I love the writings of Peter Kreft. You don’t have to agree with all his theological commitments (he’s a Roman Catholic) to benefit from his immense clarity of thought and precise, logical argumentation skills. On providing rational, non-religious, pro-life arguments, he’s excellent. He’s also a great refuter or moral relativism and a champion for the existence of objective, external moral absolutes.
Here’s a 7500 word transcript that goes with a 50 minute audio lecture entitled “A Refutation of Moral Relativism” (which is also the title of one of Kreft’s many books). Regretably, the quality of the audio is poor, so I’d suggest reading the transcript. Kreft gives six arguments for moral relativism, first stating the arguments positively and then critiquing them. Then, he gives five positive arguments for affirming the existence of eternal moral absolutes.
Two excerpts:
“To be a relativist, you must be a snob, at least on this centrally important issue. For you stand in a tiny minority, almost totally concentrated in one culture: the modern west; that is, white, democratic, industrialized, urbanized, university-educated, secularized, apostate, post-Christian society. To be a relativist, you must believe that nearly all human beings in history have ordered their lives by an illusion. Even societies like ours that are dominated by relativistic experts’ popular opinion still tends to moral absolutism. Like the Communists, relativists pretend to be the party of the people, while in fact scorning the peoples’ philosophy. In fact, for a generation now, a minority of relativistic elitists who have gained the power of the media have been relentlessly imposing their elitist relativism on popular opinion by accusing popular opinion—that is, traditional morality—of elitism.”
“It is not reason, but the abdication of reason that is the source of moral relativism. Relativism is not rational, it is rationalization. It is not the conclusion of a rational argument. It is the rationalization of a prior action. It is the repudiation of the principle that passions must be evaluated by reason and controlled by will.”