Lance Independent has a post noting among other things that many ordinary people appear to be agent relativists at least some of the time. That is to say some ordinary people sometimes they think that whether an action is good or bad can depend on whether the action-doer thinks it’s good or bad. Agent relativism is generally considered an implausible view in philosophy as Lance notes, but I want to argue that something like agent relativism is sometimes true in some difficult ethical cases.
Interesting! (Apologies for the rambling comment):
I should note that at least some religious forms of the idea that you're ethically bound by your own conscience can function in the direction of greater leniency as well. At least in the case of the Catholic view, the one I'm most familiar with, I've heard some liberal-leaning Catholic authorities say that people who truly feel obligated by their own conscience to use birth control to avoid having children that they can't adequately care for aren't guilty of sin.
You raise a good point point, however, about whether they would give the same "follow your conscience" advice to a Nazi who felt like his conscience obliged him to turn in Jews. Reading the Catechism, while it says that you're obligated to try to form your conscience in the light of Catholic teaching, if you truly just can't make your conscience agree with what the Church teaches you have to go with your conscience, and will sin by *not* following it. There don't seem to be any exceptions here. Disagreeing with the Church on birth control and disagreeing with it on genocide don't actually seem to be treated differently--it's a surprisingly universal agent-relativism.
(I do think this may be an illustration of how religious moral systems, where "will this person be *punished in the afterlife* for their behavior?" is an extremely-important question, may make agent-relativism more plausible.)
There's also the fact that the conscience-based arguments I've seen for birth control all appeal to countervailing moral *obligations* to responsible parenthood, not a mere conviction of one's conscience that contraception isn't morally wrong. The Church may, then, follow your position that conscience is only permitted to impose *additional* moral obligations (which can in some cases override incompatible ones imposed by Church teaching), rather than simply exempt one from obligations you don't agree with.
I did have some worries that way. Telling people that "If you ever worry that something *might* be wrong, it definitely *is* wrong for you" could easily go very wrong.
Interesting! (Apologies for the rambling comment):
I should note that at least some religious forms of the idea that you're ethically bound by your own conscience can function in the direction of greater leniency as well. At least in the case of the Catholic view, the one I'm most familiar with, I've heard some liberal-leaning Catholic authorities say that people who truly feel obligated by their own conscience to use birth control to avoid having children that they can't adequately care for aren't guilty of sin.
You raise a good point point, however, about whether they would give the same "follow your conscience" advice to a Nazi who felt like his conscience obliged him to turn in Jews. Reading the Catechism, while it says that you're obligated to try to form your conscience in the light of Catholic teaching, if you truly just can't make your conscience agree with what the Church teaches you have to go with your conscience, and will sin by *not* following it. There don't seem to be any exceptions here. Disagreeing with the Church on birth control and disagreeing with it on genocide don't actually seem to be treated differently--it's a surprisingly universal agent-relativism.
(I do think this may be an illustration of how religious moral systems, where "will this person be *punished in the afterlife* for their behavior?" is an extremely-important question, may make agent-relativism more plausible.)
There's also the fact that the conscience-based arguments I've seen for birth control all appeal to countervailing moral *obligations* to responsible parenthood, not a mere conviction of one's conscience that contraception isn't morally wrong. The Church may, then, follow your position that conscience is only permitted to impose *additional* moral obligations (which can in some cases override incompatible ones imposed by Church teaching), rather than simply exempt one from obligations you don't agree with.
I worry that this essay of mine puts the overly scrupulous out to suffer special pains. Any thoughts on that?
I did have some worries that way. Telling people that "If you ever worry that something *might* be wrong, it definitely *is* wrong for you" could easily go very wrong.
> rightness of wrongness
Typo, "of" should be "or".