Ethical Relativism

Allen Bloom wrote one of the most controversial books of the late-20th Century, in which he denounced the demise of the core curriculum at elite U.S. universities and it replacement by what he considered to be a vague sort of postmodern relativism from the 1960s onward. As he understood it, this new liberal worldview held that no cultures could be morally superior to any others and that anyone who believed the Western world might be were simply absolutists and ideologues whose worldview led to "wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism and chauvinism" (Bloom 1990, p. 568). Students arrived at the university having been thoroughly trained and indoctrinated in these relativistic ideas, in which the only sin was to be ethnocentric or prejudiced. Without knowing it, they were under the influence of modern liberal and progressive philosophers like John Dewey, John Rawls and John Stuart Mill, who regarded intolerance and...
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