Moral relativism is often defined as inconsistency

Not taking responsibility for your own actions and instead blaming others

"Blaming the parents is indicative of our culture's tendency to find someone else to blame for our own actions. It's a symptom of moral relativism — the belief that we can decide what is right and wrong. In essence, moral relativism makes us like god. This high-and-mighty perspective gives us the permission to point fingers. But since moral relativism gives everybody this right, it merely circles opinions and never truthfully verifies or answers the question: 'Why?'"

"Questions Surrounding Mass Murder Reveals Gaps In Moral Relativism." Tia Johnson. Delight Media. 7/30/2012.

Unwillingness or inability to judge others

“Something you’ve probably noticed about me and that I get accused of a lot is moral relativism. And I realize that it is absolutely an issue for me.
I have a lot of trouble declaring anything as definitively right or wrong.
* * *
Everyone is the hero in his own mind, so people who do things that I think are adharmic often think they are being righteous and correct. How do I know that my conception of what is dharmic is the correct one? What makes me think I know best?
And so I say nothing and I do nothing. I want to change that. I want to get better about speaking out for justice.
I may not always have a perfect understanding of what is dharmic, but showing indifference in the face of suffering is much worse.”
“Moral Relativism” by Ambaa on the blog “The White Hindu.” July 3, 2014.

The culture or social convention defines right and wrong

"Applied to morality, subjectivism becomes moral relativism.  As far as moral judgments are concerned, an act's moral goodness or badness depends upon the perspective of the people involved. One argument in favor of moral relativism is that one culture may consider an act to be good and another culture may consider it to be bad.  Here is the argument:
1. If an act is good for one culture
2. And the same act is bad for another culture
3. Therefore the act's moral value is relative to the culture"
"The Logic of Moral Relativism - Part One" - Faith & Reason: Where Two or More are Gathered. 12/30/2012.

"Moral relativism is essentially the idea that morality does not exist and cannot be defined, but rather is only a matter of agreed upon social convention." 
* * *
"If a person believes that morality is a subjective, cultural issue, they are then able to justify their own unethical actions, as well as turn their back on the unethical actions of others, if that’s what is politically correct at the time.
It is somewhat understandable that people would adopt this mindset considering they have been subject to a lifetime of watching various religious sects battle over subjective moral standards.  Likewise, they have seen corrupt political organizations use moral arguments to oppress nonviolent people and justify their own violence at the same time."
* * *
"A consistent moral standard is necessary to create a truly free and civilized society, and those standards must apply to everyone equally, transcending cultural norms and individual status.  Interestingly enough, such a standard has already been proposed and is practiced by peace and freedom seekers worldwide.  That standard is known as the Non-Aggression Principle or NAP for short.
The common law institute describes the non-aggression principle as “do not initiate force or fraud”, or “if it harms none, do what you will”, or “treat others as you’d like to be treated”, or “live and let live”. In more detail, “Do not initiate force or fraud against anyone else’s person or property.”"
"Richard Dawkins Defends Pedophiles by Evoking Moral Relativism." JG Vibes Intellihub.com September 11, 2013.

"Ethical relativists often link moral claims to cultural norms. The claim here is that what is right or wrong depends on what a particular culture, religion, political or government body dictates. Relativists do not deny that there are indeed moral rules, sometimes even strict ones, governing what people should or shouldn't do, but they hold that those rules differ from place to place and are prone to change over time. As such, ethical relativism posits that the particular ethical views of one culture are no better than another culture's." "How are cultural norms related to moral relativism." Jeremy C. Bradley. Demand Media.

"However, Monge, who was always very concerned with social justice, found herself struggling in high school to find an atheist moral system in which she was satisfied. “I believed in human rights, but couldn’t really give an explanation as to why,” Monge says, recalling her frustration. She spent her time exploring what morality without religion would look like, pondering how to ground ethics and justify human rights if God didn’t exist. Monge didn’t come up with much, though. There should, she believed, exist a universal morality. But, as she examined the ethical allowances of various cultures, Monge found that what was permissible in one community was often morally suspect in another. It was the relativism that troubled her.
* * *
During this time, Porter helped Monge realize that, for there to be meaning in her life, God would have to exist. Once, Porter played her a song on the piano—“Hallelujah.” (The Crimson)

"Those considerations do not apply today, so ancient censures make no sense. As contemporary morality reflected historical circumstances to justify polygamy and reproduction by proxy, so modern morality reflects, or should reflect, present circumstances to justify alternatives to heterosexual marriage. In this sense, moral relativism is a fact of history recognizing and respecting an evolving cultural reality in a slow response to changing circumstances. Moral relativism does not mean no morals; it means that different people in different cultures or circumstances have different morals. In a free country, have your morals, let other have theirs, and debate, not dictate, them." (First Impressions, Second Thoughts)

"By ‘moral relativism’ we mean the descriptive belief that moral standards are culturally defined–that the truth or falsity of moral claims and judgments is not universal or objective but instead relative to the particular historical and cultural beliefs, views, traditions, and practices of particular groups of people, which leads to the normative belief that everyone ought to tolerate all of the moral beliefs and belief-justified behaviors of others, even when they are very different from our own cultural or moral standards, since no universal or objective moral standard exists by which to judge their beliefs and behaviors..."
Christian Smith, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood. Quoted by Nick Nowalk in "Moral Relativism Leads to Emotivism," Dec 23, 2012.

"How Do People Define Moral Relativism?
Moral Relativism is defined as the position that all points of view are equally valid and that all truth is relative to the individual and his or her environment. All ethical, religious, political, and aesthetic beliefs are truths that are relative to the cultural identity of the individual.
Relativism can include moral relativism (ethics are relative to the social construct), situational relativism (right and wrong depend on the particular situation), and cognitive relativism (truth is relative and has no objective standard).
Define Moral Relativism – It is Culturally Based
Moral Relativism is the theory that morality is culturally based, and therefore, becomes a matter of individual choice. When it comes to standards of right and wrong, you decide what's right for you, and I'll decide what's right for me.
Moral Relativism has gradually become the prevailing moral philosophy of western society, a culture once governed largely by the Judeo-Christian concept of morality. While those early standards continue to form the basis for civil law, people by and large are embracing the notion that right and wrong are not absolute values, but are to be decided by the individual and can change from one situation or circumstance to the next. 

Generally, moral relativism claims to be morally neutral."
All About How. Accessed Feb. 25, 2013

Something is permitted or forbidden depending on who you are (e.g., man or woman)

"Women should have equal opportunity in education. Their rights should never be diluted by Western notions of cultural relativism."
"What will the Arab Spring mean for women?" Commentary. Michael Rubin, 10/31/2011.

"One of the most irritating arguments I hear from Christians all the time is that if you don’t believe that morality is defined solely by God in His allegedly infinite wisdom, you’re a “moral relativist,” presumably a bad thing. But a New Jersey Catholic School is demonstrating that quality themselves rather plainly:
Female students at the Queen of Peace High School in North Arlington, N.J., stood up during homeroom Friday, raised their right hands, and recited a pledge in unison.
“I do solemnly promise not to use profanities of any kind within the walls and properties of Queen of Peace High School. In other words, I swear not to swear. So help me God,” they said.
Meanwhile, boys at the school were free to use whatever language they wanted.
So it’s wrong for girls to curse, because they are such delicate flowers, but okay for the boys. Of course, I don’t much care if anyone curses. But how is this not the very “moral relativism” that the Pope screams about all the time? We see the same behavior from many Christians when you bring up the atrocities in the Old Testament. All of a sudden genocide will be excusable, even the dashing of children against the rocks. It’s totally different when God does it. Moral relativism, indeed."
"Catholic School Teaches Moral Relativism." Ed Brayton. Freethought Blogs. Feb 6 2013.

