I don’t know about you, but I can’t help noticing that people who argue that truth or morality are relative tend to be much more intolerant than those who adhere to the idea of objective values. The tolerance they boast of is purely specific: that they don’t object to certain given acts (e.g. homosexuality) that traditionalists do. Like Father Brown pointed out, they only forgive sins that they don’t really think sinful. Against real differences in philosophy, principle, or even politics, relativists tend to be the most narrow-minded and intolerant people you will ever meet.

Thinking about this the other day, I realized that it makes perfect sense that this should be so. Because when you remove a topic from the realm of objectivity, you introduce a factor that wasn’t there before: choice. If something is merely a matter of taste or individual preference, then the question of why you have this particular taste or preference enters in.

If ethics are a thing like mathematics: a matter of reason, then two people may disagree on ethical questions, but if they both believe in objective value then they will not (unless they are arguing in bad faith) assume that the other’s ideas are a matter of arbitrary choice which he could have chosen otherwise if he wished. They will think that each is working off of the best he knows, and in any case that the truth is something impersonal and exterior to both. Moreover, if value is objective then understanding and applying it is a matter of skill and aptitude: differences in which are only to be expected.

However, once you make morals subjective, so that each person chooses his own and no one’s is better than anyone else’s, then if someone has a moral objection to your conduct the question arises “why do you choose this moral value if you know it’ll hurt me? In fact, what does it say about you that you have such taste? There must be a reason, and the reason must be in you.”

In other words, subjective value puts all the onus on the person who holds a given value system rather than on the system itself, because it contains the idea that each person chooses his values and could choose otherwise if he wished. Thus if someone objects to, say, homosexuality, it is not because he sees by reason that it is morally wrong and believes it in the impersonal way he understands mathematical formulas, it is because he personally hates people who act that way and wants to hurt them for some pathological reason. It is not a matter for debate or reason (you can’t reason people out of tastes), but merely for condemnation. There is no space for mutual respect for someone trying to follow the best he knows even if you think him mistaken (as Grant honored the Confederates even if he thought their cause “one of the worst for which men ever fought”): the fact that he chooses to hold this shows him to be a fundamentally evil person. If he weren’t, he would think like me, because I know that I am good.

I notice most modernist ideas produce the exact opposite effect that they claim to intend.