ABSTRACT
Abraham Edel’s naturalism leads him to a tacit strategic assumption shared by most sociologically minded defenders, and detractors, of ethical objectivity: that ethics can be shown to be objective only by establishing some specific ethical result. This assumption sometimes surfaces in the demand by skeptics for a “proof’ of some ethical principle or truth; this is Ernest van den Haag’s preferred challenge to ethical objectivity. If relativism thrives on the irremedial disagreement, it will shrivel in the face of a remedial algorithm. This definition of the problem is not so much stated as presumed in EJ. It is sometimes suggested that only noncognitivism can support democracy and tolerance, and that indeed democracy is relativism in action. The true skeptic is under no pressure, moral or logical, to esteem tolerance, and can turn just as easily to Marxism, another doctrine which proudly if inconsistently advertises a noncognitivist grounding.
