Andrew Taggart has a good point when he says
There are, however, good reasons to think that relativism is a rather stingy philosophy for people living in a confusing time: stingy because it ultimately offers us an impoverished ethical vision of the world and of our place in it. I am constantly struck by its inability to answer the question: why care? Why bother when the matter before us has nothing to do with fulfilling our individual or collective interests? No relativist will be able to get off the couch when you tell her that there is genocide in Darfur, that the conditions of women living in Iran fall well below any reasonable mark, or that there is widespread poverty in Africa.
His essay on relativism grows from this concern that it’s a dead end, a stagnant pool in which little can grow except ill. Yet relativism is not a philosophical argument, but a mindset, and not usually a particularly well-founded one at that. At the start of the essay, he points out:
Needless to say, I reject relativism, but I am not certain that reason, as it is traditionally conceived, will do much to change things… whatever authority practical reason has—the sort of reason, I mean, that is concerned with moral conduct, political affairs, and values in general—is slight in comparison with traditional authority and with the authority that we implicitly associate with our everyday practices. Rarely indeed has engaging in philosophical argument changed somebody’s mind or gained her rational assent. Normally, she simply opts out or grows silent. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in Cosmopolitanism, our views of the social world tend to change when our individual habits and our communal practices change.
I would argue that most people don’t accept the full ramifications of relativism. Few of those people in the West who in general proclaim that everybody’s views are equally valid would continue to assert this in the case of (for example) the popularity of female genital mutilation in various parts of the world. The reason that relativism is popular is that it is convenient, saving us both from having to think critically about other peoples’ positions or – more critically – to defend our own positions.
At the same time, relativism has its benefits. Those who speak out vigourously against relativism (and I don’t include Andrew here) are often speaking on behalf of a parochial viewpoint that they wish to see privileged against others. In many ways this is simply a mirror image of relativism – if their views are privileged, it will save them from having to defend it and from having to think critically about others (because all others will be equally condemned).
Surgically removing relativism from public discourse won’t be very productive if we don’t replace it with something else – but Andrew’s suggestion of “public practical reason” is unlikely to find much acceptance.