...or other group identities

"This is what the London anti-sharia campaigner Maryam Namazie, speaking in Sydney last week, calls gender apartheid. She also calls it cultural relativism; one standard for us, another for them. I'd call it moral relativism, but call it what you will, it is profoundly dangerous to a free and fair society."
"Keeping quiet allows intolerance to thrive." Elizabeth Farrelly. Sept. 1, 2011.

"Yes, I agree, there has indeed been a slow motion moral collapse. But in my view it has come from the top of society, not the bottom....the real moral relativism is that, with so few exceptions, these people have got away with it, however vast the consequences of their behaviour, while those without power and wealth and connections, at the bottom of society, have been fast-tracked into prison." "The real moral relativism." Steve Wyler. Locality: Communities ambitious for change. Aug. 30, 2011.

"Numerous surveys reveal that most Americans deny moral absolutes in favor of moral relativism. Moral relativism affirms that ethics vary from person to person, situation to situation, and culture to culture. People often express this shallow view of ethics by means of mottos. Look out for number one. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. You have your truth; I have my truth."
"Point of View: Is morality in the eye of the beholder?" by Mark A. Rathel. Florida Baptist Witness. Sept. 23, 2011.

My favorite letter-writer recently proclaimed that, “What the Navy SEALs did to (Osama bin Laden) was unconscionable!” But if the SEALs had brutally subjugated East Asia in the name of Emperor Hirohito and the supposed racial superiority of the Japanese, this guy wouldn’t have a thing to say about it. I guess that moral relativism does for one’s sense of perspective what bin Laden did for international relations.
"LETTER: Self-righteousness also can be deadly." Dec. 12, 2011.

"Contrary to what the left's relativist ideology says, for us, all civilizations are not of equal value," Guéant, a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement, told a conference on February 4. "Those which defend humanity seem to us to be more advanced than those that do not," he averred. "Those which defend liberty, equality, and fraternity seem to us superior to those which accept tyranny, the subservience of women, social and ethnic hatred" -- a truth that would be hammered home a month and a half later by a jihadist murdering Jewish children in Toulouse. Thus, Guéant underscored the need to "protect our civilization."
* * *
Of course, the political figure best known for bluntly comparing the Western and Islamic worlds while suffering the establishment's wrath is Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders. "We will have to end cultural relativism," he stressed in Rome last year. "To the multiculturalists, we must proudly proclaim: Our Western culture is far superior to the Islamic culture. Only when we are convinced of that, we will be willing to fight for our own identity."
"Western Survival Depends on Western Pride." David J. Rusin, Frontpage Magazine, posted on Assyrian International News Agency (AINA). 3/28/2012. Original link: http://www.frontpagemag.com/

"Multiculturalism is, in effect, a dressed up and politicized version of cultural relativism -- the doctrine that every group has its own distinct but equally sound patterns of perception, thought, and choice. According to cultural relativism, no one can validly object to beliefs and actions of any group which reflect that group's own indigenous worldview. While cultural relativists have always claimed to be friends of tolerance -- indeed the only true friends of tolerance -- this doctrine actually implies that no one can object to any group's intolerance, if intolerance is that group's thing. Neither the cultural relativist nor the multiculturalist can object to Mayan infant sacrifice, or Spanish Inquisitional torture, or Nazi genocide because each of these practices is validated by the perspective within which it arises."
Eric Mack, Prof. of Philosophy at Tulane University, quoted here.“These double standards help the Israeli Right and Netanyahu’s expansionism — as well as moral relativism, because if any other country does it it’s wrong, sanctioned and sometimes even pushed back. When the Israeli Right does it, it gets a pass and even assistance.”
“Getting a Pass,” LTE in Jerusalem Post, Sept. 7, 2014, by James Adler, Cambridge, Mass.

Excusing bad behavior (your own or someone else's)

"After all, moral relativism is simply the self-righteousness of the wicked masquerading as profound intellectual insight. History is chock full of evidence to suggest that people truly unfettered by moral scruples will stomp all over those who let conscience get in their way."
"Does the GOP also practice moral relativism?" Alan Keyes. WorldNetDaily. Aug. 18, 2011.

"This paper discusses the ethical void in Capitalism which does not look prominent in welfare societies and states. But, its effects become more eminent in tough economic conditions. Unbridled pursuit of self interest, moral relativism, incentive-led economic choices and apathy to communal responsibilities would lead to a society where economic interests become the sole basis of maintaining and sustaining relationships."
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (2011): Thesis of religion: normative basis of Islamic economics. Published in: Journal of Islamic Banking & Finance , Vol. 28, No. 4 (01. October 2011)

"Here you are simply saying that it is useful for God to exist if one wants to avoid moral relativism (and personal responsability [sic] for one’s own moral decisions). I’ll grant that, but it certainly doesn’t prove [that God exists]."
Comment from James McGrath, April 3, 2008

Excusing other people's bad behavior, or holding them to lower standards, on the grounds that they don't know any better

"...my young son (who hopes to enter the military one day) struggles with the notion of fighting people who embrace a bad idea because they don’t know any better.  He fully understands that your average Taliban fighter (not the Western-educated elites, but the guys on the ground) has never been exposed to ideas other than the virtue of sharia and worldwide Islamic domination.  His [the Taliban fighter's] world view is a one way street.  My son therefore struggles with moral relativism as it plays out on the field of battle."
"Bad seeds and total war." Posted by "Bookworm." Bookworm Room. Aug. 26, 2011.

"[Melanie] Phillips was working at the left-wing Guardian newspaper at the time, where her editors asked her to regard the criticism of Israel for minor offenses as a compliment (because Israel was a highlevel Western country) while the murder of 20,000 Syrians by their own government was no worse then what was expected of them (because Syria was a low-level Arab country). This is what she called moral relativism, in which some parties are immune from criticism on the basis that they are behaving in line with their own culture."
"Melanie Phillips Explained." Stephen Kramer. Jewish Times Israel correspondent. Sept. 30, 2011.

     "The prized place the protection of human rights has come to occupy in international parlance makes the problem even trickier. Countries like Singapore and Malaysia have, time and again, championed so-called “Asian Values” in their attempt to carve out a place in a “Western” international system governed by liberal norms. Yet, I wonder if this takes cultural relativism too far, turning it into a “battle of moral one-upsmanship” that overlooks the individual lives at stake.
     Former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad encapsulated the paradox when he expressed his support for his government’s decision in terms of winning the “moral high ground” over other developed countries. He compared those detained under the act to those currently held in Guantanamo Bay, saying:
     "Previously, they [the US] criticised Malaysia for purportedly being cruel by detaining people without trial. But they are the ones doing it now."
     The desire to prove one’s moral legitimacy seems inconsistent with the appeal to human rights underlying such a decision. Associate Professor Bilveer Singh of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies has also suggested that Prime Minister Najib Razak’s decision was ‘driven primarily by domestic political considerations.’"
"Singapore: Human rights and the Internal Security Act." Sharon Chen. AsianCorrespondent.com. Sept. 30, 2011.

"But while we behave in a culturally sensitive way, we must always have in mind our morality. A company must know what behavior violates its moral codes, and would be unacceptable wherever it was practiced. In other words, we can accept and work across a wide cultural relativism, but we have no space for moral relativism."
"About Leadership: Cultural and Moral Relativism." Bernie Bulkin. Nov. 17, 2011.

