Dubium Caritas Est

I still haven't read Pope Benedict's encyclical "Deus Caritas Est," the first of his pontificate, but this article from the New York Times certainly takes an interesting look at it.

The author, Austin Dacey, points out that Benedict finds "fault [in] modern people for missing the transcendent meaning of love and instead caring for one another just because we feel like it" and that "Pope Benedict's worry is that individual autonomy has been elevated above moral absolutes." Benedict also sometimes targets uncertain moral standards in addition to relative standards.

A pope may have reason to be worried about these things. But should we, asks Dacey? Not if we understand what we're really about.

What Pope Benedict calls relativism are actually the values of secular liberalism: individual autonomy, equal rights and freedom of conscience. But it is easy to conflate what liberals affirm with the way they affirm it. Liberalism tells us that our way of life is up to us (within limits), not that the truth of liberalism is up to us. It entails that we tolerate even claims that we doubt, not that we doubt even the claims of tolerance. Many liberals themselves are guilty of this confusion, which can manifest as all-values-are-equal relativism.

Relativism is harmful when it mistakes the arbitrary for the indifferent. We make choices in life arbitrarily (that is technically a redundancy), yet some choices produce empirically better results. There is a mountain of difference between recognizing that we make choices and being indifferent to what we choose.