June issue of the journal Teaching Philosophy, Talbot argues against the common practice of trying “to convince students to reject moral relativism.”

Instead, teachers should “treat students who accept relativism just as one would treat students who accept other moral theories one disagrees with.”

In other words, Talbot believes in encouraging student relativists to vigorously engage their belief, just as they would any other moral philosophy.

“I don’t have a particular view I want students to adopt. I don’t have it all worked out,” he says. “But I do want to ‘indoctrinate’ them into seeing the need to think about important questions, the need to be rigorous thinkers, and that being a good person is important — whatever that is.”

As he writes in the article, “even moral relativists should engage with ethics in the ways we teach in our classrooms.”

Such an approach, Talbot argues, is more respectful of students and achieves the goal of getting them to think seriously about their belief rather than giving them a reason to tune out or undermine the class.

“They don’t need philosophers to tell them what the answers are. What they need is to learn to think for themselves on these questions and talk to other people, go to other sources,” he says.

It’s an important point, Talbot says, because teachers are more likely to find relativists in a college philosophy class than in the world at large.

“There is something about being a college student that is conducive to moral relativism,” he says, including students’ relative paucity of life experience. “I think most students give up moral relativism anyway, but they need to come to that on their own. … My college self would not recognize me now.”