Word: relativist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...students as well as professors. There were respectable moral convictions on all sides, and even among those who, like myself, feel that a University is not the proper place for military preparation there were divergences over the answer to the problem. One does not have to be a moral relativist, pace Professor Putnam, in order to want to weigh arguments and take note of the legitimate concerns even of those whose point of view one rejects. For instance, while I find little justification for the present ROTC program, I recognize the right of students to pursue military preparation...
Activity v. Self. The professionalist may vaguely believe in God, may even go to church, but "religion plays no important role" in his professionalist attempts to find a meaning in life. Ethically he is a relativist, an existentialist who prefers Tillich to St. Thomas, who reads Camus rather than Marx. His intellectual style is "anti-ideological, pragmatic and empirical," much in the mainstream of American tradition. But he does have tensions, a sense of uneasiness, a vague feeling of disquiet, and they are rooted in his strivings to reconcile two separate parts of his existence, "his public and his private...
Thus, belief in the market economy, and opposition to all governmental intervention including government aid to the individual (which either corrupts morals or, as in the case of Social Security, prevents the individual from deciding for himself how and when to spend his money) follows naturally. Communism, being relativist, atheistic, and opposed to the market principle, is of course immoral on all counts...
Just as conservatism reflects moral rigidity, liberalism reflects permissiveness. Being a relativist in intellectual outlook and a devotee of the scientific method, the liberal lacks morals, accepts expression of all views, and refuses to react against "statism." What Mr. Evans says suggests an extremely interesting conclusion which he himself shies away from. The conservatist he describes seeks the freedom to indulge in self-perfection (insofar as perfection is achievable); the liberal seeks the freedom of self-expression. The extent of the difference--in fact, contradiction-- between these two concepts of freedom is best expressed by the conservatives' reluctance to permit...
...dangerous. The sum of his advice to the U.S. is to keep talking to the Russians while watching and waiting -but he never suggests what to watch and to wait for. He merely pleads over and over with Americans to stop being inflexible and moralistic and start being relativist and realistic: "We must, as the Biblical phrase goes, put away childish things; and among these childish things the first to go, in my opinion, should be self-idealization and the search for absolutes in world affairs: for absolute security, absolute amity, absolute harmony. Let us not repeat the mistake...