A critique of moral relativism

I've used moral not to mean 'good' but to mean 'not bad' just to avoid the awkwardness of those clumsy negatives. I'm not sure on the wording here so I'll try and reword it (all the negatives in it are confusing me), whilst also replying to you. Hopefully this'll work, but apologies if it doesn't. NJ is explicitly arguing that if you think homosexuality is moral then you are a moral relativist and are employing moral relativism to justify calling homosexuality moral. Therefore, you should justify calling any sexual practice moral. That looks about right. From a personal level it looks to me like he has been told what relativism is, and why it is wrong. Not mindlessly, but once he has reasoned from the faulty information he has been given, he has reached a sequence of reasoning that makes sense to him. I think the best path here is to try arguing the fundamentals, but it might be futile. There are some interesting and fairly good criticisms and NJ is touching on them, I'm hoping it might only take a friendly guiding through relativism so that he reaches the point where he disagrees with moral relativism but at least does not level incorrect criticism at it. Once he realizes that there is no such thing as 'applied relativism' he might see that those who accept homosexuality as moral are not employing it to conclude that homosexuality is moral; they are employing their own moral philosophy.Ever the optimist, neh?

Logic has relevance to the topic, I've not said the contrary. I am asking to explain the connection of the general logic statement you made, to the specific situation we are discussing. Again, before I can go any further with this, you need to explain what you mean by A, B and C. I'd probably not engage them on the topic. Wow. You've never heard of someone breaking their own morality for selfish reasons? Guilt? That doesn't look like moral relativism to me. Absolutism is rarely so strict as you make it out to be, from wiki:

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In a minority of cases, moral absolutism is taken to the more constrained position that actions are moral or immoral regardless of the circumstances in which they occur. Lying, for instance, would always be immoral, even if done to promote some other good (e.g., saving a life). This rare view of moral absolutism might be contrasted with moral consequentialism”the view that the morality of an action depends on the context or consequences of that action.

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Modern human rights theory is a form of moral absolutism, usually based on the nature of humanity and the essence of human nature. One such theory was constructed by John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice.

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I'm not talking about this particular subset of absolutism, but absolutism as a whole. Think consequentialism, where certain consequences are held to be absolutely moral and others are absolutely immoral. These are absolute ethical philosophies, that take into account the positive and negative consequences of an action: and can hold that abortion has negative consequences (immoral) and death penalty has positive consequences (moral).

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As I highlighted in the OP, there are different ways of looking at morality. We might be having a disagreement because of this. You seem to viewing morality exclusively from a descriptive point of view, where morality describes people's behaviour. But descriptive morality can also be used to look at the sorts of moral standards people claim to follow. From here:

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In short, descriptive ethics asks these two questions:

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1. What do people claim as their moral norms?
2. How do people actually behave when it comes to moral problems?

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I'm talking about 1 and you are insisting that only 2 is valid. Does this help clear things up?Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.