"Immigrants and refugees come here for a better life - and it is a bloody great life here. Compared to the developing world we are wealthy, healthy and safe.
To keep it that way we need to make sure that some misdirected idea of moral relativism - it's their way so it's OK - does not allow abuses and inequalities to flourish."
"Shepherd: Odd, wrong...or illegal?" Tory Shepherd. The Advertiser. Nov. 8, 2011.

"Initially, anyway, it looked like multiculturalism was a good idea in that it seemed little more than an opportunity to take in the diet, dance and dress of diverse cultures. But soon the moral relativism started to occur, wherein newcomers wanted Canada to accommodate their less enlightened cultural practices rather than the other way around."
"Corbella: The export that smears freedom--multiculturalism." Licia Corbella. Nov. 15, 2011.

"I think moral relativists just lack the ability to feel empathy for others and that's why when they see things like the genocide or animal abuse, they're like "meh, theres two sides to this story" because it provokes zero emotional response from them, therefore they cannot get mad at the person ordering/taking part in the genocide, or abusing the animal. But when it happens to them? Oh, than [sic] it's evil."
"Soldrether" in Nov. 2011 in this forum.

"In what I hope is part of the last gasps of the disorienting moral relativism that marked so many intellectuals during the 2000s, Bruce Crumley was given the pages of Time Magazine to spin out the classic critique that internalises a fear of “Islamophobia” as defined by Muslims who want to avoid public criticism: * * * Crumley has made the classic moral inversion characteristic of the Human Rights Complex: he treats Muslims as a force of nature, not as autonomous moral agents. * * * Crumley here is protecting the thin skin of Muslims who, in contact with the rough and tumble verbal sport of modernity, find themselves humiliated and frustrated. * * * Here’s where Crumley and I part ways: he treats Muslims as animals or little children, and believes that he can win them over with carrots. Sticks will just spook them. So he finds Charlie Hebdo’s behavior “childish, futile, Islamophobic [sic!]… inflammatory… obnoxious, infantile… outrageous, unacceptable, condemnable.” "
"Protecting Muslim honour at the price of freedom of speech: Bruce Crumley, Time and Charlie Hebdo." Richard Landes. The Telegraph. Nov. 11, 2011.

"We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value." (ABC)

Seeking to "understand" one's enemies

New York Times national security correspondent Scott Shane has an opinion piece in today’s Sunday Times predicting an “arms race” in military drones. * * * (The other unstated premise underlying the whole opinion piece is a studiously neutral moral relativism signaled by that otherwise unexamined phrase “perceived enemies.”)
"What kind of drones arms race is coming?" Kenneth Anderson. Oct. 9, 2011.

Punishing evil too mildly

"WKU Athletic Director Ross Bjork, a former Missouri administrator, would not disclose his punishment for Guidry but told reporters it would be “stern.” So stern, in fact, that he suggested the school may limit Guidry’s out-of-state recruiting, the latest daily dose of moral relativism in college football."
"Take Two: Coach's pregame routine needs work." David Briggs. Columbia Tribune. Nov. 14, 2011.

[On Omar Khadr being released from prison in Canada:]
"He grew up in a bad family of terrorists and terrorist sympathizers...He was raised in a family that was a terrible influence..." [But, raised in Canada, he could have chosen a different path, and didn't.] "He is an enemy, and he's proud to be so." "Is a bad upbringing an excuse for murder? We don't seem to think so in other circumstances."
"Do we cry tears for Terry Lynn McClintock [a drug-addicted child, the daughter of a stripper, who, when she reached age 18, killed an innocent little girl]? OK, well we could. She had a tough line. But she crossed a line that she can't come back from. Life in prison is the penalty. Even if we accept as true that Khadr was indoctrinated as a child into jihad..."
"They should be punished to the full extent of the law to protect society."
"Has it become politically popular to identify with another culture to the dysfunctional extent that no action of a member of that minority culture and/or race can do no wrong?"
"Political considerations in no way to decide which murderers we like. How about we don't like any of them? Moral relativism and Omar Khadr." Jerry Agar. Sun News. 10/18/2012.

Not punishing evil at all

"They always worry about the cuddly quotient in TV. That's what (the book) Dexter's about; a protest against moral relativism. On a gut level, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is the only thing that makes sense to people."
Author Jeff Lindsay, creator of the Dexter Morgan character. Quoted in "'Dexter,' 'Hell on Wheels' and 'Breaking Bad' give us the bad guy as 'antihero'." Eric Deggans. Nov. 7, 2011.

"For decades now, counselors and psychiatrists have avoided words such as "guilt," "sin" and "stealing." Miscreants are encouraged to say they "made a mistake" or a "bad decision." Moral relativism helps no one except those who want to evade responsibility for their actions." "Has suggestions for getting serious about shoplifting." Suzanne Molineaux. Nov. 16, 2011. http://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Has-suggestions-for-getting-serious-about-2272620.php

Placating enemies

"In October 2003, Representative Eliot Engel, who sponsored the legislation, proudly reported the bill’s imminent passage to the inaugural Jerusalem Summit, organized by Ariel Sharon’s government and its diehard American supporters (including the ubiquitous Perle) “to work out a joint strategy of resistance to the Totalitarianism of the Radical Islam, and to the moral relativism which in vain tries to placate this Totalitarianism by sacrificing Israel.”"
"The long road to Damascus." Maidhc Ó Cathail. Nov. 16, 2011.

"Appeasement, flattery and moral relativism don’t work: in his 2009 Cairo speech the president said Islam and the West should “learn from each other,” but what can America really learn from those who associate worship with violent rage?"
"The Toxic Mix of Rage and Worship," Michael Medved, Sept. 18, 2012.

Willingness to debate people who have done bad things

"The BBC knows the limits of what the organisation absurdly terms ‘balance’ but is more often the promotion of moral relativism. A poppy week broadcast package may include as well as a British Legion spokesman an Islamic jihadist advocating sawing-off the heads of soldiers, an evangelical Christian may be ‘balanced’ by a Satanist, a reputable scientist by a flat-earther AGW advocate and so on. For every politician urging the benefits on-air of family life with both mother and father will be another defending the rights of promiscuous bastardy at the taxpayers’ expense."
"BBC: 'balance', nonces and moral relativism." by Hatfield Girl. 10/23/2012

Associating with people who have done bad things

"So, Nike have dropped Lance Armstrong. Lance Armstrong has also resigned as head of his Livestrong Foundation.
I don’t think Nike had much choice here. Not only is Armstrong a proven cheat but it seems he was also involved in encouraging (or “bullying” according to the testimony) his team mates into doing the same. It seems he may well have been encouraging his team mates to “Just Do It” in a rather different context from that which Nike intends. Armstrong and US Postal were far from alone in their cheating though.
* * *
All of this raises an issue of moral relativism for brands – when is an indiscretion sufficient to cut your ties with a celebrity? Is an indiscretion against your sport really a worse thing than one against your wife? Morally, of course not. Do I care about that one way or the other, or am I simply worried about the continuing credibility of a celebrity to endorse my brand? I suspect the latter is true, though few would admit it. There is no moral judgement, simply a brand value judgement. For many brands, their values would determine that the call may be seen from outside as having been made on moral grounds but the cynic in me suspects that, in reality, that’s not the case."
"Nike, Lance Armstrong and Moral Relativism." Andrew Jerina. Research Geek. 10/18/2012

Tolerance or politeness:
"Our dedication to objective truth girds the Hillsdale College community. It is by this commitment that we strive against a modern world conceived in relativism, where the only idea not tolerated is intolerance itself." "Reject Relay relativism." By Jordan Adams. Hillsdale Collegian. Sept. 29, 2011.

