Relativism

Kelsen's theory represents the most accurate representation of what most developed countries in effect do and are, indeed forced to do by virtue of the fact that they are not monarchies. Since the rebirth of democracy in the eighteenth century, developed western civilizations began to develop constitutional democracies. If I understand Kelsen correctly, then this would be the example of a grundnorm. The rest of society is based upon this very norm, i.e. that a government ought to be a constitutional democracy. From this, at least in the United States (I can only raise conjecture about others as I have not studied them with any depth), we observe that throughout the ages legislature does not reflect any one ideology of the times, but rather a mixture of both of the two main ideologies of the times. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin regarding American democracy, we must respect the opinions of one another enough to come to a reasonable compromise. All of the individual norms that groups of people, or even individuals (although individuals alone will not get much done without a group backing them in a democracy), are debated in the legislature and the hope is that the compromise created will be a mean between the two extremes in which people sometimes generalize their arguments into. I think this is what Dr. J was saying during class today. Moral relativism seems to be exactly what we have been searching for in the other theories of justice we have studied--a PRACTICAL analysis of the way things ACTUALLY work. In its formalization, I agree with Kelsen that the main reason people dislike his theory is that it gives them too much responsibility. We all know how much people hate responsibility. Now that I have been given an accurate representation of moral relativism, rather than the lazy one as our professor put it, I pretty much completely agree and find myself baffled at the fact. The idea definitely merits further study.