A Major Threat To Ethics

A major threat to ethics, according to Simon Blackburn, a philosophy professor at the University of Cambridge, is the threat of relativism. Blackburn describes in his novel, Ethics: A Very Short Introduction, the dangers of relying on the fact that truth and moral values are relative to certain individuals and cultures rather than universal. Some of these dangers, which I will describe further in this essay, include the lack of universal truth and the belief that one’s values cannot affect relations with another. Dangers, such as these, cause relativism to threaten people’s standards of behavior by making ethics seem impossible, thus becoming a threat to ethics. The first issue of relativism that Blackburn discusses is that of the ‘freshman relativist’. He begins by describing how comfortable and preferable relativism can seem at first. He states, “Nobody is comfortable now with the blanket colonial certainty that just our way of doing things is right, and that other people need forcing into those ways.” (18) Many people do not like being told what they should believe and how they should do things. Americans, especially, are known for their tendency to fight back when their rights are imposed on, as proven through civil rights movements.
This, however, leads to the belief that ‘what is right for certain people is not right for other people’. This belief that there is no absolute or wrong, no universal truth is what defines relativism. Blackburn shows a need for universal truth through his explanation of Antigone by Sophocles in which Antigone is faced with the choice of obeying the King’s laws or burying her brother who opposed the King. In Antigone’s case, she is under the pressure of following two different standards, that of her king, and that of her family. She is forced to make the decision of which is more important to her, and then she must face the consequences of her decision. Ultimately, she decides to give her brother a proper burial and suffer the