Moral or ethical relativism refers to the belief that what is right and wrong is not based in any absolute truth, but instead varies according to culture, situation, individual preference, and so on. Shakespeare’s Hamlet said it this way, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. . . . “ It seems that a growing faction in our society today sides with Hamlet. I dare not say we’ve seen it all, but we’ve seen a lot—from Bill Clinton’s infamous “It all depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” all the way to Whoopi Goldberg a few days ago declaring on “The View” that a 40 year old man having sex with a 13 year old girl wasn’t “rape-rape.”
In the news recently: Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for a crime he admitted to years earlier, the rape of a 13 year old girl. He was 40 years old at the time. Whoopi argues that because “she was aware and the family was apparently aware,” it wasn’t rape. Are you kidding?
By the way, how well did things turn out for Hamlet? Hamlet struggles to deal with the knowledge that his uncle murdered Hamlet’s father and married Hamlet’s mother. He waffles so much and so long about how to respond to that knowledge that the body count of the innocent and the guilty rises fast—including Hamlet’s girlfriend, her father, Hamlet’s mother, uncle, and Hamlet, himself. Now why would we want to follow that path?
Heaven help us.
Check out Whoopi’s comments below: