Absolutism vs. Relativism: The Hidden Fault Line in the Culture Wars
Beneath many of today's loudest arguments — over statues, cancel culture, education, and whose values get to count as "correct" — sits an older philosophical dispute that rarely gets named directly: moral absolutism versus moral relativism. An Aeon essay revisits philosopher Bernard Williams' nuanced position, which resists both a naive relativism ("everything is culturally determined, so no judgment is possible") and a rigid universalism, instead insisting that ethics is genuinely shaped by circumstance without collapsing into "anything goes" [4].
The Institute of Art and Ideas pushes further, arguing that both moral realism and relativism are ultimately self-defeating as grand theories, and that progress comes from wrestling with specific ethical concepts rather than defending an entire philosophical system [5]. A Baruch College review frames the practical stakes plainly: are there universal standards for judging other cultures, or does context make judgment illegitimate [6]?
What makes this framework useful is that it cuts across left-right politics entirely. Two people who vote the same way may sit on opposite sides of this divide, and recognizing that can reframe a shouting match as a genuine philosophical disagreement worth exploring rather than dismissing.
AI's Double Life in the Information Wars
Artificial intelligence has become both the disease and a proposed cure in the fight against misinformation. A Harvard Misinformation Review piece describes a "multipolar AI order" in which fact-checking is increasingly contested territory, caught between claims of epistemic sovereignty and outright ambivalence about whether verification is even possible at scale [7]. The European Digital Media Observatory calls this the "paradox of AI in fact-checking" — the same tools that can verify claims in seconds can also generate convincing deepfakes and synthetic disinformation just as fast [8].
Researchers cataloguing AI-driven disinformation note a shift in tactics: rather than blunt censorship, bad actors now flood channels with noise, bots, and synthetic content, producing public cynicism as an end in itself — if everything might be fake, why trust anything [9]? Proposed fixes include AI "truth meters," content provenance tracking, and accuracy nudges, alongside hybrid human-AI verification systems designed to preserve transparency without handing over gatekeeping entirely to algorithms or governments [7] [9].
The authoritarian angle complicates things further: selective, state-controlled fact-checking in countries like Russia and China shows how "combating misinformation" can itself become a censorship tool — a tension that advocates for AI verification say must be designed around, not ignored [8].
Reassessing the Pandemic's Chilling Effect on Speech
Nearly five years on, the free speech costs of pandemic-era policy are getting a harder look. Human Rights Watch documented how governments worldwide used COVID-19 as justification for speech restrictions, deplatforming, and penalties — often invoking public health or equity — creating strong pressure toward conformity [10]. Academic research on "civic space restrictions" during the pandemic reinforces this, tracking a broader erosion of expression rights beyond what public health mandates strictly required [11].
The strongest case for these measures is that they were emergency responses to a genuinely chaotic information environment, where medical misinformation carried real, immediate costs to human life — a tradeoff, defenders argue, that was temporary and proportionate. The counter-case, increasingly voiced in retrospective policy panels, is that the suppression extended well beyond misinformation into legitimate scientific and policy debate, chilling dissent under the guise of consensus and reducing individual agency in ways that outlasted the emergency itself [12].
The debate now isn't really about masks or lockdowns anymore — it's about whether "following the science" became, in practice, a mechanism for enforcing orthodoxy rather than fostering the open inquiry science actually requires.
The Bigger Picture
Today's stories share a common thread: the mechanisms meant to help us find truth and cooperate — discourse, moral judgment, fact-checking, and public health guidance — are all vulnerable to being captured by the impulse to win rather than to understand. Whether it's a Twitter pile-on, a philosophical framework used to shut down debate rather than deepen it, an AI tool weaponized for noise instead of clarity, or a health policy that hardened into unquestionable dogma, the pattern is the same: legitimate tools for resolving disagreement get repurposed as instruments of certainty and control.
What connects the moral absolutism/relativism divide to the fights over AI and pandemic speech is that none of these are simply "one side right, one side wrong" situations — they are genuine tensions between competing goods: freedom versus safety, universal standards versus cultural context, verification versus overreach. Treating them as culture-war scorecards rather than as substantive tradeoffs is precisely what fuels the exhaustion and cynicism documented across these stories.
The throughline for anyone trying to argue better, online or off, is to separate the position from the person, to ask what legitimate concern might be driving an opposing view before dismissing it, and to stay suspicious of any framework — philosophical, technological, or political — that promises certainty without the work of actually engaging the disagreement.
Key takeaway: The health of public discourse depends less on being right and more on staying curious about why reasonable people land somewhere else — a discipline every institution in today's briefing, from social media to AI to public health, has struggled to maintain.
Sources
- https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/public-leadership-management/sake-argument
- https://ic4ml.org/journal-article/civil-discourse-and-democracy-unteaching-divisive-argumentation-through-critical-inquiry/
- https://www.thefridaytimes.com/12-Feb-2025/reviving-civil-discourse-from-hostile-debates-to-meaningful-dialogue
- https://aeon.co/essays/bernard-williams-moral-relativism-and-the-culture-wars
- https://iai.tv/articles/both-moral-realism-and-relativism-are-wrong-auid-2991
- https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/lexingtonreview/absolutism-vs-relativism-the-moral-argument-behind-judging-other-cultures/
- https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/fact-checking-in-the-multipolar-ai-order-between-epistemic-sovereignty-and-ambivalence/
- https://edmo.eu/blog/part-of-the-problem-and-part-of-the-solution-the-paradox-of-ai-in-fact-checking/
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12351547/
- https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/11/covid-19-triggers-wave-free-speech-abuse
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2023.2209021
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqk3e-n2z38