Relative vs. Absolute Morality

In college, I remarked once to my roommates that for every issue you could think of--gun control, abortion, tobacco, the death penalty, illegal drug use, etc...--you could always find supporters on both sides of the issue. That is, every issue except one--pornography. Seemingly, everyone is on the same side when it comes to pornography. In other words, unlike the other issues you won't find editorials in the newspaper, nor empassioned rallies outside state capitol buildings, nor men or women in Congress making speeches and laws in support of pornography. (This remark was followed by some weird looks from my roommates)

The fact remains, pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry, so it obviously has the support of very many people. I just found it surprising that very few people actually come out and argue in favor of pornography, only the opposite. Shame, or embarrassment, perhaps? (Note: defense of 'free-speech' which is often directly related to pornography cases doesn't count. Many people (myself included) support free speech, but not pornography, which basically says pornography has the 'right to exist', not necessarily that it 'deserves to exist')

This previous discussion occurred to me when reading Gregg Easterbrooks's latest blog entry containing a 'defense' of sorts for pornography. (In fairness, his entry is entitled "Lesser Evil" so it's not actually saying 'pornography is good', but he is criticizing the government for actively opposing it. Read the blog entry for his full message.)

As always, Easterbrook makes some valid points, especially about the movie industry in America, but I can't agree with the main message. Easterbrook falls prey to a common, yet dangerous, fallacy about relative vs. absolute morality.

Relative morality is judging the morality of an action solely in comparision to another action, usually for the purpose of 'excusing' the lesser action. Taking office supplies home from work, for example, versus robbing a bank. Falsifying a story one tells to others about oneself at a party versus lying under oath in a courtroom. Many people set their personal standards--that is, the personal line dividing things one feels okay doing, and things one wouldn’t feel comfortable doing--based on relative morality. Everyones relative line of demarcation is different, of course, which is why most people regularly criticize other people whose moral standards are lower than theirs, but are horribly offended when people with higher standards criticize them (“How dare you judge me!”).

Absolute morality, on the other hand, is where the morality of an action is determined absolutely without regard to its relative position to other actions. A action can be inherently wrong even if A) it’s legal, B) a majority of the people (even 100% of the people) think it’s okay, and C) one can name thousands of things that are worse. Notions of absolute morality are usually (but not always) based on religious belief, an idea of universal right and wrong where standards don’t change over time and the concepts of righteousness and unrighteousness aren’t dependant on popular vote.

One problem with having relative moral standards is that it’s basically impossible to judge someone else’s standards as ‘wrong’ when, of course, everything is relative—there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. (If more people realized their standards were relative, they’d be a lot less judgemental). A more serious problem is the tendency to use the existence of a worse action as an ‘excuse’ for the lesser action (“Hey, {action A} isn’t so bad…it’s not like I’m doing {action B} or something?”). The problem is this will pretty much excuse anything other than murder (and even then it depends on the ‘type’ of murder), and comparing action A to action B isn’t an accurate way of judged the inherent morality of action A, which is the real issue. Is action A, by itself, good or bad--beneficial to oneself and mankind, or harmful?

This is the real flaw in Easterbrook’s reasoning; he’s essentially saying the government is wrong to persecute pornography makers because non-violent pornography ‘isn’t so bad’ compared to the amount of violence regularly put out by Hollywood. No argument from me as per Hollywood, but saying in essence ‘the people who make porn movies aren’t that bad —I mean, it’s not like they KILLED anyone or anything’ avoids the real issue: is pornography, judged by itself, good or bad? If bad, then the government has a right to actively oppose it, whether or not there are ‘worse’ things out there.

This is no different than the argument that marijuana should be legal because tobacco is. Whether tobacco should or should not be legal, and whether marijuana should or should not be legal are TWO SEPARATE QUESTIONS. Although you can (and undoubtedly will) use the same criteria and reasoning to answer both questions, the relative comparision between the two drugs is meaningless (i.e. the fact that cocaine is a worse drug than marijuana has no relevance to the discussion of whether marijuana, judged solely by itself, should be legal.) Likewise, arguing pornography isn’t as bad as violent movies isn’t relevant to the debate of whether pornography is inherently good or bad for society, which Easterbrook doesn’t discuss.

I will, however. I’ll discuss whether pornography is good or bad from an absolute standpoint…in a future post. Stay tuned…