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Throughout the twentieth century, despite the almost complete lack of agreement among philosophers concerning the foundational principles of their discipline, there has nonetheless been almost total agreement concerning one of those principles: that is the principle of the subjectivity and relativity of values. Only Christian philosophers have cared to weather the storm against the possibility of an absolutistic ethics, which is normally thought to be the only possible alternative to relativism; otherwise, assent to some form of relativism has united thinkers on both sides of the Channel and both sides of the Atlantic. What are the reasons for this near unanimity? To inquire fully into this question would take us far afield, but it is not difficult to see the grounds for it in the tendency of many philosophers to make of the human being an object of a value-free scientific scrutiny (the only kind of scrutiny that can aspire to the title of "scientific"). The goal of biology, when it turns to the human being, and of anthropology, or of psychology, or even of economics, is to understand and explain the values that human beings have believed in at various times and places in terms of the natural causes of their embrace. To make an object of a human person, it seems, is to deny any foundation for values, for they may then be construed as an item of human behavior, perhaps as tokens of the pleasures and pains that arise out of the stresses, frustrations, and successes of our animal life.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3099-0_7

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