"Some academics seem wholly committed to relativism. They are often enthusiastic about views they do not agree with. Expressing your opinions is what counts....There is no authority to relativists other than the authority of the personal view point....few of today’s ubiquitous relativists are scoundrels. In fact they are rather nice; too nice to be scoundrels. They are the people who do not want to give offence."
"Relativism is dead: long live relativism." Dennis Hayes. Aug. 26, 2011.

"In a famous scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the lord of a castle seeks to bring peace to warring opponents by saying, 'Now, now, let’s not fight and squabble about who killed who.' ... Moral relativism is a bit like that."
"Why Can't We All Just Get Along?" T. M. Moore. The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Aug. 29, 2011.

"We live in a society which is morally sick. We have a relative rather than an absolute moral code. ... The only long-term solution is a return to a moral code in which right and wrong, good and evil are reinforced by sanctions and rewards."
"A musing about life and moral decay." Peter Bingle. The Dispatch Box. Sept. 29, 2011.

“Nick Spencer seems to think that a decline in religious affiliation will mean a descent into moral relativism. ... When I teach ethics ... I want them to see that they agree on a lot, to become aware of the nature of their actual meta-ethical views before they get to the theorizing, and to try to prevent them from taking refuge in relativism out of intellectual exhaustion with the many incompatible meta-ethical theories. ... Again and again, they affirm that an action that is wrong here and now would be wrong everywhere and always.  In other words, they are not relativists but natural objectivists – even if they also think we should all be relativists to ensure that we are tolerant, as some of them inconsistently do.”
"The wrong diagnosis and the wrong remedy." Brian Zamulinski. December 23, 2011.

”There's an old saying. What's mine is mine. What's yours is up for grabs. The person who coined it was obviously a cynic, but the saying does capture the hypocrisy of the modern moral relativism. Put basically, champions so-called "tolerance" demand that their views be accepted that even if a person disapproves of a view, he or she should respect the right of the individual to live in accordance with that view without being judged for it.
BUT, this champion of "tolerance" will not practice what he or she preaches. This person will not accept the right of the individual who believes in Christian morality to live in accordance with that view. On the contrary, he or she will quite harshly judge and condemn these views, trying to suppress them.
* * *
We see demonization of opponents.
Thus we see the proponents of modern moral relativism do not practice the tolerance they demand their opponents follow.”
"The Hypocrisy of Modern Moral Relativism." by "Arnobius of Sicca." 12/31/2012

---

"Rule-breaking is usually about curiosity and a sense of immortality, two things people lose as they grow older; we suppose fearing for her life has been good motivation."
A. E. Osworth, We Are Watching Eliza Bright (Grand Central Publishing, 2022)

Moral relativism and the belief that 'everything is permitted'

Some people define "moral relativism" as the attitude or belief that 'everything is permitted'. This is not necessarily the best definition of it. I have collected some examples of people using it this way.

"[Veit] Bader is concerned to avoid both the temptation to “universalise particular moralities” and on the other end of the spectrum the problem of moral relativism which implicitly condones anything. In order to avoid these poles, Bader proposes that the state should seek to secure a moral minimalist position. * * * He regards the minimal morality required in liberal-democracies to be more demanding as it includes such things as equal civic and political rights, equal legal rights and political autonomy."
"Book Review: Secularism or Democracy? by Veit Bader. Stumbling through the Past. April 11, 2011.

"Upholding the world's diversity as the norm, [Sergey] Lavrov is at the same time immune to the fashion for relativism in handling value system issues. His strongly held view is that contemporary societies should be built on solid moral foundations which alone can cement relationships between nations, peoples and ethnic groups. Lavrov is open about his aversion to Pontius Pilatus-style indifference expressed in his famous reply “What is truth?”. Rather, he sees the crisis of the European society whose value system were eroded by what Z. Brzezinski described as “a civil war within the West” as the root cause of most of the XIX and XX century tragedies."
"Notes of a Diplomacy Professional." Armen Oganesyan. The Voice of Russia. Nov. 2, 2011.

"Astonished, I asked them how could they not think that this ["open relationships"] was wrong. I got answers like: “well, since it is all out in the open and everybody knows that everybody is doing it, there is nothing fundamentally wrong. No one is cheating on a spouse because the spouse was also swinging.”
I said to them: “what about the seventh commandment – do not commit adultery.” One student answered that these people are really not religious. What the students didn’t seem to understand was that whether they were religious or not, there is a moral code that is rooted in the Bible which defines for us what is right and what is wrong. The problem is that when pressed, many of the students simply said that if it feels good and if it feels right then who am I to judge? I told them I wasn’t suggesting that they go over to somebody who is engaged in swinging and chastise them, but that they had to have an opinion on this practice. They looked at me with some disbelief."
"Living in a post-moral world." Rabbi Haskel Lookstein. Sermon for Parshat Noach. Oct. 29, 2011.

"For the advocates of redistributive policies and antidiscrimination policies the answer is clear: the freedom to "do your own thing" entitles a person to the resources to support them, and immunity from criticism for their chosen lifestyle – it is just their own thing after all! This is precisely the vision of the modern moral-relativist welfare state. This is what the advocates of redistributive and antidiscrimination policies have in mind when they hide behind this innocuous phrase. How dare you refuse to contribute your earnings to others who are just trying to do their own thing? How dare you deign to criticize the actions of other people, or discriminate against them – don't you realize that they are just doing their own thing?
In this corrupted sense, the notion of a society where people are free to "do their own thing" becomes a cruel joke, a nightmare tyranny in which this peaceful slogan belies a rigorous system of coercion and control. In such a society, people are not free to do their own thing at all. Not if "their own thing" happens to consist of thinking and telling the truth about the people and institutions around them, objectively assessing and judging the ideas and actions of others, and trying to live their own lives free from egalitarian molestation. In such a society, people are free to do their own thing only to the extent that they avoid objective reasoning and kowtow to the tenets of moral relativism, adopting the mushy "nonjudgmental" thinking." (Lew Rockwell)

"Moral relativism is the ideology that we can do, essentially, whatever we want. “It can be right for you but not right for me, and that’s okay”. As you said, “Also, morals are just opinions of what’s right and what’s wrong. As a result, you cannot say that your morals are superior to anyone else’s.” That’s MR at its finest." Tumblr

Paul Tournier:

“…the worst thing is not being wrong, but being sure one is not wrong. Nothing is more dangerous for us than to believe ourselves to be the authentic interpreters of the divine will. This is the source of all illuminism, of all brutal intolerance, of all proselytism and fanaticism. See how delicate a problem it is: objective criteria tend towards overbearing moralism…”

Paul Tournier. The Violence Within. Translated by Edwin Hudson, 1978. New York: Harper & Row, 1982, (originally Violence et Puissance, 1977) pp. 64–65.

Elites inside the GOP (up and coming “intellectuals” like Nate Hochman or former Rubio chief of staff Mike Needham) are eagerly adopting fascistic rhetoric to draw voters to Trump. Such rhetoric doesn’t just reflect what exists, it also has the power to shape. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024...

