Political denunciation is an art form too rarely analyzed. To be effective, a rhetorical attack must be sharp-edged and clever enough to wound, but also accurate enough to reveal something true about ...

These days, cultural relativism has a bad reputation in many quarters. It conjures images of a world where anything goes. According to this domino theory of norms, if people open themselves to the ...

Broadly speaking, ethical relativism contends that ethical rules are drawn from human experience and that what is right or wrong is dependent upon particular times and places. There are cultural ...

Philosophical leanings might seem impossible to pin town with exacting word problems. But recent work by Geoffrey Goodwin and John Darley shows that it might be possible to employ a simple mental ...

That was the odd question posed to me many years ago at a Catholic convention in the New York City area. I had just finished giving a presentation on moral relativism when an energetic young man ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Suppose you believe abortion is permissible.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard the words “moral relativism.” I was in college, talking with a friend who was taking an ethics class on campus. He told me the professor promoted moral ...

What does it mean to say we are in a “post-truth world”? A bunch of liars are in charge. Yes that but also a decline in the appreciation of reason. A relativistic streak – always present in public ...

Every philosopher knows of the “freshman relativist,” quick to assert, dogmatically even, that everything depends on how you look at it, that if one group thinks something then it must be true for ...