[quote]hspder wrote:
Quite the contrary. Equating the two requires moral absolutism – be it equating them to both being right or both being wrong, depending on what system of morality you pick.[/quote]
You miss the point. First, morally , they are not equal. That said, ‘equating’ the two is not a function of putting both acts on the same moral plane, thus invoking an ‘absolutism’ that sniffs of consistency - it is something different.
The ‘equating’ is made up of two different ways to measure two different events: on the one hand, the outrage at Abu Ghraib’s humiliation is measured against Western human rights/values; the outrage at decapitation should be greater, given the greater evil under a Western human rights/values approach, but it can’t even be argued that the ‘outrage’ of the worse acts is on par with outrage of the Abu Ghraib abuse.
So why is there less outrage at the worse event? Because the commentators refuse to measure the decapitation, suicide bombing, etc. by Western standards: they hold Westerners to a different standard than they hold the non-Western perpetrators of the greater evil.
For them - we’ll call them the media, for shorthand - don’t ‘equate’ the two events at all, per your situation - in fact, the opposite: they use one set of standards to measure behavior for Abu Ghraib and another deferential set for decapitation, etc. Relativism.
You say that treating the events this way is an act of ‘moral absolutism’ - perhaps you are thinking of something else. Here, we have each event being judged on a different scale: one by the rigid, uncompromising Western standard, and the other by a deferential, “we don’t really have the authority to judge them” standard. Relativism.
As above - decapitation, etc. is morally worse than humiliation, assuming you use the same standard to judge the actions. If you choose to use one standard sometimes, and then defer to the decapitator’s standards when judging the decapitation - that is moral relativism.
[quote]The classic example to distinguish between moral relativism and absolutism is based on the “give the other face” lesson from the Bible:
If you are punched, Moral Relativists will tell you it’s OK to respond in kind (under the justification of self-defense). Christian Moral Absolutists will tell you it’s not.[/quote]
Nonsense. If you are punched, the idea of punching back in self-defense is not an act of Moral Relativism because the act of initial violence and the act of retaliation are not moral equivalents.
I am left to assume that your version of Pacifism here is predicated on the idea that “to punch someone is wrong, regardless - so even if someone hits you, you have no moral basis for hitting them back - wrong is wrong”. But that is a useless abstraction because it oversimplifies morality - much as retaliating is not the moral equivalent of an act of naked aggression, punishment of a crime that is similar to the crime (having to pay fines for stealing money, or being sent to prison for holding someone against their will) is not the moral equivalent of the crime itself.
Your examples of morality are too simplified and don’t help your cause. And your definition of relativism needs work: a relativist theoretically couldn’t say that a first punch was immoral in the first place - after all, if the person doing the punching didn’t think it was immoral, how could it be? Letting someone punch back is not an act of relativism.
Moreover, Christian Pacifists mostly argue about ‘hitting back’ not from the immorality of the strike back, but of the inevitable consequences of the cycle of violence it will invoke.
[quote]Also, you might want to check out this page that is, ahem, very dear to my heart:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-ethics/
[/quote]
Interesting page, it really is - not especially relevant to what we are talking about.