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— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 8:04 AM

Fascistic propaganda works, especially when well-funded & made by smart, shameless elites with the connections and resources to get that propaganda in front of a lot of eyeballs. In a free society, elite restraint plays an important role in limiting the production & spread of fascistic propaganda.

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 8:10 AM

When a party of the right is in the process of radicalizing ever more rightward, the name of that furthest right polestar toward which they are oriented and headed is “fascism.” One of the defining features of fascist political cultures is that they almost never adopt that label. But fascism exists.

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 8:14 AM

People on the left who are socialists will happily and openly use that term . Same goes for the smaller number of Americans who call themselves communists. But since the 1930s, American fascists have called themselves pablum names like “Christian patriots” or “nationalists.”

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 8:18 AM

Fascist movements frequently fail. Fascist rhetoric only works on a limited number of people. Fascist propagandists rarely “believe” their own content. Their goal is power, not persuasion. So there’s no need to cower in fear of all-powerful monsters. But this is a time for boundary drawing.

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 8:25 AM

Modern democracies will always have parties of the right. When such parties become hostile to religiously and culturally pluralistic democracy, rule of law, and free and fair elections, they cross the boundary from center-right to far right…and from democratic to fascistic.

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 8:30 AM

As any American leftist can tell you, the Democrats have quite robust guardrails that gatekeep and mute the left edge of their coalition. The GOP has long stopped even pretending to care about its right edge. Nick Fuentes ate dinner with Trump and no one cared. Trump tried an actual coup and meh.

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 8:42 AM

At the risk of venturing into the Cheney discourse, this is why GOP defectors like them matter. That’s what boundary drawing on the right looks like. It’s prominent people on the right saying “my party has crossed the line into fascism and I absolutely reject it.” This is a 100% good thing.

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 8:56 AM

The current GOP is a coalition of the center-right & the far right in which the center-right is the very junior, vestigial partner. People who pay attention to politics know this, but most voters do not pay attention to politics. This is why elite-signaling (like what the Cheneys have done) matters.

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 9:14 AM

I don't have much hope that the GOP is going to to change course and tack toward the center any time soon. It's hard to see where the momentum or leadership for that change might come. Thus the best strategy right now is to give center-right people permission to stop voting for a far right party.

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 9:19 AM

My research focuses on the history of how the far right took over the OR GOP. It was a very long and slow process, but the result is that the GOP has become increasingly electorally unviable. It has done the opposite of course correct, & has just kept losing. sethcotlar.substack.com/p/walter-hus...

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— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 9:26 AM

The same dynamic has played out in California, Washington, and Colorado. We saw it also play out in the huge losses of MAGA-weirdo candidates Mastriano in PA and Dixon in MI in 2022. We'll probably see it play out that way in NC with Mark Robinson. It might even happen to Ted Cruz?

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 9:29 AM

One thing I appreciate about Trump/Vance is that they've called the question as to what sort of party the GOP now is. VP Burgham or Rubio would have allowed the party to semi-plausibly cosplay as center-right normies. Picking Vance was a clear statement about the party's proudly illiberal future.

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 9:32 AM

If Trump wins a bunch of low information voters who thought they were supporting a center-right, tax & regulation cutting Republican will soon discover that they voted for someone gleefully locking up his "enemies" and dumping the nation into a recession with his police state mass deportation plan.

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 10:02 AM

Meanwhile, a cohort of sadistic bigots and anti-democrats will be jumping for joy because they succeeded in creating just enough panic about crime at a time when crime is decreasing, and fear about economic chaos at a time of relative prosperity, to get their anti-democratic wrecking ball into power

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 10:05 AM

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In response to Seth Cotlar's "Modern democracies will always have parties of the right. When such parties become hostile to religiously and culturally pluralistic democracy, rule of law, and free and fair elections, they cross the boundary from center-right to far right…and from democratic to fascistic...":

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This distinction is key: The modern conservative movement was founded in opposition to egalitarian pluralism - something conservatives derided as “relativism” and an assault on the “natural” order. The question has always been: If society moved away from their vision, would they embrace extremism?

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— Thomas Zimmer (@thomaszimmer.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 10:33 AM

This conflict has defined the modern Right. As the conservative movement was formed, at its core, as an anti-“Left” - meaning: opposed to leveling existing hierarchies in the name of egalitarianism - coalition, a radicalizing dynamic was constitutive: Whatever it takes to defeat “the Left.”

— Thomas Zimmer (@thomaszimmer.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 10:43 AM

Most of the leading modern conservative thinkers of the 1940s and 50s, both from the “traditionalist” and the libertarian camp, explicitly saw liberalism and communism as merely different manifestations of essentially the same threat - and the conservative movement existed to defeat that threat.

— Thomas Zimmer (@thomaszimmer.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 10:47 AM

Is there a line self-regarding conservatives should not cross, even as Liberals gain power and influence, even as the “leftist” project of leveling “traditional” hierarchies proceeds? Unfortunately, a whole lot of “respectable” conservatives have answered that question with an emphatic “No!”

— Thomas Zimmer (@thomaszimmer.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 10:58 AM

Conservative philosophy may have a limiting, restraining, moderating principle. But the conservative movement as a political project formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century never did. It was not only ideologically aligned with anti-democratic extremists, but often embraced them.

— Thomas Zimmer (@thomaszimmer.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 11:02 AM

What language can we use for evil?

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Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, Chapter 9:

"But how to be morally severe in the late twentieth century? How, when there is so much to be severe about; how, when we have a sense of evil but no longer the religious or philosophical language to talk intelligently about evil? Trying to comprehend ‘radical’ or ‘absolute’ evil, we search for adequate metaphors. But the modern disease metaphors are all cheap shots. The people who have the real disease are also hardly helped by hearing their disease’s name constantly being dropped as the epitome of evil. Only in the most limited sense is any historical event or problem like an illness. And the cancer metaphor is particularly crass."

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Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Section 187:

"Quite apart from the value of such assertions as 'there exists in us a categorical imperative' one can still ask: what does such an assertion say of the man who asserts it? ...moralities too are only a sign-language of the emotions."

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"They Get to Me." Jessica Love. The American Scholar. Spring 2010. p. 71. :

"German bilinguals consistently described the bridge with more feminine adjectives (elegant, beautiful), and Spanish bilinguals described it with more masculine adjectives (sturdy, dangerous). Here’s the kicker: instructions were given in English, descriptions were written in English, and the photograph of the bridge was just that—a photograph. This suggests that pronouns might be important, not just to how we use language, but to how we experience the objects in our world (although, as dear Steven Pinker points out, “Just because a German thinks a bridge is feminine, doesn’t mean he’s going to ask one out on a date”)."

