The political right complains a lot about moral relativism being introduced to the Anglo-Saxon countries via postmodern philosophies. But which school of thought claimed moral statements could not be meaningful? Answer: the analytic school, i.e. “Anglo-Saxon” philosophy.
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This is the school of thought that dominated Anglo-Saxon universities for decades. I think the suspicion of postmodernism originates in two sources: 1/ Postmodernism is French (and a bit German), highly suspect for Anglo-Saxon people.
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Analytic philosophy wanted philosophy to provide “clean” statements for science. Postmodernism pisses on this project by asking questions about the sociology of science. The real source of “moral relativism” is Bertrand Russell, not Michel Foucault.
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This is not to deny that postmodernism isn’t “morally relative”, but rather to say that it’s probably a misnomer that it contributed to “mora relativism” a great deal among Anglo-Saxons.
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“Moral relativism” itself is a bit of a red herring and is sometimes used to imply “amorality” or “immorality”. After all, Montaigne and David Hume were “moral relativists” and they didn’t read Foucault obvs. The idea that “moral relativism” betrayed the Enlightenment is silly.
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