Contraversial AC Related Thread (TL;PR)

[nietzreznor]

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It's easy to think of many a relative basis for a moral decision or principle. I think I've already given an example or two.

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You haven't given any that are 'clearly' relative--you've only given examples of things that might be relative (eg, 'theft is wrong') but you still haven't provided an argument for why they are relative.

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But if no one can do so satisfactorily then rationally speaking, morals should be considered relative. So, I disagree, the burden of proof is on the moral absolutist.

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First of all, I'm not a moral 'absolutist'--I believe that there are objective ethical facts, but that doesn't entail anything about absolutism.
Second, when both the majority of the philosophical community believe moral relativism to be false, and the majority of people act as if there are objective ethical facts, I don't see how one can really make a case that the burden of proof doesn't lie with the relativist. I think that the reason one might find this view attractive is that one might be tempted to see objective ethics as this positive position that needs justification, while relativism is a "negative position"--not really a claim about an ethical matter but a claim that other positive claims are false. But this is a misrepresentation of what is happening, since moral relativists are making positive moral claims; they're just making unique positive claims for each individual (or culture, or whatever) since a moral relativist is essentially intepreting a statement like "theft is wrong" as "theft is wrong FOR ME" (ironically, the statement "relativism is true" seems to lose all force unless it is interpreted non-relativistically).
Similarly, ethical non-cognitivists (which are separate from ethical relativists but I'm still not entirely sure which view you are advocating) are making the (dubious) positive claim that ethical 'statements' aren't really statements at all (and hence a statement like "theft is wrong" just means something like "theft! boo!"). But this position surely needs justification!

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Second of all is it fair to say the burden of proof lies with us, because the majority of philosophers disagree with us (I'm not even sure this is true, but assuming it is)? The majority of philosophers used to believe in God, after all and I don't know that you'd want to say the burden of proof was on atheists to disprove God.

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I would certainly say that the burden of proof lay with the atheists, at least within the philosophical community. I'm not sure that they had the burden of dis-proving god (just like I don't think you have the burden of dis-proving my position), but they certainly had the burden of supporting their claims!

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And how would you support number 1?

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I'm not sure this needs support, since most people already believe that theft and slavery are wrong.

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Empirical sciences have predictive power. "Theft is wrong" does not. That's an important difference.

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I'm inclined to agree that, yes, this is an important difference, and it has something to do with why ethics and natural sciences are totally different branches of knowledge. But this is a difficult argument for a relativist to make, since what constitutes an 'important' difference is relative (according to relativists).