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In P. Glassen, "The Cognitivity of Moral Judgments," Mind 68 (1959), pp 57–72. and P. Geach "Assertion." See also C. Wellman, "Emotivism and Ethical Objectivity," American Philosophical Quarterly 5 (1968), pp. 90-9. Reprinted in Richard Joyce. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge University Press, 2001. p. 13. :

"Glassen's point is that if all the evidence suggests that we intend to use our moral language in an assertoric manner, then all the evidence suggests that our moral language is assertoric, for assertion is entirely a matter of our intentions. The evidence that Glassen assembles I would employ to a slightly different end: as confirmation that the linguistic conventions that govern moral discourse are those of assertions. Here is Glassen's list..."
1. They (moral utterances) are expressed in the indicative mood
2. They can be transformed into interrogative sentences
3. They appear embedded in propositional attitude contexts
4. They are considered true or false, correct or mistaken
5. They are considered to have an impersonal, objective character
6. The putative moral predicates can be transformed into abstract singular terms (e.g., "goodness"), suggesting they are intended to pick out properties
7. They are subject to debate which bears all the hallmarks of factual disagreement
We can add to this list the two related characteristics highlighted by Peter Geach.
8. They appear in logically complex contexts (e.g., as the antecedents of conditionals)
9. They appear as premises in arguments considered valid"

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Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains

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"The world comes to us in a tremendously complex tangle. The norms of contemporary journalism—maybe just journalism, period—insist on the present in a way that is flattening and not true to the thickness of time. In general, and definitely in the US, we are discouraged from historical thinking. Even in terms of what’s going on right now, in Israel and Palestine, you hear people say that referring to the occupation or anything that preceded October 7 is a distraction from the present. That attitude is not going to help us understand the violence of our world order. And it won’t help us transform it. I would say the same about nationalism. It’s not explanatory, and we miss so much if we insist on framing things that way. I come from self-consciously diasporic communities, but even if I didn’t, I hope I would still have enough sense to keep my moral focus on people rather than states.

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In general, I’m not interested in a kind of criticism where people retweet it and say, 'This is the last word on X or Y. Mic drop.' I've never been interested in those kinds of proprietary claims. I'm interested in a form of criticism that really opens up other desires, associations, lines of inquiry — because to me, an object is never exhausted, no matter how many people write about it. But there’s also so much where the idea of authority or expertise barely comes up because critics haven’t seen those objects as worthy of analysis. That’s my sweet spot."

— Carina del Valle Schorske, interviewed by Merve Emre. The Tuning Fork in the Ear. Episode Ten of “The Critic and Her Publics”. New York Review of Books. June 25, 2024.

Image by InspiredImages from Pixabay

From The Dual State by Ernst Fraenkel, p. 109:

Our attention for learning and valuing (Scheler's 'Wertnehmung')

Max Scheler (1874–1928) places values in a hierarchy: at bottom, sinnliche Werte (utility and pleasure), followed by Lebenswerte, (life values, what we might call "virtues," e.g., courage), followed by geistige Werte, which are more intellectually oriented ("principally justice, beauty and truth," McGilchrist explains), and lastly, das Heilige (holiness).

McGilchrist's thesis is that our starting point in this hierarchy depends on whether our brain's right or left hemisphere is evaluating the hierarchy. He believes that the right hemisphere calls most of the shots, and it begins with das Heilige, and all other values serve it. The left hemisphere begins with sinnliche Werte and strives to reach das Heilige, because "the left hemisphere is reductionist, and accounts for higher values by reference to lower values." The left hemisphere is also crucial to us, but in a sense it is the servant of the right hemisphere. (Overall, in human life — not only in the context of values — the left hemisphere is "the emissary," and the right hemisphere is "the master," as they are referred to in the title of McGilchrist's book.)

McGilchrist further explains Scheler's position (presented here with my emphases):

Value, for Scheler, is a pre-cognitive aspect of the existing world, which is neither purely subjective (i.e., ‘whatever I take it to be’) nor purely consensual (i.e. ‘whatever we agree it to be’). It is not, he asserts, something which we derive, or put together from some other kind of information, any more than we derive a color, or come to a conclusion about it, by making a calculation. It comes to us in its own right, prior to any such calculation being made. This position is importantly related to two right-hemisphere themes which we have encountered already: the importance of context and of the whole. For example, the same act carried out by two different people may carry an entirely different value, which is why morality can never be a matter of actions or consequences taken out of context, whether that be the broader context or that of the mental world of the individual involved (the weakness of a too rigidly codified judicial system). Hence we judge some things that would out of context be considered weaknesses to be part of what is valuable or attractive in the context of a particular person's character; we do not arrive at a judgment on a person by summing the totality of their characteristics or acts, but judge their characteristics or acts by the ‘whole’ that we know to be that person.
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Value is not a flavor that is added for some socially useful purpose; it is not a function or consequence of something else, but a primary fact. Scheler referred to the capacity for appreciating value as Wertnehmung, a concept which has been translated into the rather less accommodating English language as ‘value-caption’. For him this value-caption governs the type of attention that we pay to anything, and by which we learn more about it. Our value-captive knowledge of the whole governs our understanding of the parts, rather than the reverse. It is, in fact, one way of breaking into Escher's circle of hands...

This idea inspired me to write a tiny article, "Do We Choose to Be Who We Are?", followed by another tiny article, "How Do We Know Who We Are?". I offer both to you here — unpaywalled, if you use these links.

Also, please check out McGilchrist's large book:

Source: Iain McGilchrist. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009.

Also, a comment on values:

"Simone Weil is not in any way mistaken about the dignity and necessity of temporal values. She sees them as intermediaries — metaxu — between the soul and God."

That's Gustave Thibon in a 1947 introduction to Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace (La Pesanteur et la grâce (1947) , translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. p. xxxv.

Pierre Bourdieu's 'habitus'

Quote:

"Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social and cultural reproduction is one of the most prominent attempts to explain the intergenerational persistence of social inequality. Bourdieu contended that the formal education system is a primary mechanism in the perpetuation of socioeconomic inequality, as it serves to legitimate the existing social hierarchy by transforming it into an apparent hierarchy of gifts or merit (Bourdieu, 1997, 2006; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). In constructing his account of social reproduction, Bourdieu deployed a number of compelling concepts. Cultural capital is arguably the most well-known of these concepts. Less prominent, but no less integral to his conceptual framework are the accompanying notions of habitus, practice, and field.

* * *

Habitus is the learned set of preferences or dispositions by which a person orients to the social world. It is a system of durable, transposable, cognitive ‘schemata or structures of perception, conception and action’ (Bourdieu, 2002: 27). Habitus is rooted in family upbringing (socialization within the family) and conditioned by one’s position in the social structure. Bourdieu termed it ‘socialized subjectivity’ or subjectivity conditioned by structural circumstances. Habitus shapes the parameters of people’s sense of agency and possibility; it entails perceptual schemes of which ends and means are reasonable given that individual’s particular position in a stratified society."

— Edgerton, J. D., & Roberts, L. W. (2014). Cultural capital or habitus? Bourdieu and beyond in the explanation of enduring educational inequality. Theory and Research in Education, 12(2), 193-220. https://doi.org/10.1177/1477878514530231

Interlocking lizards by Rodman Browning from Pixabay

Law is based on 'judges, well, judging'

In a September 28, 2021 article for Raw Story, Terry H. Schwadron reports:

[Jessica] Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School...explains that [Jonathan] Mitchell, who now runs his own one-man law firm, is dead set against both Roe and the cases governing same-sex rights because "they're based on judges, well, judging."

The same Jonathan Mitchell who is seeking termination of abortion as legally valid argues in his Mississippi abortion case challenge due for hearing in December that women can have no protected right to abortion because it was never written in the Constitution.

The metaethical question implicit here — as always, when discussing Constitutional fundamentalism — is this: Is it relevant that the Constitution itself is based on Madison, well, maddening, and the Founding Fathers, well, foundering? Or, are those human sources infallible or otherwise not to be questioned, and the only human infallibility that matters is judges, well, judging?

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

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Gavel by Arek Socha from Pixabay

Here, Kristi Noem uses the term "activist" as an insult against a judge to explain why she doesn't have to follow the judge's orders.

(While we're here, think about what it means when they call anyone else an activist. It's just a word they use to delegitimize that person and whatever power they may have.

