ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the comprehensive moral crisis and the concepts of social value and of social goals–freedom, equality, justice–the violation or abandonment of which is thought to delineate the substance of that crisis. Each of the ism-ideologies contains a distinction between "is" and "ought"; each contains a principle of social value, and thus can offer guidance to believers in determining "which direction is forward" and how to get there. The positive-normative dichotomy has been used as a device to divert inquiry from an extensive examination of the character of the moral crises of the age. Ideologists and evolutionary political economists who work their way out of the entrapments of the positive-normative distinction may yet encounter a second formidable and entangling clump of conceptual underbrush–the dichotomy of ethical relativism and ethical absolutism. An evolutionary theorist rejects ethical relativism for its professed ambivalence regarding behavior and criteria for judging behavior.
