ABSTRACT
The topic is relativism, especially relativism of judgment, and what I have to say about it is very simple, maybe simple-minded. I cannot offer a sophisticated, authoritative resolution of this problem, only at best some low-level help in trying to think clearly about it. I took up the topic as a teacher, for the sake of my students, who in recent years seem more and more “hung up” on what they call relativism, or the problem of being entitled to judge. More and more our seminar sessions seem to slide into that topic and to stay there, thrashing about helplessly, so that at the end of the semester we have made no progress on it at all, and little progress on anything else. That is the reason why I stick my neck out now on this formidable topic. Alan Bloom begins his controversial book, The Closing of the American Mind, with
the words,
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. . . . [This] is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate. . . . The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion . . . [but] to their way of thinking, there should be no tolerance for the intolerant.