KARL: Did you know about the judge's order when you issued your order for the planes to continue? KRISTI NOEM: This is an activist judge. We comply with all federal orders that are lawful and binding.

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) November 30, 2025 at 11:28 AM

They’re simultaneously arguing that soldiers have to follow all orders from the president, legal or not, but they get to ignore orders from a federal judge if they feel they’re not legal.

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— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) November 30, 2025 at 12:43 PM

How we determine what is correct

Here's some trilemmas.

Trilemma 1

Consider the following proposal:

1. Everyone who actually contributes to the project will be recognized as having equal status to the other contributors.
2. Everyone with contributor status will be given equal power to help determine the right path.
3. The current power structure will remain the same.

They cannot all be true. Which statement will be rejected?

Trilemma 2

Consider the following statements:

1. We can solve any question of power distribution regarding how we determine the right path.
2. We have the motivation to do good by solving such questions.
3. There is an open question of this type.

They cannot all be true. Which statement will be rejected?

Trilemma 3

Consider the following statements:

1. The rightness of the path is self-justifying or uses a circle tying back to itself.
2. The rightness of the path depends on a fixed point outside itself.
3. The rightness of the path depends on an infinite regress of points.

Are these the same or different?

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

How to end violent motives, according to 'Virtuous Violence'

Answer: Convince people to update their cultural norms and relationship models. Here's why.

Only a small proportion of all violence is an instrumental effort to get something, like someone else’s wallet, Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai maintain in their 2014 book Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships. Most violence, they say, springs from motivations within the perpetrator’s moral worldview, meaning that the perpetrator resorts to violence to constitute or regulate an important relationship “with a fully moral partner” especially as a kind of punishment or revenge. The perpetrator (and those around them) perceive it as a moral obligation to carry out the violence even if doing so triggers “guilt, shame, remorse, sadness, nausea, or horror” due to competing motives; overall, to the group, the violence “makes local sociocultural sense.”

Commonly, people understand their “setbacks, failures, illnesses, injuries, and deaths” to have been inflicted upon them by angry “deceased ancestors, spirits, or deities". This is just a supernaturally illustrated instance of the same principle. They believe the gods use violence to manage relationships, too.

Steven Pinker wrote the foreword, in which he claimed that his own prior book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, included a similar claim that violent people believe they are acting for a higher good. He praised “Fiske’s theory of relational models [as] the best — indeed the only — overarching theory of social psychology.” This refers to an identification of four types of relationships — Fiske calls them "communal sharing" (CS), "authority ranking" (AR), "equality matching" (EM), and "market pricing" (MP) — any or all of which can be transgressed and thus lead to violence.

In particular, violence is used to uphold expected relationships based on who one is, such as establishing power dynamics based on race and gender (CS, AR), as well as on what one has done to earn one's treatment by others (EM, MP).

A 1996 paper by Bandura et al. in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology proposed a scale to measure moral disengagement based on one's willingness to use violence and lies to protect one's in-group. Fiske and Rai, however, say that behavior sure looks like moral engagement to them. Even if your personal or cultural norms hold that “moral motives must be peaceful,” it doesn’t mean that people with violent motives aren’t engaging in moral reasoning of their own. Once you accept that the violence is morally motivated, it “makes no sense” to understand violence as dehumanizing its victim, since the perpetrator must assume the victim is human enough to bear guilt and to feel pain “in order for his punishment to have any moral meaning.” Perpetrators “fully appreciate that they are hurting fully human beings, and judge that it is right to hurt them.” The prefixes of dis-engagement and de-humanization are also confusing here because they imply "an original state of social relatedness…[and] moral engagement” that has been abandoned in the act of violence.

Violence is usually treated as “the essence of evil,” but this is a mistaken understanding. “Morality is about regulating social relationships, and violence is one way to regulate relationships.” Ordinary people “feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.” They do it “to create, conduct, protect, redress, terminate, or mourn social relationships with the victim or with others....to create, sustain, modulate, and repair the relationships that matter to them, to terminate relationships that become intolerable, or to mourn the loss of a partner.”

That is not to say that violence is (objectively) moral. It is only to say that real people perceive and reason it to be moral within whatever cultural view binds them. To argue that violence is truly immoral (as seen from some outside perspective) or that the violent person somehow misunderstands their own cultural norms is not the project of Fiske and Rai's book.

The authors present a recipe for "the only way to reduce morally motivated violence": Bolster relationship norms that support nonviolence and prohibit violence, grow networks of relationships that uphold these norms with complete clarity, and build awareness and consensus about these norms and relationship networks so that everyone knows that everyone else agrees on them. This is "what cultural change consists of: consensual transformation of preos and metarelational models." "Preos" and "metarelational models" are their funny words for cultural norms and complex relationships between multiple people. It just might work.

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Dick Cheney was the "mastermind and primary organizer on the 'war on terror,' which, in a 20-year span of insanity, cost the United States some $8 trillion and killed (murdered) nearly a million people, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project," writes Robert C. Koehler. (On Cheney, Trump, and the Nature of Violence: As a nation, as a unified planet, we need to create a future that’s bigger than Trump, bigger than Cheney—bigger than what they could imagine in terms of global politics and power. Common Dreams, Nov 6, 2025)

"Trump is just the next step," having "loosened himself from all sense of political dignity," he says.

Koehler is currently writing a book that "begins to address the nature of violence. I begin by quoting journalist and peace activist Colman McCarthy, who once asked: Why are we violent but not illiterate? This question stuck in my soul." His answer so far is that illiteracy is a kind of ignorance, but violence is more than "the absence of knowing how to behave with calm rationality and creative compassion...To behave with violence, at least with a high level of violence, requires a great deal of knowing. Nations couldn’t go to war if they didn’t have the capacity to organize armies and equip them with up-to-date weaponry; to do this requires an extraordinary amount of 'violent literacy,' you might say." When we commit violence, we collectively make "an abdication of self-ownership, an abdication of everything that is godlike within us: an abdication of our vulnerability." So how do we "evolve beyond violence" in the same way we evolve beyond illiteracy, until it "is no longer possible or even, in a personal sense, imaginable"?

Though "many such systems already exist...they don’t reduce simply and easily to a story: a plot device." It's hard to quickly illustrate what they look like in practice.

Koehler's website is commonwonders.com.

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Marisa Kabas writes in the Handbasket:

"“So many in media are ill-equipped to interview officials about what’s happening because they begin with the presumption of legitimacy and don’t know enough about history or U.S. foreign policy to foment intelligent pushback and hold officials accountable,” journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones posted Sunday on Bluesky. She continued, “The questions begin with WILL regime change be successful, not how is it legal or ethical to orchestrate a coup and who are we to decide when leadership must go and who are we to believe we have rights to a sovereign nation’s resources.”

Hannah-Jones pointed specifically to Trump’s claim that the US is “reclaiming its stolen oil” and how there’s little pushback on the framing, or an explanation of the veracity of that claim."

Tobin Zolkowski writes on Medium:

Psychologist Albert Bandura discovered how ordinary people can participate in atrocities and yet believe themselves to be good. He called this process “moral disengagement”...

Here are the ways we do this:

1. You convince yourself that you’re not being cruel, you’re merely protecting an important concept (moral justification).
2. Instead of calling the behavior by its true name, you give it a euphemism (such as “collateral damage,” or “enhanced interrogation” or “accountability”).
3. You find someone who has done something worse than you and claim to be better than them (advantageous comparison).
4. You make excuses for your actions based on the fact that you were simply following the rules (displacement).
5. You claim that since everyone else was doing it then technically no one actually did anything wrong (diffusion).
6. You tell yourself that they’ll be okay (disregard).
7. You dehumanize the person so that you can’t see how similar you are to them (dehumanization).

