Moral Relativism as a Moral Hazard

A friend of mine recently speculated that the promiscuous nature of Hollywood might be a big part of the reason there is so much sexual harassment and sexual assault there.  When everyone is rich and famous, and life is half party and half soap opera, sexual innuendo becomes par for the course.  Brad Pitt meets Jennifer Aniston on a set.  They have sex.  They get married.  Brad Pitt meets Angelina Jolie on a set.  They have sex.  Jennifer Aniston finds out and divorces Brad Pitt, who marries Angelina Jolie only to then to meet Kate Hudson.  Angelina Jolie finds out and divorces Brad Pitt.  Somewhere along the line, the Paparazzi caught Brad Pitt vacationing naked with Gwyneth Paltrow.  Was he married to Jennifer Aniston, or Angelina Jolie at the time?  Brad Pitt was also caught vacationing naked with a female assistant while married to Angelina Jolie.  The list goes on and on.  I’m not trying to pick on Brad Pitt – I think he’s a great actor, and as far as I know he has not been accused of sexually assaulting anyone yet.  My point is that this is the world these people live in.  They get whatever they want, all the time, and for the most part everyone is falling all over them trying to give them whatever they want.  With sex as a smorgasbord, with no value attached, is it surprising that some people in Hollywood start to treat it as a perk?

When Trump said women let him grab them by the you know what, while it was just brash locker room talk, there was also some truth to it.  There are a lot of people who chase those with wealth and fame, who really will let the rich and famous do as they wish.  Is it possible that some in Hollywood have gotten away with so much – the vast majority of which was freely accepted – that they have a hard time reading the intent of others?  More to the point, the vast majority of the people in Hollywood are as liberal as liberalism gets, and liberalism believes in moral relativism.

Moral relativism is the belief that different cultures have different morals, and that no culture is better or worse than any other.  Because of this, all morals are considered equal.

I disagree that all cultures are equal, and as such I have nothing to base a belief in moral relativism on, but even if I did believe all cultures and morals are equal, I would still point out that they are not all compatible.  The more equal we view cultural values, for that matter, the less able they are to coexist.

Western culture is very open to homosexuality.  Middle Eastern culture believes homosexuality should be punishable by death.  Western culture holds women and men to be equal.  Middle Eastern culture holds that women are fully subservient property of men.  Western society holds that a woman owns her body, and that any unwanted encroachment upon it is a crime.  Middle Eastern culture holds that if a man is turned on by a woman, the woman caused it, and that whatever happens next is entirely her fault.  There is no ‘he said she said’ in the Middle East, as their culture dictates that a woman’s testimony is only worth one third that of a man.

Islam is particularly incompatible with the West, but I’m not trying to pick on them, so let me throw other cultures in as well.  In Japan it is considered a sign of wealth for a man to have what is essentially a private paid prostitute.  A wife’s social standing suffers if her husband has no concubine, whereas wives are not allowed concubines in Japan.  In Indonesia, there is a tribe that compels women to cut off a portion of a finger whenever a family member dies. Endocannibalism (the practice of eating the remains of dead tribe members) is still practiced in parts of South America.  A tribe in Indonesia has a holiday in which they exhume their dead (in some cases decades after they have died), dress the dead bodies up, and parade them around town.  The Ainu people, who are indigenous to parts of Japan and Russia, believe in sacrificing bears in public.  Shiite Muslims commemorate the death of Imam Hussein by parading through town, while cutting their heads open with daggers, as punishment for not being around in the 6th Century, to save Imam Hussein.  In parts of China, a man must carry his bride across burning coals before he can take her into their home for the first time.  In Nepal, to keep populations down, all brothers in the same family marry the same wife.  There is a state in India where it is customary to throw all newborn babies off of a 15 meter building, to bestow good luck upon them.  Romani men are not allowed to marry unless they first kidnap a woman to marry.

In Pakistan, using contraceptives is a sin.  In Uganda, there are no moral grounds for divorce.  Good luck getting an abortion on Ghana – 92% of the population consider all abortions to be morally unacceptable.  98% of the people in Ghana also view homosexuality as completely immoral.  Alcohol is unacceptable in Pakistan.

Here is the PEW study I pulled those numbers from.

I could go on and on about different moral values, and different customs, around the world.  Who is right and who is wrong is not the point.  The point is that many of the values different people in different parts of the world hold are grossly incompatible with other views held in other parts of the world.

Moral relativism says that all morals are equal, and that nobody needs to change their morals when they move to a new place.  That is absurd.  Different moral standards are grossly incompatible with one another, making it impossible for those different value systems to coexist in the same place, and making moral relativism is a morality of the least common denominator – which is to say that there is no morality at all.

We can have different cultures in different parts of the world, and coexist.  We can travel and experience different cultures, perhaps even bringing some of the cultural elements we find home with us.  We can respect different cultures and different values, particularly when we work with or visit people from different parts of the world.  We can be respectful, and courteous, and understanding.  We should also understand that when we go to different parts of the world, where different values are the norm, we have to abide by their values.  If you don’t want to abide by the values of some place, we should not go there, and if we are not willing to adjust, we should not move to a place with different values.  It is up to the person who moves into a new society to learn how to co-exist, and only then can the new society be gracious and accepting.

We cannot continue to pretend that all cultures and all moral values are equal, or that morality is relative.  This belief may very well be the cause for all of the sexual harassment and assault in Hollywood, and if we allow this belief to continue, that’s just the beginning.  Some values really are better than others – certainly some values are incompatible with others – and we need to preserve our cultural sense of morality, no matter what the cost.