Lately, there has been an obsession with the idea of presenting both sides to every issue, and the truth is that sometimes, an issue does not have two valid points of view. This concern troubled me during class last week, when we discussed corruption and similar issues. Every conversation seemed to include justifications for corruption. Of course, one can come up with convoluted reasons why corruption may benefit certain people in rare cases; however as economists, political scientists and common rationale can attest, it is damaging to a country as well as immoral and incorrect. The idea that all opinions are valid stems from moral relativism, the philosophical argument that, “the truth or falsity of moral judgments, or their justification, is not absolute or universal, but is relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of a group of persons,” as defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. To accept moral relativism is to be cynical of the progress of humankind and to ignore the fact that the collective constructs of morality and ethics we have created for ourselves unify us and allow us to interact with each other.

It should be noted at this point that this article should not be read as pedantic. I am not in any way implying I have the authority to tell what is wrong, nor does this article wish to be condescending to those who hold logically or morally invalid opinions. We can learn from the opinions themselves and from the people who hold them, but in order to do so, we must detach people from their ideas and hold only their opinions, not their characters, to scrutiny, holding their opinions to the judgement of factual knowledge and a basic level of morality. All people should be respected and all people should be heard, but people are not their opinions. And the fact of the matter is that there is such a thing as the wrong opinion.

If we reject moral relativism, if we believe that all opinions are equally valid, then we would have to ignore the progress we have collectively made throughout history. After centuries of struggle, we’ve managed to advance our collective moral code and ethics to include, in some parts of the world, the concept of basic human rights. Haitians gave their life for freedom, African-Americans endured police brutality and South Africans were jailed because they believed in something — they believed that some truths were incontestable.

If we seriously believed that all opinions are valid then we must be prepared to constantly debate over segregation, suffrage and the right to basic human rights such as suffrage and egalitarianism. Scratch that. We would have to prepare ourselves to accept that these three things are valid only in our own societal constructs, and that if another culture believes them to be evils then we must accept that. We’ve establish things such as torture, slavery and murder as wrong. Should should we allow other countries to practice them if they believe it to be right? After all, it’s a valid opinion, it’s a cultural thing. This is simply unacceptable. We can no more discuss slavery than we can discuss the roundness of the Earth. This obsession with fairness leads us to forgive or allow crimes against humanity so long as they are committed in the name of what some people think is right.

If ignoring the great struggle we’ve made to try and improve human welfare is not enough, the obsession with fairness deters from creating a sense of a global community. The problem here is that, naturally, there are many differences across societies. We can live with these differences and we should learn from them, adopting them into our own frames of reference and while expanding our world view. Sometimes however, there are differences that we simply cannot condone. Sterilizing women is one of them. This isn’t a cultural thing; this is an abomination. If we accept rape culture as a simple case of cultural difference, we immediately accept that people in that society are not wrong but simply different from us — and this creates a sense of alterity. We see them as different from us with traits that we simply cannot understand nor incorporate, instead of seeing them as fellow humans who, usually because of understandable different historical contexts, have yet to eliminate these aspects of their society. What we should do then is embrace the advancements we’ve made. We should rejoice at the fact that we have determined a basic standard for human rights. We should actively pursue worldwide implementation of these policies — not as imposed constructs, but as self-evident truths.

To do this is to reject moral relativism. To be humble is to accept that the views we hold might be wrong; to be — for lack of a better word — cosmopolitan is to accept that maybe my culture has it wrong and I should learn from others. The main reason why we should be having class discussions should be to find a truth that might be eluding us. I want to learn what is right and what is wrong – not spin my own wheels. To reject moral relativism isn’t to see the world in black and white, nor is it to be arrogant in thinking I personally hold some universal truths. To reject moral relativism is to be humble. It is to accept that there are wrong or invalid opinions, and that I might hold some of them. Although my views are strong concerning free healthcare, I can concede there is some validity to the argument against it; however there simply isn’t one for punishing homosexuality with capital punishment. We can discuss what the minimum working age should be, but we know it is not four. There isn’t one universal truth for all ethical conundrums, but as a collective we have managed to establish certain truths; we have managed to find light in the sea of darkness that is the morality of interpersonal relationships.

Historians often talk of presentism — holding past events and actors to modern day standards. One of the ideas of relativism is that certain decisions or opinions can only be seen as valid if they are a part of an agreement with others. It then follows that the same opinion, decision or action might be seen as valid or invalid for different groups with different agreements. This entails allowing groups to hold whatever views they might have, forcing us to accept them. This is simply impossible in all cases. It is understandable why someone would do something we consider wrong given a certain context, but this does not validate it. Here is where objectivism comes into play; as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “moral judgments are ordinarily true or false in an absolute or universal sense, that some of them are true, and that people sometimes are justified in accepting true moral judgments - and rejecting false ones - on the basis of evidence available to any reasonable and well-informed person.” When thinking of historical figures, for example, we forgive their wrongs because we understand them. We don’t accept them as being somehow morally right.