See Bandura's 1999 and 1996 articles.

"We have the power to encourage those who want to refuse illegal orders, who deep down believe in the principles of justice and freedom enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Our compassion just might embolden them to join us." — Aimee Liu

Appalling: During Trump's effort to indict Dems for the video warning against carrying out illegal orders, one of their lawyers asked prosecutors to say what statute was allegedly violated, I'm told. They failed to name one. Then they tried to indict anyway. New: newrepublic.com/article/2066...

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— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) February 18, 2026 at 7:20 AM

"Very often, when people say that Trump is “transactional,” they mean something like “just transactional”; he only cares about money, so in the end he cannot be that bad. But that is not where transactionalism leads: it leads to the basic reality that Trump has no notion of interests beyond his own, and will find it natural to take your money and spend it for his power."
Timothy Snyder, Trump's Military Dictatorship Budget: The proposal only makes sense as a bribe, Jun 4, 2026

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. I publish essays on Medium.

Fatal flaws in 'Mere Christianity' by C. S. Lewis

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis is a book beloved by millions of people. When I first read it out of curiosity, at age 18 and having just started college, I found it to be a string of fallacies. I didn't expect ever to change my mind about this. Twenty years later, I reread the book and wrote up my assessment. Indeed, my basic assessment did not change. My long essay is on Medium.

A hundred types of transgression - or more

It is often claimed that, all over the world, certain acts are seen as clear-cut examples of moral wrongdoing, regardless of the cultural background of the one who is asked to judge them. Everyone opposes the unprovoked killing of other people. Everyone is offended by lying and stealing. Everyone, that is, except psychopaths. These things are wrong by definition. Furthermore, acts that suggest character traits such as disloyalty and greed also tend to receive widespread disapproval.

Yet, even if there is agreement about which actions are wrong, this does not entail that all wrong actions are equally wrong. "Anthropologists have found," Lance Morrow wrote in his book Evil: An Investigation, "that when they ask people to describe the most evil act they can imagine, different cultures may produce different answers." Americans and Europeans are likely to mention violence against children, while Japanese may mention greed and corruption in politics. This raises the question of whether there is a workable scale.

The American forensic psychiatrist Michael Stone, interviewed by Max Miller in 2010, explained his 22-step "scale of evil": "...the first one was 'not evil,' just justified homicide. Number two was crimes of passion, all the way up to 22 where there was usually a serial killer subjecting victims to prolonged torture. So, that's about as bad as it gets." (Here, he represents what Morrow suggested might be a culturally specific orientation toward this question.)

Stone's "scale of evil" focuses on ranking different types of murder, so it might not succeed at explaining evil generally. On the middle range of his scale of evil – somewhere between a justifiable or readily understandable near-accident and, on the other extreme, the callous scheming of a rogue loner – there are examples of the sort of criminal motives that should concern everyone. This includes people who live with day-to-day anger that eventually boils over; people who kill those who seem to threaten their power or to block them from doing what they want to do; people who repeatedly deceive others without remorse; and people whose crimes are sexually driven. This sort of evil is banal, to use Hannah Arendt's well-known term. It is more dangerous because it is more common, and therefore its destructive capacity is less likely to be recognized.

Stone's list gives the impression that a "psychopathic" mind is always more evil than a non-psychopathic mind. This may be true almost by definition, as Robert D. Hare's 1999 book on psychopaths is titled Without Conscience. If conscience refers to the ability to distinguish "right" from "wrong," and if psychopaths lack conscience, then psychopaths will inevitably choose to harm others without a sense of remorse – and therefore, it would be fair to call such people "evil," if indeed anyone may be called evil.

Because evil depends at least in part on a person's intentions (in addition to usually considering the actual consequences), any attempt to rank wrongdoing on a scale should consider whether the perpetrator has a conscience in the first place. Barbara Wootton worried in Social Science and Social Pathology that psychopathic motives are so inscrutable to normal people that "the psychopath may well prove to be the thin end of the wedge which will ultimately shatter the whole idea of moral responsibility," to which the philosopher Mary Midgley responded reassuringly in her essay Wickedness that "all conceptual schemes run into difficulties and paradoxes when they are used for awkward and unusual cases." Just because a scale is imperfect does not mean that it cannot be developed and used at all, on Midgley's view.

In 2009, the Australian government's Bureau of Statistics produced a list of 155 types of crime, ordered according to degrees of seriousness. Traffic offenses are at the bottom. Next comes prostitution, alcohol, gambling, trespassing, rioting, and drug use, followed by animal cruelty, incitement to hatred, and breaches of judge's orders, and then by environmental and public health violations. The top half of the list, indicating the most severe crimes, includes theft, fraud, bribery, weapons charges, drug dealing, sexual assault, vehicular homicide and murder. The list does not have legal standing, but it is intended as a tool to analyze crime. It is significant that "murder" is considered a more severe crime than "attempted murder" (here, as in most places). If "evil," as opposed to crime, is understood primarily as a matter of a person's intentions, then there should be no difference in severity between evil that has been accomplished and evil that has been merely attempted.

American forensic psychiatrist Michael Weiner has an ongoing Internet-based survey called The Depravity Project that investigates "whether any of the items under study – 26 specific intents, actions, and attitudes – can achieve consensus as to whether or not the public considers it reflective of depravity." Participants are asked "to rate whether the item is 'especially,' 'somewhat,' or 'not' depraved." In the survey's first decade, it received over 10,000 responses. The goal is to allow words like "evil," "heinous," and "depraved" to be used in a more objective fashion in courtrooms so that they reflect the nature of the crime rather than assumptions about the perpetrator as a human being.

When a religious approach is taken, the question of what is most evil is often aligned with someone's belief about what offends their God. The Catholic Church maintains two categories of sin: "mortal sins" that lead to Hell if they remain unconfessed and the less serious "venial sins."

The Inferno, a poem written by Dante in the early fourteenth century, assumed a Catholic vision of the seven deadly sins and implicitly suggested that sins could be ranked. As Dante's characters approach Hell, they first encounter dead souls who, while alive, could not quite make up their minds to be good. The crimes worsen as the characters penetrate deeper into Hell. In the First Circle, they see good people who had the misfortune to be born before the Messiah could save them. The Second through Fifth Circles contain the souls of people who were intemperate with sex, money, possessions, or in general had a bad attitude. The Sixth and Seventh Circles include religious heretics, violent people, and those who otherwise offended God. The Eighth and Ninth Circles are reserved for those who committed fraud and disloyalty.

Do people really distinguish degrees and kinds of evil? "Is evil," Morrow asked, "a great dark forest that we behold, or is it thousands of individual sprouts of wickedness, which we sort out the way a forester would differentiate among maple, spruce, oak, birch, pine, cedar, elm, hickory, hornbeam, ash, palm, gingko, acacia, fig, and so on?" And if people do not already distinguish types of evil, ought they try to do so?

It is not obvious that it is even possible to objectively rank types of evil. With its emotional and religious overtones, and with its reliance on understanding someone else's motives, the very idea of "evil" may be too personal and too blurry to pin down in a ranking chart. But even if the schema can never be completed satisfactorily, it may still be a useful exercise for anyone wishing to understand more about how different people and institutions personally interpret the severity of moral wrongs.

Originally posted to Helium Network on Jan. 6, 2013.

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