Atheists only vote please: Do absolute MORAL truths exist? Is Rape ALWAYS "wrong"?

[Thumpalumpacus]

"Moral Relativism" is the idea that not only is there no objective moral truths (whatever that even is supposed to mean) but that there are no moral claims that can be made at all, that all ideas of right and wrong are just opinions. This philosophy only makes sense if you also subscribe to "solipsism", the idea that reality itself is up for grabs and that all knowledge is just opinion.

It only means that the morality of an action is dependent on who is doing the deed, and who is doing the judging. An example is killing: if the killer is not a person acting under a certain set of circumstances, the killing is regarded as immoral. If the killing is under the color of law, it is said to be "justifiable" (meaning morally justifiable). Example: compare a soldier to a serial-killer. They both kill multiple people; the serial killer is put to death, while the soldier is given some medals and a pension.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The term ‘moral relativism’ is understood in a variety of ways. Most often it is associated with an empirical thesis that there are deep and widespread moral disagreements and a metaethical thesis that the truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to some group of persons.

Wikipedia:

Moral relativism may be any of several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures. Descriptive moral relativism holds only that some people do in fact disagree about what is moral; meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong; and normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when we disagree about the morality of it.

Not all descriptive relativists adopt meta-ethical relativism, and moreover, not all meta-ethical relativists adopt normative relativism. Richard Rorty, for example, argued that relativist philosophers believe "that the grounds for choosing between such opinions is less algorithmic than had been thought", but not that any belief is equally as valid as any other.

Moral relativism has been espoused, criticized, and debated for thousands of years, from ancient Greece and India to the present day, in diverse fields including philosophy, science, and religion.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Moral relativism is the view that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint (for instance, that of a culture or a historical period) and that no standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others.

Solipsism is not necessary to accept moral relativity both as a description of human views on morality, and also as a prescriptive basis for actions -- namely, the tolerance of values outside our own sociocultural spectrum.

Therefore, we can philosophically discuss morality in a coherent way. Therefore, morality is not relative.

This is a non sequitur. It may well be that the differing moralities have areas of overlap, some large, some small, which permit those who hold different moral values to still discuss those morals, and differences, coherently.

And even if they couldn't have that discussion, it doesn't demonstrate that morality is absolute.